A Bard for All Seasons

Aug 18, 2022
A Bard for All Seasons
Permanent site lighting recasts the grounds of the Shakespeare Festival in Saskatoon into a year-round venue

By Samantha Schwirck

Photos: Garrett Kendel, King Rose Visuals

Ordinarily limited to two full-length plays each summer, the Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan (SOTS) Festival is now able to tell its stories in all seasons. Thanks to a two-year redevelopment project, the festival site has been expanded and modernized, resulting in a permanent, year-round presence on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River in the heart of the Canadian city of Saskatoon. 

The redevelopment included specialty site lighting designed by Saskatoon-based PWA Engineering. The client, explains Jeremy R. Hall, managing principal with PWA, wanted to maintain their identity as a summer riverside festival, while exploring opportunities for year-round use by the community and local performers.

In turn, PWA designed and installed a flexible lighting and controls system, aided by an early conceptual plan for festival lighting developed by Berlin-based Studio De Schutter. “The idea was to provide a visual theater of sorts to enhance the experience at the SOTS site,” Hall says. “New design elements were introduced, and concept elements modified to suit the final project, environment and climate challenges, all while keeping the original concept plan in view.”

Unveiled in 2020, the new lighting system caters to the playful nature of the theater by providing animated color on various natural canvases around the site. At the front entry, for example, visitors are met by illumination from multi-image gobos, as well as a colorful wash of light on the ground. “The front entry was meant to be an opening between two forested areas,” Hall says. “Although many of these trees were cleared for the redevelopment, the hope is that they will grow back and frame either side of the main gate.” 

Currently, two stationary gobos (Martin Lighting), located on a pole across the road, project images on the ground in front of the entry gate. When the trees grow back in the future, the gobos can be re-aimed to provide the effect originally imagined on the foliage instead. The same pole that holds the gobos also holds color-changing fixtures (Acclaim Lighting) aimed down at the pathway leading through the gates.

A similar approach was taken to illuminate the festival courtyard on the other side of the entry, where people congregate before shows. The lights are mounted on 25-ft poles and aimed at the theater tent and courtyard ground. “The fixtures are color-changing floodlights with DMX control, as well as some animated gobo projectors in key areas for providing corporate logos or patterns on the ground and tent,” Hall says. “The tent is removed during the winter months so the system is flexible to accommodate the site lighting both when the tent is up as well as when it is down.”

When the tent does come down, the stair risers and stage within the main amphitheater become the canvas for the lighting design. Concrete tiers, which form the amphitheater seating, house linear LED tape/ribbon light (Acclaim) that washes the rise of each tier. Mounting the ribbons proved challenging for PWA. “We had to figure out a way to put these linear, color-changing lights within fixed concrete tiers that would be fully functional and vandal resistant,” Hall says. “We also had to devise a means to have the wiring for the lighting, as well as the drivers and controllers, concealed, as the amphitheater is open to the elements for much of the year and is an unsupervised location.”

Ultimately, the fixtures were placed within small aluminum channels cast into the concrete lip of the risers. “There was a lot of difficulty feeding these fixtures and it all happened within the void space below the risers, with conduit poke-throughs occurring behind the actual stairs of the amphitheater, which were set in place after the fact and are theoretically moveable,” Hall says. Additional lighting is mounted in the aisle stair steps to illuminate egress paths.

Animated theatrical lighting for performances, on the other hand, was not part of PWA’s scope. “It is provided annually by the SOTS production team, hung from the rigging on the tent structure from year to year,” Hall explains. However, the systems are integrated via DMX controls and can be used together if desired. “The fidelity of control includes both horizontal and vertical motion across the tiers in several different zones, allowing for very dynamic and animated effects,” Hall adds. “These effects can be integrated with performance lighting, providing an additional canvas to enhance productions.”

Since the site is located along a riverbank near existing walking trails and other environmentally sensitive spaces, it was important that the lighting design tie into the trails for non-festival functionality. During festival times, color-changing floodlights (Acclaim) mounted on 25-ft poles illuminate the ground and trees in these adjacent spaces.

“When it’s outside of festival hours, the color washing along the riverbank is turned off and the 3000K walkway lights—mounted on the same pole as the color-wash fixtures—are utilized,” Hall says. “These pole-mounted path lights have motion sensing in them, allowing them to dim down when there is no one using the pathway and brighten up when people are on it. The color and control of these fixtures was a critical element of the Meewasin Valley Authority to provide minimal impact on the integrity of the riverbank ecosystem.”

Similarly, the riverside deck is illuminated by 3000K tube lighting (Acclaim) mounted under the railings and seating. “The hope was that the top rail and deck floor would catch the color from the area lights and the railings and bench faces would stay ‘white’ from the flex tube,” Hall explains. The contrast provides a comfortable visual effect while decreasing the amount of light shining into the riverbank environment.

Tying all of the spaces together is a site-wide control system programmed with several shows for daily and special events. The system has multiple components, beginning with a Mosaic controller that forms the “brain of the site control, housing all scheduled lighting events, as well as accepting input from the theatrical show control,” Hall says. The Mosaic software allows SOTS to design shows remotely, and the controller can be accessed remotely as well as through VPN access.

In addition, an Aria wireless system can broadcast DMX signals received from the Mosaic controller to all pole-mounted colored lights, thus eliminating the need to run DMX cabling to all fixtures and reducing the cost of labor and materials on-site. Finally, nLight Air sensors and wireless control integrated into the white pathway lights allow for simple motion sensor and photocell control. “Wireless DMX was utilized for many of the components, which allowed for a more economical installation as well as flexibility in the event that the owner wishes to add additional fixtures to the site for special events, which they have done a few times successfully to date,” Hall says.

The PWA team considers the integration between the site lighting and festival theatrical lighting to be one of the project’s biggest practical successes. “From a lighting design standpoint, the biggest success is that this is the first of its kind along the riverbank of Saskatoon,” Hall says. “As the river is so very integrated with the city, it was our desire to provide a vibrant and playful showpiece on the river—to show Saskatoon what can be done, and why it should be done more often.” With this flexible and scalable lighting solution, Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan is fully equipped to take center stage—for any event, and all year long.

THE DESIGNER

Jeremy R. Hall, P.Eng, is managing principal and senior design engineer for PWA Engineering in Saskatoon, Canada.