Kuno van Velzen (Controllux), Amare lighting technician Mathijs Grool and Amare stage manager Arjen Bijtelaar (photo: Louise Stickland)
The Netherlands - The new Amare building is an arts, culture, and educational hub on the Spui in Den Haag, which opened last year at the heart of this lively capital city, after six years of construction. Built on the footprint of the old Lucent Danstheater, Amare is a centre for excellence and houses the Dance and Music Centre, The Hague Foundation, the Residentie Orkest, the Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT) and the Royal Conservatoire.
Offering a 1500-capacity concert hall (2500 standing) and a 1300-seater theatre plus two other performance halls and extensive rehearsal facilities, it was a big deal to get over 100 Robe moving lights specified for the project.
These are a mix of 86 x T1 Profiles and 30 x T2 Profiles plus 60 x ParFects all supplied by Robe’s Benelux distributor Controllux and installed in the two primary venues and their main black box space.
Arjen Bijtelaar is the venue’s stage manager specialising in lighting. He has worked for the venue since 2006 – including at the Lucent Danstheater before its demolition – and explained that the original tender was for profile LED luminaires offering full white and multicoloured colour control.
The venue already had a good experience with Robe as one of the first in the country to invest in the DL7 series in 2016. This was for their temporary residence at the Zuiderstrand Theater in Scheveningen Harbour, Den Haag, which operated during the lengthy construction period.
Here the company notched up another landmark as the first cultural institution in Benelux to have Robe’s T1 Profile.
When the Amare build project started, the T2 had not yet been developed, so the initial spec won by Controllux was for the 86 x T1 Profiles. However, after moving into the fnew facilities last year, some additional funding became available with which they purchased the T2s and ParFects.
The requirement was for lighting that would assist both the concert hall and the stage, all genres of dance, plus theatre and concerts.
Of the 30 x T2s, eight are on used for the concert hall FOH, with four on one of the upstage bars, and the remaining 18 fixtures are in the Theatre, at FOH and in some of the side positions.
The T1s originally intended for the concert hall’s FOH bridges are deployed in other positions around the venue, mostly on the advance bar with some in the side balcony positions, with the four other T2s replacing the previous FOH positions. The remaining 18 x T2 Profiles are in the theatre.
Arjen and Amare lighting technician Mathijs Grool are delighted with the fixtures as are all the guest LDs who have so far visited with their various shows.
The control consoles in the building are all ETC and the DMX merging is achieved via an ACN network.
Controllux’s Kuno van Velzen comments, “The lighting crew at the Zuiderstrand Theatre (the temporary venue for the Amare during the build) were among the first in the world to buy the Robe T1 Profile back in February 2019. It was there that they fell in love with the finesse and potential of Robe’s multi colour solution for theatre applications.”

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