Rob Halliday
Rob has been working in performance lighting for almost thirty years as a lighting designer, and collaborating with other lighting designers as lighting programmer or associate lighting designer.
His lighting designs have included Tree of Codes at the Manchester Festival and around the world, Giudizio Universale in Rome with Bruno Poet, many shows over two decades for London’s Royal Academy of Music, the opening shows at the new Chester Storyhouse Theatre, Buried Child, West Side Story, Hello Dolly and others at Leicester’s Curve, The Wizard of Oz touring the USA and in New York, and Daddy Cool in London and Berlin.
Rob has also taught and spoken about lighting around the world, is a founder of the Backstage Heritage Collection, is a leader of the Association of Lighting Designer’s #SaveStageLighting campaign, and writes regularly about entertainment design and technology for a range of publications.
LUKE HALLS – VIDEO DESIGNER
THEATRE: The Lehman Trilogy, Antony and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, Ugly Lies the Bone, The Great Wave (National Theatre); Everyone’s Talking About Jamie, The Moderate Soprano, Frozen (West End); 2071, The Nether (also West End), Linda, Girls & Boys (Royal Court); Miss Saigon (Japan, New York, UK tour); Alys, Always, My Name is Lucy Barton (Bridge Theatre); Shipwreck, Oil (Almeida); Desire Under the Elms (Sheffield Crucible); Elegy for Young Lovers (Theatr an Der Wien); Half a Sixpence (Chichester); Mary Poppins (Tour); Hamlet, The Master and Margarita (Barbican); I Can’t Sing (Palladium); Local Hero (The Royal Lyceum Edinburgh), The Lehman Trilogy (Park Avenue Armoury), The Starry Messenger (Wyndham’s Theatre)
OPERA: The Unknown Soldier, Don Giovanni, Krol Rogerat (ROH); The Cunning Little Vixen, Don Giovanni, Der Freischütz (Danish Royal Opera); Otello (Metropolitan Opera, New York); Zeitgest (Coliseum); Das Liebesverbot (Teatro Real, Madrid); The Flying Dutchman (Finland National Opera); West Side Story (Malmo Opera); Don Giovanni (Barcelona Opera); Marco Polo (Guangzhou Opera House); Carmen (Bregenzer Festspiele); Don Giovanni (Houston Grand Opera); Porgy and Bess (National Opera, Amsterdam).
BALLET: Malgorzata Dzierzon (Ballet Rambert); Connectome (Royal Ballet).
OTHER WORK: Magic Mike London (London Hippodrome); projections for Adele, Rihanna, Paris Fashion Week, Robbie Williams, Pet Shop Boys, The Sessions, The Band, Olympic and Paralympic 2012 closing ceremonies, ‘Concert for Diana’ at Wembley Stadium, George Michael, Rolling Stones, Genesis, Darren Hayes, Elton John, U2, Muse, and Nitin Sawhney.
AWARDS: Knight of Illumination awards for 2014, 2015 and 2016; BAFTA for The Cube.
BRUNO POET – LIGHTING DESIGNER
Bruno Poet works extensively in opera, theatre, dance, and live music. He has won two Knight of Illumination Awards, one for the Sigur Rós 2013 world tour and one for Frankenstein at the National Theatre, for which he also won the Olivier Award for Best Lighting Design.
Credits include Bjork’s Cornucopia (The Shed, New York); TINA: The Musical (West End/Broadway/Hamburg); A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julius Caesar (Bridge Theatre); Stories, St George and the Dragon, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Treasure Island, London Road (National Theatre); Miss Saigon (West End/Broadway); Faith Healer (Donmar Warehouse); From Here to Eternity (West End); The Convert (Young Vic).
Opera includes Otello, Don Giovanni, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (ROH); The Merry Widow (ENO); Akhnaten (ENO/ LA Opera/ Met NY); Carmen (ENO/ Den Norske Opera); Das Liebesverbot (Teatro Real, Madrid); Die Dreigroschenoper (Theatre an der Wein); Amadeus, Der Freischutz (Royal Danish Opera). Bruno has also designed the lighting for 14 season at Garsington Opera.
Dance includes The Unknown Soldier, Connectome (Alastair Marriott/ Royal Ballet); Material Men (Shobana Jeyasingh); Elsa Canasta (Javier de Frutos/ Scottish Ballet) and Other Stories (Royal Ballet).
Image credit: Luca Parisse
Featured Work
Giudizio Universale
Giudizio Universale uses the art of performance design to tell the story of an artist from another age, Michelangelo and his creation of the artworks for the Sistine Chapel – and to bring audiences closer to that artwork, enveloping them within it.
Created by the Italian company Artainment Worldwide Shows and staged in Rome in a theatre close to the Vatican itself, the show saw a close collaboration between artists from the UK, Italy, Denmark, Greece and elsewhere. A performance space that encompasses not just the venue’s stage but its entire auditorium, with a new barrel-vaulted roof installed above the audience, provides a place where epic-scale projection and live performance are blended seamlessly together by precisely considered lighting. No one design element would function correctly alone; tests and careful planning were carried out over many months, allowing the creation of the show as a cohesive whole within the venue itself – with one final surprise, a light that reached out to touch the audience, saved until the very end.
The inspiration here was the fascinating, open conversations with the show’s directors, Marco Balich and Lulu Helbek, with Lulu’s fascination with the possibilities of light as art in its own right as well as within a show, of course with Michelangelo’s original artwork, and with the desire to explore the way that light and projection can interact so that you can’t tell when one ends and the other begins’. When a character holding a candle moves close to a projected image of a painting and that image appears to be lit by the approaching candle, it is a glorious moment.