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Beijing’s ‘Aida’ illuminated by Clay Paky

The National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing has staged Verdi's opera ‘Aida’ with the lighting designer Vinicio Cheli and a group of Italian professionals: stage designer Ezio Frigerio, director Francesco Micheli, costume designer Francia Squarciapino, and Sergio Metalli, who dealt with the video projections.

Frigerio increased the size of the sets. "The tomb of Radamès was 59 feet high (18 metres)," says Cheli, and the set was submerged with sand: during the Napoleonic campaign, half of the monumental ruins we know today in Egypt were still covered with sand. Cheli used Clay Paky's colour system to reconstruct the subdued daytime and night-time atmospheres evoked by the pictures in the 19th-century text 'Napoleon in Egypt'.

Using the set designer's sketches, Cheli set out identifying the "points where the light should arrive from, choosing the fixtures to use, and finding some technical solutions" in order to light the various scenes that take place during the story of Aida and her love for Radamès. "You go from outdoors - the first act takes place on the banks of the Nile - to the gardens of an Egyptian Palace. Then the scene moves on, with a change without any interruption in the music, to Radamès' triumphal march (Act II, scene 2)."

The scenic movements, which went well beyond the normal depth of the stage (130 feet [40 metres] of overall stage space), were dynamically lit with the slow silence required in a theatre using about sixty lights, including Alpha Profile 1500s and Alpha Wash 1500s.

“The river in the Nile scene was a projected video. It was therefore necessary to position the lights very carefully just outside the projected video image in order not to ruin the stage lighting results," Cheli explains.

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