Vice & Vertu Celebrates the Music Halls of 1930s Montreal with Support from MA Lighting's dot2 Consoles

	Vice & Vertu

To mark Montreal's 375th anniversary and the Festival Montreal Completement Cirque, The 7 Fingers presented the immersive production, Vice & Vertu, at the city's Societe des Arts Technologiques (SAT). The 7 Fingers used MA Lighting dot2 XL-F and XL-B consoles to control lighting for the kaleidoscope of circus, theater, comedy, video projections, burlesque, and music acts that comprised the show. A.C.T Lighting, Inc. is the exclusive distributor of MA Lighting products in North America.

Vice & Vertu relived the rise and fall of Montreal's cabarets and music halls; it featured encounters with notorious and pivotal historical figures from the city's red light district and burgeoning cultural scene of the 1930s.

The production ran for one month and was staged in two different main venues inside SAT. The audience moved from one area to the next with the artists accompanying them as sets were transformed into a red light club, cabaret, radio station, and mafia backroom.

"The production played out in three different zones on two levels, each with its own challenge," says lighting designer Jean Laurin of Blue Hour Design. "The first floor was the biggest room and also had a low ceiling. We had to cover a lot of space for acting and for acrobatic numbers and used a big conventional and LED kit with a few moving lights."

"On the second floor the action was in a big dome space, which is mainly a 360-degree projection room and is rarely used for circus performances. We came up with a system of towers along the outside perimeter of the room adding a single point in the roof to hang a lighting position. To be less intrusive to the video projections all around the lighting design had to be very discrete."

Laurin deployed one dot2 console in the main room and one in the dome. "Being a grandMA2 user and knowing that all of our programmers were too, I thought the dot2 would be perfect for the production," he says. "The console was easy to integrate and everyone learned it the first day. The fact that this show had some moving lights but a lot of LED fixtures was the perfect match. Space was also a concern so the small footprint of the console was a real asset. MA Lighting's reliability and the support of Alex Monast at A.C.T Lighting meant a lot to the overall experience with the dot2 as well."

Laurin says the console's "StoreLook function was great and speeded up recording cues. User guidance was a bonus as we made the transition from MA2 to dot2. And track and shield was another new and interesting function."

He found that "the general layouts on the small screens were quite impressive for the size of the console. Also, I could easily set up some groups and views in advance in dot2 onPC."

Catherine Fournier-Poirier and Benoit Lariviere were the programmers for Vice & Vertu.