Sixty Robe moving lights were used at the 2006 Michael Elliot Trust Awards, a top charity dinner recognising the best of UK theatre and TV performance, and celebrating the 60^th Birthday of the legendary 1940s puppet character, Muffin The Mule.

The event was staged in the Great Room at London's Grosvenor House. Lighting was designed by Attila Keskin and supplied by HSL.

The show, hosted by Nichola McAuliffe, was replete with many special guests including Dame Judi Dench and David Suchet. Performers included Chris de Burgh, the cast of two of Bill Kenwright’s leading theatre tours of the moment – "This is Elvis" and "Whistle Down the Wind" and Camilla Dallerup and Ian Waite from "Strictly Come Dancing".

Keskin's challenge was to light a low headroom space serving as both dining room and a performance area. The stage was extremely limited for lighting positions, so HSL rigged a box truss in the centre of the room flanked by two outside trusses either end of the auditorium, plus a long 'goal-post' truss at the rear of the stage.

The Robes – 30 ColorSpot 1200 ATs and 30 ColorWash 1200 ATs - were scattered across the three auditorium trusses. The stage was very tight for space, but they squeezed fourteen fixtures onstage some on the floor and some on the goal post truss.

It was the first time that Keskin has used Robes. It was a very positive experience he reports, "I like them .. the optics and colours are excellent, the brightness is amazing, and they are really fast".

He used them for a myriad of effects – both architectural and traditional – including sweeping across the tables with break up gobos to create a nice ambience for the dinner session, and for injecting the stage with glamour and razzmatazz for the presentations and performances. He operated the show using a Virtuoso lighting console, and was also running an M-Box Extreme digital media server for the SoftLED backdrop onstage.

HSL's Mike Oates co-ordinated everything from their end and comments "We have the largest rental stock of Robe kit in the UK and it's all constantly working. The units are proving really reliable for all applications. That's a major consideration for any rental house, and specially on a gig like this, where there's so little time to get everything in and working in time – you need to know it's all going to work first time!".

Robe fixtures are also on tour with several of HSL's current theatre productions including "This is Elvis" (LD Ben P Cracknall)

Date of issue: April 2006