lighting design
Sustainability isn’t normally your first consideration when you’re lighting a touring show in New Zealand.
Our performing arts venues are wildly non-standard in terms of size, shape, and technical specification, and lighting equipment is so different from venue to venue that you’ll probably need multiple plots of your production. I’ve even had a tour that finished up with five different lighting designs because we were trying to cram it into everything from rural halls to opera houses. The only way to counter this would be to tour your own lighting rig, but unless you’re playing arena shows, this is going to be so expensive that I won't bother encouraging you as your producer will have shut down that idea long ago.
Photo Credit: Stephen A'Court, The Impossible Has Already Happened
So a good touring lighting design should be flexible enough to take into account a broad range of variables. This behoves simplicity, which fortunately goes hand-in-hand with sustainability. And there are also some small but very significant things you can do to reduce the emissions and waste you create as you tour.
One piece of lighting equipment that’s always good to tour with is a console. In-house consoles vary, most consoles won’t open show files saved on other brands of consoles, and few designers and operators are up to speed with all the different types you’re going to encounter. However laptop-based consoles like the ETC Nomad are much smaller than a full-sized lighting desk (as well as cheaper) and touring one of these instead will save you a lot of weight and space on the road.
Some New Zealand venues have efficient lighting rigs that are based around LED fixtures, but most of our theatres don’t. An old-school opera house rig of incandescent fittings can chew through over 100,000 watts of power when in use, and that usage includes your rehearsal and plotting times, not just your show time. That’s about the energy footprint of thirty New Zealand houses.
Photo Credit: Stephen A'Court, Heat, 2008
The world's first piece of emission-neutral touring theatre, toured its own wind and solar power system. It was taken offline for some time during the run of the show and then run with power stored up over the course of the previous day.
It makes no sense to avoid them, but as a touring company you can encourage these venues to invest in a hybrid lighting model. That means starting to swap out incandescent fittings for LED versions and retiring those power / lamp / gel-hungry lights. This will also reduce the amount of variation between venues that you’ll have to incorporate into your design. It’s a good idea to ask each venue what LED fittings they have available and if they could source the LED fittings you need for your design locally, and start your design with that.
In many designs, a single colour-changing LED unit can replace three or four incandescent units of different colours. It will be around ten times as power efficient as a single incandescent would be, and will remove the need for lighting gel to generate its colour. Gel is an expensive and imported single-use plastic, and dark coloured gels burn out and need to be replaced surprisingly quickly, sometimes only lasting a handful of hours. Again, the savings aren’t just environmental. When you swap incandescent bulbs that have a 1000-hour life for LED fittings with a 50,000-hour life you get fittings that pay for themselves in a few years. The key here is investing in good fittings. Cheap and poorly made LEDs are common, and a poorly made LED can fail quickly, whereas robust LED fittings should have a 20-year lifespan and tend to be designed in a way that future-proofs them better also. Don’t just excitedly purchase a kit of cheap LED parts that you saw on Trademe. Instead, replace outdated fittings carefully and proactively, considering the needs that your company has, and encourage the venues you work with to do the same.
There are also things you can do straight away to reduce the environmental footprint of the spaces you’re working in. At times when your full stage lighting is not in use, such as during meal breaks or in pre-show before your audience enters, you can fade down light fittings that aren’t LEDs. I often record a scene on a submaster that’s my “efficient lighting” sub, and which uses only LEDs. If a specific scene isn’t actively in use I’ll shift to that scene as a default state. This will make a notable difference to the power consumption of the venue, and save the venue money as well.
Single-use plastics in the form of cable ties and tape, particularly electrical tape, are a source of plastic waste generated by lighting that’s easy to swap out. There’s no way to recycle used tape or cable ties, they end up as tiny scraps of forever plastic destined for landfill. But instead of carrying tape and cable ties, carrying a small bag of black bungee connectors (which you can even make yourself out of used car innertubes and short pieces of dowel) will let you cut your electrical tape usage down to almost nothing.
Photo Credit: Marcus McShane
Bungees are strong, just as fast to use, and normally faster to remove on pack-out. For simple cable-coiling it’s good to put a Velcro tab on each cable, and to use this to hold your cable coil together on pack out instead of electrical tape. These things can’t replace every bit of tape and cable tie usage, but they’re an easy swap for about 90 percent of it, I’ve found.
Photo Credit: Marcus McShane
And rather than just sending incandescent theatre lights to landfill when a venue does replace them, they can be recycled in a number of ways. Older lights, particularly from the 1980’s and earlier (which are still in use in many New Zealand theatres) have become retro design pieces by now. Strand 23s and 123s are the most in demand, but many less classic fixtures are still sought after. In the UK there’s a whole cottage industry based around rewiring these fittings with LEDs, polishing them up, and then selling them as chic domestic lamps.
A refurbished Strand 123 will sell for more than it costs to replace it with an LED Par, so it makes decent economic sense. Outdated fittings that don’t have desirable design aspects still contain valuable metals for recycling and have lenses that, well, are just beautiful objects. I once stayed in an old theatre flat in London whose dinner plates were all recycled Fresnel lenses. They were heavy but strangely elegant and quite fun to use. So perhaps think outside the box a little. Incandescent fittings might not be great as lights anymore, but they can still become a lot of things apart from landfill.
Marcus McShane
Marcus is one of New Zealand’s most prolific designers, having produced over 500 theatre designs and installation artworks since 2005. He has 22 awards spanning visual art and design, specifically in the areas of theatre, fine arts, architecture, and museum design. Marcus has a graduate degree in English Literature and Philosophy that he’s philosophical about, and his interests include finding sneaky ways to keep his carbon footprint low, growing vegetables, building bicycles, and reading things worth reading.