Blinded by dazzling lighting effects

For many years my wife and I have been frequent visitors to these islands, especially at times of festivals such as the recent Victoria Arts Festival. Many wonderful events are offered to the public, one of which we visited last Friday evening.

This was a dance spectacular at the Main Square in Victoria which for us and many others, was spoiled by the lighting "effects". It seemed to us that the attitude was - because they exist we must use them. An array of moving lights lined the stage at eye-level, they swivelled and flashed and occasionally blinded the audience. Their strobe effect may even have been a hazard to epileptic sufferers. These particular lights were only useful when played on the back wall, otherwise they were interference.

The main lighting consisted of two banks of five lamps, two red and one white in each bank. The white, natural light was used minimally, leaving the red and blue to wash the stage. Many of the costumes of the dancers were lavish and colourful, but only witnessed in their true colour for an instant as they came on stage. After that they were uniformly red or purple. The effects reduced the costumes to a boring sameness.

With a little thought the lighting design could be used to great effect, rather than have the effect diminish the production.