Escape to a better world

The 6 March showing of the two-part ballet “Strawinsky” at the Nuremberg Opera – featuring “Petruschka” followed by “Sacre” – was the theatre’s last dance performance for a long time, as it transpired. The visually imposing second part of the evening was dominated by a giant ring of light that hovered over the stage, exuding a symbolic force that continued resonating beyond the curtain.

An enormous, dark ring, filling the entire stage, lowers over the dancers in “Sacre”, the second part of the ballet evening “Strawinsky” at the Nuremberg opera.

Its shadowy contours blur into the otherwise empty expanse of the stage. The audience’s gaze is held by a ribbon of light within it, shining brightly, with a circle of moving lights underneath. Throughout the piece, the ring rises and falls to various heights – high above the dancers or just hovering over the floor. The mighty construction also tips vertically in different directions, hanging heavily and slanting like a crown over the performers’ heads. At times it seems menacing and sombre, at other times sheltering and warm.

Its light pulsates to the rhythm of the music and communicates with the people on the stage, as if exchanging energy with them. The ring of light and its beams give the empty space changing contours and boundaries. The moving lights focus on individual dancers and unite with them. They play with the light, catch it, follow it. And they are followed by it and try to elude it. The light beams in the darkness of the stage seem to transport the dancers to another sphere. What do we see there? A gateway, a new path or a boundary? A sign of a higher, oppressive power? It could be any of these. The mesmerizing combination of the dance, light, and Stravinsky’s powerful music casts a spell on the audience. And climaxes in a pas de deux performed by a ballerina and a light beam.

“Sacre” is one part of the ballet evening “Strawinsky”, with choreography by Douglas Lee (“Petruschka”) and Goyo Montero (“Sacre”), premiered on 21 December 2019. It showcases ballet director and chief choreographer Montero’s own interpretation of the famous ballet “Le Sacre du Printemps”, premiered in 1913 in Paris. In Montero’s version there are two sacrifices: “One is chosen by the community; a person considered to unite all the qualities of the society, its most ideal member. The person to be sacrificed is selected by means of a kind of competition. The community is convinced that they must send the strongest, most powerful person, but in the end the power itself chooses – it chooses the person who shows the most fellowship with the others in his group, in pain, in joy, in fear,” Montero explains in the programme.

In “Sacre”, to sacrifice oneself for the good of the community is a way to escape to another, better world. Set designer Eva Adler imagined a ring as a portal and a source of inexhaustible energy. Montero associated the power, the superior force, with a spaceship that could be lowered from the flies and tipped in all directions.

Their ideas culminated in the design of a ring, 10 m in diameter, representing the underneath of a spaceship. For the surface design, they took inspiration from images of spaceships in science fiction films, Adler reveals. They turned to Karl Wiedemann, head of the lighting department at the Nuremberg state theatre’s opera, to find out whether it would be possible to install little moving lights in the ring to allow its inner surface to be illuminated in different colours. The development phase, on which Eva Adler, Karl Wiedemann, and the theatre’s technical team co-operated, started in early 2019.

The ring construction is made of standard aluminium truss material. The ring’s truss is clad in wood with the surface laminated in a rust colour. Numerous tubes and cables create a technical, rather morbid appearance; they also cover the eight steel cables on which it is suspended. The inner side of the ring is 40 cm high and clad in plexiglass all the way round, with LED strips installed behind.

Dancing with the light

At the start of the 2019/20 season, Montero inquired into a tracking system for the production. His idea was that one dancer would duet with the light. He had heard about a system that allows the spotlight controller to also control moving lights via the mixer. Looking into the matter, Wiedemann discovered the SpotMe 3D tracking system by Robert Juliat. He contacted Lightpower to find out more about it. “By that time the stage set, i.e. the ring construction, was almost completed and we had hung 40 Movo Beam 100 in a 10 m circular truss. The inside was fitted with LED strips and during rehearsals we had decided on four positions, where the moving lights should follow the dancer or dance with him. When I told Lightpower about our plan, they put me in contact with Ludwig Lepage from Robert Juliat and Paul Roch from zactrack. Ludwig Lepage is responsible for SpotMe and Paul Roch for the control system that connects the mixer and the spotlights.”

The various experts involved got the tracking system going in Nuremberg, just in time for the technical rehearsal. First, Wiedemann needed to divide the moving lights into four groups and assign them positions. Roch then set up all the moving lights, and Lepage arranged the spotlights with the SpotMe extension and calibrated it. Wiedemann recalls: “During the tech rehearsal Goyo Montero was keen to add a fifth position. The very next day Paul Roch brought a solution to the lighting rehearsal! The zactrack Maestro Server can control 80 fixtures, so we set up a second group of virtual lamps. That was the only way to make a fifth position possible, as all 40 lamps in the other four positions were assigned and programmed.”

Lights as part of the choreography

Extra rehearsal time was scheduled to work out the choreography with the lighting technology, in which the ballerina and the technicians operating the SpotMe lights got accustomed to each other. In this piece, the choreography of the dance become a choreography of technology – by precisely coordinating the dance movements with those of the moving lights. “It’s a bigger challenge than ‘just’ following a dancer with a spotlight, as this way the technology and the moving light are part of the choreography.”

Chief choreographer Montero’s openness to and curiosity about technical solutions keeps leading Wiedemann and his department to new fields, discoveries and realizations: “Through ‘Sacre’ and the use of SpotMe in this piece I was able to get many of my colleagues interested, too. In retrospect, this production was really something extraordinary. We had never done anything so technically demanding before. And I have to say, we all surpassed ourselves,” says Wiedemann.