Below, we excerpt an entire blog entry, written by designer Michael Nabarro, describing Arcola Theater’s lighting design for their recent production of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People.  It serves as an excellent guide for smaller theaters seeking to save energy by using lower-wattage equipment and a reduced lighting plot without sacrificing artistic quality.

As director Mehmet Ergen says in the Arcola’s press release, “The environmental impact of all theatre productions can be reduced without artistic compromise through careful choices and creativity. I urge all directors to demand not more light and bigger set budgets but the right light and the right set”.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

The challenge was to light a naturalistic piece of theatre, a new translation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, using just five kilowatts of energy.  The method employed on the previous show in Arcola Studio One involved the use of LED lighting to achieve this.  The nature of the Ibsen piece meant that this approach would probably not have been suitable.  The colours, dimming profiles, and quality of light given from the current generation of LEDs make them difficult to use in a naturalistic piece of drama where the lighting has to should generally go unnoticed.

When first given the challenge I was doubtful that a show such as this could be lit with this constraint.  Being on three sides it immediately meant that general lighting would have to come from a number of angles, and being a very low venue, it meant that a number of sources would need to be used to provide the coverage. With an audience of around 150 and given the nature of the play, light levels could not afford to feel low.

I decided to look at the use of low wattage and low voltage tungsten sources.  On paper, the photometric data suggests that a 50W source gives roughly ten times less light out than a 500W one.  In practice I did not believe this would be perceived to be the case.  For a start, running a 500W source at 10% will give virtually no light out whereas running a 50W source at 100% will give you quite a lot.  So clearly there are better and worse levels at which to run sources in order to achieve the most efficiency.

Source 4 375W (www.etcconnect.com)
The rig was to consist of a number of ETC’s well loved Source 4
lanterns.  I was keen to lamp these at 375W rather than the usual 575W. My experience of using 575W Source 4s in small venues is that I very rarely need to run them at a level of over 60%.  Due to the fact that I am running them at a lower level, the light output becomes much warmer and it is necessary to use colour correction filter to adjust for this.  As soon as a filter is used with a light source, energy is absorbed by the filter and not output as light.  Using a 375W, I would run lamps brighter, therefore getting a higher colour temperature from them and avoiding the need for a colour correction filter and therefore energy loss.  The 375W lamp along with the efficiency of the Source 4 fixture due to its reflector design and optics, make the combination an exciting choice for trying to reduce energy consumption while offering me a tool I am extremely happy to be working with.

Pacific 80V (www.seleconlight.com)
Selecon claim a 40-50% energy saving using 80V technology compared to the traditional 240V technology.  They equate the output of a 1200W Pacific 80V fixture to that of a 2kW or even 2.5kW 240V fixture.  The 80V lamp also has a higher colour temperature suggesting that a less saturated filter could be used to correct the light output when running the lamp at a lower level (the same argument as for the Source 4 above).  For this show I used four 80V Pacifics with wide angle lens tubes (2 x 90 degrees and 2 x 45/75 degree).  Without these unique lanterns it would have been impossible to create such effective key light in such a low venue.  A single 90 degree fixture could cover virtually the whole stage from just 2.5m above.  The first act saw one 90 degree Pacific running at 45% and providing the key light for a scene supposedly lit by gas lamp.  In similar designs in the past I may haverequired 2 or 3 kW to do this – in this case just 540W was sufficient.

Selecon Acclaim Fresnel 300W (www.seleconlight.com)
In a similar vein to lamping the Source 4s at 375W, I decided to lamp a number of the Selecon Acclaim Fresnels at 300W instead of 650W.  Again, on paper this suggested I should get half the light out. In practice the result was very different.  A set of eight provided the general backlight cover and these were run at between 30% and 60%, therefore never drawing more than 1440W in total.  With 650W fixtures I expect I would have coloured them more heavily and perhaps run them at up to 45% therefore drawing 2340W – an extra 62.5%.

Selecon Aureol 50W (www.ardiislight.com)