Robe blinds Friedrichstadt-Palast with delight

One of Berlin’s most iconic venues, the Friedrichstadt-Palast, AKA Palast Berlin, a revue theatre in the city’s Mitte district, has made a substantial investment in Robe moving lights to help facilitate its newly launched Grand Show production, BLINDED by DELIGHT, created by Oliver Hoppmann, complete with a vibrant new lighting design by Chris Moylan of Sunrise Studios.

The venue now has almost 300 Robe fixtures in the house lighting rig, including 54 x FORTES, 22 x PAINTES, 80 x Pointes, 17 x MegaPointes, 75 x TetraXs, 36 x Tetra2s and 6 x ColorStrobes, confirms technical director Thomas Herda, who oversees a technical department of 85 full-time staff helping to bring these spectacular Grand Shows to life onstage.

The new investments into the Grand Show are the 75 x Robe TetraXs used as an animated back-wall matrix of effects upstage of a blow-through LED screen, revealed as another layer of visual surprise in Chris’s design. The 22 x PAINTES and 36 x Tetra2s – supplied to the venue by Robe Germany – are also new for this Grand Show.

Thomas has been at Palast Berlin since 2017, and technical director since 2020, and Chris Moylan has been designing lighting there since 2018’s Vivid Grand Show.

A total of 656 lighting fixtures are being used for BLINDED by DELIGHT; 468 of them are moving and the rest are a mix of LED and conventional luminaires.

PAINTES were specified by Chris for their expedient size, which makes them handy for installing anywhere. He had used them before, particularly onboard ships where space is always at a premium. In recent years, some of Palast Berlin’s older moving lights have been replaced with Robe FORTES, a product that Chris has been using for a while, but before the final choice, he arranged a comprehensive shootout with competitor products for all to see.

FORTE proved to be the cleanest option with the best colour reproduction. He likes the optics, the whites, and the front and thinks they are “an excellent all-in-one package option.”

Thomas mentions that having the FORTES and other new Robes in the house rig has also meant less ongoing maintenance is needed. Pointes were the first Robe fixtures there, he elucidated, after which they kept adding to that initial purchase. The total is now 80 x Pointes, which are in constant use, together with the 17 x MegaPointes.

For BLINDED by DELIGHT, 12 x MegaPointes a side are rigged in wagons and pushed into positions upstage for specific scenes. The TetraX matrix was conceived as a modern take on the wall-of-light effect, bringing a contemporary studio look to a classic revue environment on a monumental scale. “I wanted to have lighting effects on all sides, just as you would with a camera environment,” explained Chris, adding that he also needed something that would work with the transparent screen in and out. He needed a fixture versatile enough to create beams, blinder and wash effects, plus an array of kinetic shimmering and sparkling texturing from a front-mounted position at the back of the space … and the TetraX ticked all the boxes.

Chris’s Team included lighting programmer and longtime collaborator Matthias Schöffmann. Andreas Schindler was also onsite to program video, which is triggered via the lighting console.

www.robe.cz

Photos © Louise Stickland