Tribute Concert at Renovated Communist-era Circus Building Features Elation Lighting

Elation dealer Eventika Grup SRL of Moldova recently finished an interesting project that the company worked long and hard to complete. After the USSR collapsed, the circus in the town of Chisinau, Moldova, disintegrated along with it, leaving behind a large circus building that had the potential to be an excellent performance space. After years of laying idol, Eventika was able to partially restore the building with local help, without foreign investment, and held a 20th anniversary tribute concert at the venue for the Moldavian rock band Gindul Mitei (Cat's Thoughts).

The circus building, Chisinau City Circus, opened in 1981 and was once the largest auditorium in Moldova with over 50 performances there each year. With post-Communist era struggles however, the venue was abandoned in 2004. For the 2017 20th anniversary tribute concert, bands and solo artists presented Gindul Mitei classics while the building's big top past came to life with gymnasts, jugglers, and even an acrobat on a white horse performing for the audience.

Besides their task as renovators of the venue, Eventika fulfilled every possible role for the concert event -- show production, full technical contractor, design, décor and scenography, direction, and more. Lighting design was by Serghei Buchin with the support of Eventika lighting designer and operator Maxim Cojocari.

"There were restrictions to the circus arena so we made a classical concert mix of lines of rigging," Serghei Buchin of Eventika Grup explains. "We placed Fuze Wash Z350 fixtures upstage on both sides of the stage and along a backstage truss to provide color wash from the right, left and center. They have a good color mixing system and covered the space in dynamic washes of color. It also has an excellent zoom range so it can cover a wide area."

As a powerful, dynamic moving light was needed, Serghei turned to the versatile 3-in-1 Platinum SBX for variable beam effects to energize the arena. "We needed an extremely bright spot but also a powerful beam luminaire," he says. "We had the SBX's at the main upstage position on two lines of truss for mid-air and beam looks." Not only can the SBX change between Beam and Spot modes quickly but a unique frost system was employed when a wash effect was needed.

Multi-purpose SixBar 1000 LED color-changing battens were lined on five vertical upstage towers and used for color and eye-candy looks while Opti Par White fixtures were spread throughout the upstage rig and along five angled stick trusses in back of the performers.

"This was really a test for lighting fixtures as it's a big round hall with a dome height of 20m," states Serghei. "We used all of our Elation products on this and they performed great. Everything turned out splendidly and I once again became convinced that Elation produces excellent devices. I personally am proud that our small company has become part of the history of this building. We worked hard on this project for one year."