Stage Line from Clay Paky
The limelight at the Weilheim theater

Sixteen Stage Color 300 and four Stage Light 300 provided the successful lighting for the season of theater in this Bavarian town, offering inventive usage of the lights
    

“... The success of a theatrical production comes from the synergy of various elements: the words, the actors, the director’s ability, the public, the staging, the lighting, the costumes. By accentuating any one of these elements, the results can be particularly interesting ...”.
Carl Uwe Nieseg, LD and art director for the summer theater productions in Weilheim, a town in Bavaria with a strong artistic tradition, has very clear ideas. This year he decided to try something extra - to set up a production where the lights were of prime importance. They had to be used in all their expressive possibilities to create new dramatic aspects, and to become an element of dialogue between the characters in the play. The lights must also bring together and, in part, substitute the scenery.

Working on this project Nieseg immediately understood that to carry it off it would be necessary to introduce another major innovation - that of replacing the usual theater spotlights - static and without any flexibility - with mobile beam spots which would be able to offer a high output and a wide range of uses unmatched by conventional spots.
The LD looked around and decided that the ideal solution was STAGE LINE by Clay Paky. He went to Lightpower, the Paderborn company that markets Clay Paky products in Germany, and these supplied the Weilheim theater with 16 Stage Color 300 and 4 Stage Light 300, as well as a Stage Scan and 2 Super Scan Zoom.
Stage Color 300 is a universal washlight, very light and manageable, which combines significant power with convenience. It is fitted with a Frost filter which can create a wide aperture angle, keep the illumination even over the entire area covered and considerably reduce the loss of light output which is common among the other diffusers. The colors system is based on a three-filter “color mixing” device which makes it possible to find the shade required from an infinite palette of combinations.
Stage Light 300, on the other hand, is a universal mobile body effects projector, which has an electronic focusing device, and is combined with a manual zoom to achieve a wide range of projection angles. It offers a colors system that enables 36 color combinations, two filters for the correction of the color temperature and an unusually wide range of graphic effects for a projector of this size.

Lightpower worked in close contact with the LD to guarantee all the technical support necessary. The Stage Color 300 and Stage Light 300 spots were mounted on a frame behind the stage and used for backlighting and for repeated sweeping circular movements. Other Stage Colors and Stage Lights were used on two intersecting trusses on either side of the stage in order to spectacularly illuminate the scenic elements in the center, at the same time producing long shadows on stage. Hanging over the stage were two Super Scan Zoom which diagonally projected the “laser effect” (achieved with a metal gobo which has a thin line cut out around its diameter), while the Stage Scan supplied various combinations of rotating gobos and color wheels.
Lastly, ten Stage Color 300 were positioned in a cage at the front of the stage for lighting the actors and the backdrop using very evocative techniques: a backing of light in slow, continuous movement, mixing colors by progressively passing from one shade to another, together with many other chromatic effects, further enhanced by the use of smoke.
In their usual way, Clay Paky and Lightpower wanted to be involved not just as suppliers of products, but also offering all the necessary technical support to ensure the production’s greatest success.

For the Weilheim theater, Lightpower and Clay Paky wanted to push themselves further, offering themselves as promoters of the event. “This theater season is an important moment for us” - explains Ralph Werzorke, Managing Director of Lightpower - “because it represents the launch in Germany of Clay Paky’s new Stage Line. We are very proud to have taken part in this theatrical project which is extremely innovative. It was a real challenge - combining the classic aspect of the theater with the modernity of advanced technologies, without losing in either restraint or quality. Knowing the high levels of performance and reliability of the products that we market, we were sure of reaching the objective”.
The LD, Carl Uwe Nieseg, sustains this view: “ This show represents an opening to the use of new techniques in the theater: the language of lights and images can offer a production a strongly emotional experience, which is distinct from the omnipresent intellectual theater”.

Stage Color 300 and Stage Light 300 made their first appearance with the production of Faust by Goethe which was shown from 14th July to 9th August at the Weilheim theater. It all begins with a huge silvery ball holding center stage. On it were played the beams from the Stage Color lights, which bounced off the reflective surface in a thousand images and glittering colors. At the same time, long and threatening shadows extended from the side of the object. The ball opened and Mephisto found himself thrown into an ocean of whirling lights. In this phase the strobe effect prevails (up to 11 flashes per second!) used together with a slow changing of color from white to blue. The lighting is never an end in itself, but always precisely connected to the dramatic key, which integrates the performance by the actors. This is fundamental so that the relationship between the actors and the public does not finish with mere technical wizardry.

The lighting was particularly well received by both critics and the public, who seemed to appreciate the innovation and the professionalism with which they were used for the production. In particular, operators from the sector enjoyed seeing the great possibilities for use of the lighting effects, which includes the use of color mixing, rotating gobos, prisms, frost and filters of various types. They have also noted the enormous reliability of these projectors in the theater environment: compact, precise in focusing, and very silent.

Clay Paky has always been a point of reference for professional lighting, and its products illuminate the stages of hundreds of artists, dance rooms, theaters, television studios all over the world. “I have often used Clay Paky products,” says Carl Uwe Nieseg “and they have always proved to be powerful, reliable and strong. This new range of products is truly innovative because it offers the best solutions for every type of lighting requirement. I hope to be able to also try out as soon as possible Stage Zoom 1200 and Stage Color 1200, the top products in the range, which offer incomparable output and the revolutionary possibility of exchanging the heads on the projectors using a single basic system. I will be happy to be able to use them in the theater again - there’s plenty of potential for innovation in this sector!”.

For eleven years, the Weilheim Theater has been offering events of great artistic and cultural importance, which bring in thousands of followers every year. This year, with the “Weilheim Theater 1998” project, it has also become a laboratory for bringing innovation into tradition, a challenge for opening new horizons in the use of contemporary technology in the theater.