Organised by ENO Baylis, ENO's education team, the three-day project took place at the Great Hall, Queen Mary's College in Stepney, and involved children from four local schools working with a small orchestra and set under a lighting rig to learn about opera. ENO needed not only equipment to fit the brief supplied by set and lighting designer Dody Nash, but also a team to install and operate that equipment.
Fortunately White Light now have Jon Coventry as Production Manager, overseeing exactly this kind of project where a customer needs more than just to 'dry hire' equipment. Coventry managed the lighting for ENO, supplying and then leading a team that installed a 12m wide, 6m high free-standing box truss supporting a lighting rig consisting of one 2.5kW Strand Alto PC, eight 2.5kW Cantata Fresnels, twenty ETC Source Fours and a 6m diameter circular Litebeam truss holding forty birdies, together with dimming and RAT Stands for the musicians. To rig the box truss, the team made use of four SuperLifts recently purchased by White Light. Coventry also supplied all of the necessary Risk Assessments and Method Statements for the project.
"Though it wasn't a particularly big rig, the orchestra rehearsals, kids rehearsals, technical rehearsals and dress meant that we only had four hours to get in and get everything ready for focussing," Coventry notes. "Fortunately I had a great team, including Leigh Porter, Matt Holliday, Simon Jones and Paul Colwell, so everything went very smoothly. Matt then stayed for all three days to program and operate the show and assist the lighting designer, and once the show was over we had the rig down and out in under two hours. Most importantly, ENO were very happy!"
Jon Coventry is available for any project where more than just equipment hire is required, of any scale - as well as the ENO project, he and his team were also responsible for the lights illuminating the London Eye for the recent Nokia product launch. He can be contacted at White Light on 020 8254 4800, or by email to Jon.Coventry@whitelightgroup.co.uk. Further information about ENO and the ENO Baylis education project can be found at www.eno.org.