Total Eclipse for dbn Lighting's Gig in the Dark

	The crew for the Amadou and Mariam concert

Manchester, UK based dbn Lighting has been asked to work on some challenging and quirky projects in its time, but Eclipse, a special performance by Malian musical superstars Amadou and Mariam for the Manchester International Festival was the first concert where the requirement was to "light" it entirely to be dark.

The three completely sold-out performances were staged at the 500-capacity New Century Hall in central Manchester. Eclipse told the story of the duo's work and life together, featuring a collection of songs - a magical fusion of pop, blues and Malian music -- spanning their amazing career which started over 25 years ago, when they met at the Mali Institute for the Young Blind.

Amadou and Mariam specifically wanted the audience to experience the show in total darkness, so they could appreciate the psychological and sensory shifts involved in perception and experience that take place without vision, in the process gaining a valuable insight into the energies and emotions of their world.

dbn's Peter Robinson took up the challenge with great alacrity, and none of the normal parameters for lighting a show applied.

His brief involved designing an emergency lighting system, under manual control, which would function practically and safely in case of emergency, as the quest for total darkness in the room meant that the hall's in-house system, which bled too much ambient light, needed to be bypassed. This meant removing bulbs from a total of 20 fittings and involved installing a new temporary emergency lighting scheme, for which dbn used its own specially adapted emergency exit signs, strategically positioned, which only illuminated if the power was lost, along with a large number of emergency twin-spots.

dbn also installed infra-red lighting so the audience could be monitored with IR cameras during the show, and used UV and a miniscule amount of very dim stage lighting upstage -- mostly behind a mid stage drape - on the backing band (who were sighted) to allow them to see critical parts of their instruments.

The emergency lighting system was powered from dbn's mains distribution so that if the ability to bring up lights manually was lost, the room would be illuminated.

The overall auditorium emergency lighting was divided into eight zones, each lit with four 650W Fresnels hung from four 59' Slick Lite Beam trusses flown on CM Prostar hoists. During the shows, operator Nick Buckley stood by with a set of manual cues programmed into his Jands Vista S3 lighting desk, in case of an emergency or the need to remove a disorientated audience member -- none of which were actually needed, as the performances all ran like clockwork.