The 2,800-capacity Terminal 5 in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan (photo: Ryan Muir)
USA - Three key live music venues in New York City managed by The Bowery Presents - Brooklyn Steel, Webster Hall and most recently, the 2,800-capacity Terminal 5 in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan - all feature Robe moving lights in their house rigs.
The lights have been specified by Luciano Savedra, head of lighting for The Bowery Presents which is the East Coast regional partner of AEG Live and owns and operates a diverse mix of venues across NYC and in other major metropolitan centres.
At Terminal 5, where Savedra also oversees and runs the lighting day-to-day, the 12 x MegaPointes and 12 x Spiider LED wash beams have greatly added to the flexibility of the existing lighting rig. The lights were supplied via BML-Blackbird.
Brooklyn Steel - on the site of a former steelworks and named one of the 10 best live music venues in America by Rolling Stone Magazine - has 16 x Spiiders. Webster Hall has 10 x MegaPointes and is among New York City's most historically significant theater halls, having hosted social and performance events since the club's construction in 1886.
Savedra has worked for Bowery Presents in different capacities since 2003, and in 2007 was hired to design new and contemporary lighting for Terminal 5, which had just joined the Bowery franchise, and also for another venue, Music Hall of Williamsburg, after which he stayed on as the house LD.
All the house rigs are designed to provide top-level touring artists with the facilities to produce a comprehensive show, although that’s not exclusively the case, and productions can ‘mix and match’ systems by bringing in their own specials, or in some cases, their complete rigs.
Top of the agenda is to provide a straightforward lighting system with plenty of creative scope to embrace the wide collage of styles and genres of music staged there.
Savedra’s starting point for any house system design is ensuring all the basics and bottom line “needs” are covered first - including front, back and side light. From there, a combination of physical and financial aspects influences how enthusiastic he can get with additional layers of lighting and effects!
In all these three mentioned NYC venues, the Robe products are providing direct back light plus an assortment of eye candy and high-impact effects.
Remote controllability of the lights via RDM means that fixture changes can be made even quicker and more straightforward to suit the needs of travelling lighting designers.
The Terminal 5 lighting is run from a grandMA3 console.

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