TINA ARENA

Don’t Ask Again

Tina Arena has toured Australia with a nationwide encore tour of one of the country’s highest-selling albums, Don’t Ask. Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the album, the tour is titled Don’t Ask Again, with lighting design by Peter Rubie.

The stage has no LED screen or imagery, with the show’s creative visuals focused on a touring lighting rig supplied by POWA Productions, including Martin MAC PXL, Ayrton Eurus, and their brand-new zactrack Smart plug-and-play automated follow system.

Jason Henderson from POWA is on tour, calibrating the zactrack system and leading the bump-in for each tour stop. Lyndon Buckley is also on the touring LX team as 2nd LX.

“We’ve got four dedicated spots for Tina with two Ayrton Eurus on the front truss and two Claypaky Sharpy X-Frames for backlighting, along with a along with a curtain-wall linear array of Robe LEDBeam 100s for effect, all utilising zactrack,” explained Jason. “It takes on a distinctly different look depending on the song and the number.”

Jason reports that the zactrack Smart is an excellent piece of software, and easy to use. He adds that they’ve had great support from distributors Show Technology, which significantly enhances the user experience.

“It makes it a lot easier to use,” he added. “If you’ve got questions, you can always ring Branden at Show Technology, and he can answer them on the spot. He’s been invaluable with it. I’ve found it helpful, and it’s pretty easy to give the LD control of it. I think zactrack provides the show with so much more dynamic lighting because you’re not just getting followspots from the front; you’re getting them from the back and covering all different angles.”

Peter says he runs two tags on Tina for redundancy and smoothness averaging, and two additional tags for support act Dylan Wright.

“The system has been great,” he remarked. “It’s so lovely to have a tracking backlight and front light on a performer, and the ability for the colour, intensity and precise levels to run in complete sync with the rest of the design is a wonderful thing.”

“Plotting that level of detail into the cues right from the start of Previz sessions becomes so intuitive, and it makes a lot of sense from a design point of view to execute a truly theatrical vision of which this show leans heavily into. Because the show is fully timecoded, it means I know Tina’s lights are going to fade up and down at exactly the right moment and fade duration every show, something that is harder to achieve when calling spots with new operators in every city.”

Peter adds that, aside from the X-Frames, the Eurus are his only spot in the show, and he’s been impressed with their output.

“The colour mixing has come a long way from earlier Ayrton fixtures,” he noted. “I cluster the Eurus in groups of three, giving some nice, powerful looks.”

POWA has close to 50 Ayrton Eurus in its inventory, with Jason commenting that they’re very bright, punchy and have a great range of gobos. A total of 23 are in the rig.

Hung upstage of the band is a backdrop of four ladders, each holding four Martin MAC Aura PXL. The positioning of the MAC Aura PXLs on the ladders creates a backdrop of fixtures that gives a curved illusion.

“I wanted to move away from traditional straight lines,” explained Peter. “The blinders are also formed in curved arches from the floor booms up, through the ladders, overhead trusses, and back down. The LED backdrop of movers replaces a traditional upstage LED wall, and I create custom effects using Madrix for both the main 37 LEDs and the 141 MAC Aura PXL backlights. The fluidness and organic feel of the MAC Aura PXL backlights are lovely, and you can achieve both shiny, sparkly effects and soft diffused content depending on where the lens sits in the zoom range.”

Peter runs sACN directly to every MAC Aura PXL, since each fixture requires a whole universe. The main fixtures and 37 LED backlights patch into the console, and then Madrix takes the console’s output, and HTP merges it onto the stage.

“I tour with a Vista by Chroma Q console, which I prefer for a touring show of this nature as it’s workflow is very suited for a designer and programmer with everything being so visual,” explains Peter. “The ability to create and manipulate show looks and add lots of detail easily without being distracted by complex syntax, macros, or maths is a pleasure to work with. Making updates in the hotel or on the plane without multiple screens is much easier than some of the other consoles I work with, as the interface is designed primarily around a single screen. The show is tightly timecoded and pre-programmed, but I also took advantage of some of the newest busking features of the software to very quickly create unique and fresh looks each night for our support act Dylan Wright.”

“The ladder MAC Aura PXLs bathe the stage in colour and effect through the show, but for the times I use them facing the crowd, I lean heavily on the Aura LEDs for sparkly eye candy looks and gentle waves,” Peter added. “When using the main LEDs as eye candy, I don’t run them over 10% due to their brightness, which presents some fun dimming curve challenges. The fallback to the Aura LEDs is a good saver here, and they throw a fair bit of light and create interesting criss-cross shards of light when there is a good level of haze in the space.”

The tour has just wrapped up its final show in Adelaide after an eight-city run, including Perth, where EAVP provided a similar rig.