Tasmania’s Dark Mofo winter festival
Australia - For a company specialising in events, a festival that takes over an entire city can be both the best of times and the worst of times. Tasmania’s Dark Mofo winter festival is all of that for the Hobart-based Alive Technologies Group, but it’s a challenge the team delights in rising to.
Dark Mofo, created and run by MONA - Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art - is a fortnight of festivities which celebrates the dark through large-scale public art, food, film, music, light and noise, all held at venues which may be created or re-designed just for the occasion.
A huge amount of that venue staging, lighting and audio is taken care of by ATG and the company’s lighting project manager Nathaniel Collins was at the heart of much of the work.
“We do a lot with MONA so as a result of that connection, they brought us on, as the largest local supplier. We can always accommodate some of their more demanding projects,” Nathaniel says.
The brief for this year was responsibility for around 15 of the 18 stages scattered around the whole city, hosting a range of different performances. For such an important project, reliability and versatility are key to the choice of products, and the Alive Technologies Group chose Robe lighting fixtures for those very reasons.
For the performances at MAC2 (Macquarie Wharf Shed No. 2), the main venue, the fixtures included Robe BMFL Spots, Robin 600 LEDWash, and pointes. Also among the selection was what Nathaniel calls ‘a lot of’ strobes and blinders.
“The fixtures needed to be high output as one of the acts used a large amount of atmospherics and they needed to be able to punch through.”
The company also used Robe MegaPointes at other venues, including highlighting one of the giant 17-m high inverted crosses for Night Mass. There were four installed around the city, and this one was in a car park that was the central location of Night Mass, home base for the festival’s nightly after-parties.
(Jim Evans)

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