The nuclear blast at Hiroshima in 1945 is often described in Japanese as a flash (pika) followed by a bang (don). Last year, a performance lit with ETC Source Four LED Lustr+ fixtures aimed to represent the unexpected terror of the pika don through the medium of dance. Un Coup de Don, by dance company Ariadone and led by Carlotta Ikeda and Ko Morobushi (Japan), was part of the Festival Automne in Normandy, France.
Lighting director Eric Blosse says: “We all agreed that we needed to restart from the beginning, rather than seek to replicate the actual flash itself: we were left with a blank white space focused on the body in a trance.”
The style of dance, Butoh, is traditionally performed in white body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion, which is well suited to trance-like movements and subtle colour shifts.
Says Blosse: “The ability of the Source Four LEDs to offer a variable white temperature was key to the performance: we could make subtle adjustments to the light levels, highlighting the bodies’ movement in the time of the trance. This little-used facility led us to propose a new language of light.”
All fixtures in the ETC LED range were designed to optimise skin tones. Whereas units from other manufacturers may make actors and set colours look unnatural or unpleasant, Source Four LED and Selador fixtures use up to seven colours to achieve the widest possible gamut.
ETC Source Four LED fixtures, which were first launched little more than a year ago, have already won a number of awards, including ABTT 2012 Product of the Year and the PLASA 2012 Award for Sustainability. ETC set out to produce exceptional light output and quality for the amount of power consumed – and, depending on the model, they achieve from 30 to over 40 lumens per watt.
Fixtures in the range include the full colour Lustr+ that Blosse used, and which is able to achieve a wide range across the spectrum; along with white light specialists Tungsten (3000K, offering warm whites); Daylight (5600K, offering cool whites); and new Studio HD, which offers an ultra-flexible, variable white light (2700K-6500K).
The fixtures for Un Coup de Don were supplied by Les Ateliers Lumière of Bordeaux.