ELEMENTS

An American creation, now managed and administered by the Amsterdam-based Stage Entertainment organisation, Holiday On Ice is one of the longest-running and most successful entertainment concepts ever to be put in front of a live audience. And I’ll be honest — it wasn’t until I attended the world premiere of its latest production, Elements, and spoke to the design team, that I fully appreciated the measure of Holiday On Ice’s achievements.

Under Stage Entertainment’s leadership since 1999, and now with affiliated offices in Hamburg, London, Madrid, Milan and Moscow, Holiday On Ice has recently been transformed to meet the more sophisticated demands of modern audiences, with a range of shows that merge elements of the theatre, dance, opera, musicals and acrobatics, with increasingly innovative production designs.

The statistics are astounding. Since it was founded in Ohio in 1943, Holiday On Ice has appeared in 620 towns and cities in 80 countries and been seen by more than 312 million people worldwide. The company currently employs in excess of 350 skaters and 120 crew members, who appear in and stage six different productions that simultaneously tour in three continents. Not counting existing investments, each new show costs a minimum of around £2.9 million (4m Euros/US$6m). You get the picture.

Premiered at the Color Line Arena in Hamburg on November 8, Elements contains scenes inspired by Fire, Water, Earth and Air, and transports the audience from dawn in Asia through a journey that encompasses Celtic mythology, a Chinese fireworks festival and the world of the Native Americans.

Elements features a set design by Bart Clement, including approximately 240 metres of uniquely-shaped lighting truss built by LiteStructures; sound is by Leo van den Boogaard, lighting by Luc Peumans, original music by Maurice Luttikhuis, choreography by Karen Kresge, and an impressive collection of costumes and props was designed by David Shields. In addition, an enchanting aerial silk act was created by Stephane Haffner.

Before interviewing the technical production team about their work on Elements, I spoke to the creative director Robin Cousins MBE — famed for his gold medal-winning figure skating performance for Great Britain at the 1980 Winter Olympics — about what distinguishes this show amongst others that have recently been staged by Holiday On Ice (HOI).

“It’s the technology, and that’s been happening over the past five or six years with HOI on shows like Hollywood, Diamonds, Fantasy, Romanza and last year’s production, Mystery,” said Cousins, who has held a directing role with HOI for many years.

“In my day, a very simple lighting structure would tour, the sets were painted, the costumes were always wonderful, but the technology now allows us to have a set like this that can tour, be taken apart, and travel twice in the same week. The advancements of the lighting fixtures themselves have been tremendous.

“For me, it’s more about the look of the show than the content. Obviously, ice skating has moved on a lot from 30, 20 or even 10 years ago, so the dynamic changes within the confines of the show. But it’s how it’s surrounded that allows the audience to realise that we’re in a different century in terms of the technology.

“The designers of our shows are now the same people who do rock shows, and they understand touring which is crucial because the ability to be a moveable feast has always been one of HOI’s greatest assets. I’ve worked with people like Mark Fisher, Patrick Woodroffe and now Bart Clement who has done the last two years with us.

“When you’re playing arenas of this size, you can have the type of show that we had a few years ago. Now we have a scale of show that can work in an arena for 11,000 people or in the Brighton Centre for 4,500 people, where it will be tight and half the length, but people will still go ‘Wow’.”

The basic ideas for Elements came together between Cousins and Hans Staal, HOI’s director of production & operations, during a trip to China. In the absence of a bespoke HOI rehearsal facility, the cast and crew prepared for the show in a disused Utrecht factory before loading into the Color Line Arena.

Cousins added: “For Elements, we’re dealing with something that’s spiritual, other-worldly and slightly Asian. Last year, for Mystery, Bart was able to design something that brought the set out into the audience, and that’s what I wanted for this show.

“Seeing this all come together, with the bull horns in the trussing and the fact that the lighting is so integrated within it, I’ve realised that it’s an entity in it’s own right. Then it was just a case of Luc Peumans, our lighting designer, to work with Bart and David, our costume designer, to create a production.”

SET & LIGHTING
Bart Clement’s innovative truss structure concept presented LiteStructures with one of its most complex and challenging design and construction projects of recent years. Turning the concept into functioning reality took just 11 weeks, which was a remarkable achievement, given that the construction was entirely from non-standard, bespoke components.

The final structure comprised three sections — the dominant feature being a huge central spiral, measuring 25m across, 4.5m deep and more than 150m in overall length, and weighing seven tons. The design also called for two outer formations, each fitted with spot chairs, which were also specially designed and fabricated at LiteStructures.

The third element, originally envisaged as inflatables, finally emerged as 'bull horns', extending from the stage front on to the ice. Other parts of the set and decoration were supplied by Applied Arts, Perfect Link and Showtex.

Bogdan Lewko, a former skater who has been HOI’s technical director since 1999, expressed his delight with LiteStructures’ contributions. He said: “Adrian Brooks [MD], Richard Carr [operations manager] and their engineering team are very flexible, open-minded people and it was a great pleasure to work with them. We worked with Brilliant Stages last year but this time they were too busy to take on the project, and recommended LiteStructures to us. It turned out to be a very good move for us, and I think the results speak for themselves.”

Flashlight APR’s Belgian branch provided the sound and lighting systems, and as Cousins already mentioned, the lighting was designed by Luc Peumans of Painting With Light, in collaboration with Clement.

I asked Peumans about the challenges involved in lighting an ice floor, compared with a regular stage and set. He said: “The ice looks like a perfect projection surface to create a textured atmosphere, but most of the time it’s very hard to highlight the skaters’ action without diluting the ambience. As the ice floor is white, it easily reflects the keylight for the skaters and they can appear to be underlit. The trick is to find the right balance between the focus and visibility of the action and the created atmosphere.”

Peumans’ choice of console was a full-size MA Lighting grandMA. Two were present in Hamburg, where there was still much multi-programming in progress by Paco Mispelters and his assistant Joenraad Demees. The second desk controlled follow spot cues, while the main desk handled the remainder. Once the show was on tour, only one grandMA was required at FOH.

“We chose the grandMA because of the networking capabilities — you can easily work on the same show using different consoles,” said Peumans. “This is my fifth HOI production and I’ve been using grandMAs for the last three years. It’s become my preferred console by a long way.”

Peumans’ first idea was to use either Robe or High End digital lighting so that he could transmit moving images through the fixtures via a media server, but unfortunately the budget didn’t run to that. His alternative was to spec a selection of Vari*Lites.
Said Peumans: “I’m quite a fan of VLs for this kind of work, and knowing that I couldn’t have a massive amount of lights on the truss, I felt the VL3000 spot would be the most powerful option so we have 34 of those doing gobo projections and special moves.”

The Vari*Lite element of Peumans’ rig also includes 25 VL2500 washes and 22 VL500D tungsten lights. Peumans also has six 2.5kW Robert Juliat Ivanhoe follow spots within the set with Wybron CXI scrollers, eight Martin Atomic strobes and 720 Egg strobes at his disposal, along with a pair of MDG Atmosphere hazers.

Amongst the more unusual fixtures are the 12 DMX-controlled 400W LT-404F long-throw floods from U.S. manufacturer Wildfire. These are each fitted with a Wybron douser, and Peumans uses them for two scenes in which the cast are wearing ‘blacklight’ costumes. The fixtures are particularly effective during a magical flying act with the Dragonflies.
Featured within Clement’s weird and wonderful truss design are a number of spherical spiral creations which, being aluminium, take light beautifully and reflect beams around the arena. “I did think of inserting some LEDs into these ‘balls’ but the existing effect of the reflections was enough on its own,” commented Peumans.

The design did, however, include another kind of LED application, and an ingenious one at that. Inside the truss structure there are 102 clusters of four 9W RGB LED units. The LEDs themselves were manufactured by Ivano Burato at the Italian company, Colours, and they were mounted into specially-made modules, designed by technical project manager Hans Willems, with the aim of optimising light coverage of the truss.

Peumans explained: “I came across Colours products when I was doing a design for a club. I watched a demo and it was one of the first RGB LED fixtures that I felt really worked for me. You get a very nice blend of colour and they look great up there.”

The visual palette also included liberal amounts of pyro, provided by LMP Pyrotechnik Ibbenbueren, and a water fog system from Las Vegas company, Alumifax.

TECHNICAL LIAISON
The LED modules and the technical drawings of the curved truss design represented just a fraction of Hans Willems’ responsibilities on Elements. Working under the guise of his company, WiCreations, he liaised with associate producer Kees Rutgers, Hans Staal, tour manager Peter Schwartz and all of the technical department heads from the earliest planning stages to ensure that each of their areas interface correctly on site and work within budgets. In a rock’n’roll touring situation, he’d have the title of production manager, but things work a little differently in Holiday On Ice world.

He said: “We had to fit all of the sound and lighting systems, the set, costumes and everything for the tour into five trailers. That was a bit difficult because if you build a custom truss like this, it takes up a lot of volume. So we built it in two halves and each of them can be stacked inside a numbered dolly [designed by WiCreations] for instant recognition. The whole set fits into 12 dollies and the aim has been to make everything as compact as possible, whilst making it very quick for the crew to load in and out with maximum accuracy. The dollies definitely make organisation a lot smoother.”

On the tour, the HOI crew and cast will be spending an average of three days in each city, and doing three shows a day. It’s therefore important, according to Willems, that additional trucking is hired to ‘leapfrog’ part of the production ahead to the next venue to advance the next show.

Another of Willems’ tasks for German shows is to complete a Baubuch, or building book — an extensive document containing a full set of drawings and statistics for all of the production’s structures. This is required by German law and it’s used as a reference for verification and eventual health and safety approval by TÜV officials. A production cannot go ahead without the document being authorised and stamped by TÜV.

Said Willems: “It’s quite time-consuming to get all this information together, but it is essential and it serves as a good reference point for all of the production team, so it would be worth doing even if it wasn’t a legal requirement.”

AUDIO
The music for Elements was co-ordinated by Maurice Luttikhuis and consists of a number of his own original compositions, as well as a selection of well-known songs that have been re-recorded as covers. These songs are all stored in multitrack form on Pro Tools and, uniquely, they are mixed live in groups at FOH during every show via the resident Digidesign D-Show Profile console.

Sound designer Leo van den Boogaard explained: “We wanted to inject the excitement of a real live mix into the show, and so no two performances are the same really. A lot of feeling and reaction to the audiences goes into the mix.

“It’s not a true surround sound system, but we allude to that a little by enhancing some voices or instruments and feeding to different loudspeakers, rather than producing a regular stereo mix. This is most noticeable when sound effects move around.

“This is the first time I’ve specified a D-Show Profile. I’m very familiar with the full-size D-Show, but the Profile was big enough for this job, plus it’s very compact and that suits our needs. I like it a lot.”

Van den Boogaard’s choice of PA system is the Synco W8LM Mini line array by Martin Audio. “We have eight main sources, which are the full-range Combi boxes, and another eight of them as fill-ins. We’re also feeding to the house JBL VerTec system here at the Color Line Arena, which is a system I’ve used many a time, so I know how to handle it.

“There are Synco/Martin 18" subs at the front and sides, and also under the tribune to add weight to the sound underneath the seating. At some points in the show, the audience really feels the sound but they can’t tell where it’s coming from, which is how it should be. In a show like this, you really can’t have a lot of speakers in view — it would spoil the whole look.

“We also have some extra Synco/Martin Combis in the far corners as discreet, localised monitoring for the skaters, and this small line array set-up is perfect for this, too, because the lower boxes cover the actual ice floor very well.

The whole production runs on time code, allowing the sound and lighting teams to work in sync, and pre-show and interval announcements are played in from the console via a 360 Systems Instant Replay hard drive unit. The show content was slightly different for the premiere, owing to the addition of special guest speakers, a cameo appearance by famed German figure skater Tanja Szewczenko and an interval performance by Howard Carpendale who sang live to playback.

Like all HOI productions, Elements is destined for a long life on the road. The show travels to 13 German venues through to February 2008 and then, curiously under the alternative title of Spirit, it heads out to Paris and through the rest of Europe on a journey that is expected to last up to three years.

So far, the reactions have been very positive, as Robin Cousins said in closing: “I’m very excited by this show and the whole team have worked their socks off to bring it to life. It’s very atmospheric and what we’ve heard back from audiences is that there’s such a great connection and energy to the package of the show before you even get to the skating.”