It seems the designers of the new water-based Han Show, in Wuhan, China, have things a bit backwards. Instead of brainstorming on the conceptual basics of a theatrical show and securing the proper venue for it, the leading designers of the production have gotten support from Dalian Wanda Group, a large Chinese commercial property developer and cinema operator that constructed an entire theater for the specific purpose of housing The Han Show..
To any rational outside observer, this seems like putting the horse before the cart. Upon further inspection, however, it’s completely fitting that The Han Show’s large-as-life spectacle should be awarded its own venue, which opened in late 2014. Developed as a three-tiered visual experience, The Han Show features aerial acrobatics, more than 200 square meters of immersive video screens, monstrous robotics, almost 1,300 lighting fixtures, an 8.7-meter-deep performance water basin (containing 10 million liters of water), hundreds of fountain jets, a 27.5 meter high diving platform, and much more.
Theater director Franco Dragone, founder of the world famous live-event company Dragone, successfully navigated three other major water-based shows prior to The Han Show, including O at the Bellagio Las Vegas, Le Rêve — The Dream at Wynn Las Vegas, and The House of Dancing Water in Macau, China, which took two years to complete and opened in 2010. After securing a deal with developer Wanda, Dragone communicated his desire to embark on yet another water-soaked epic to the late architect/designer Mark Fisher, of Stufish Entertainment Architects, and the two visionaries set about formulating a concept to transform a proscenium theater into an arena-style setting, via moveable banks of swing seats.
Fisher, who died in 2013 before building was complete, was the perfect choice for a project of this kind. He’d worked with Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones, among others. He was involved with the design for the memorably enormous “claw” for U2’s 360° tour. Fisher was also the chief designer of the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, as well as a set designer for Cirque du Soleil’s KÀ and Viva Elvis.
With Fisher as well as acoustician (Jaffe Holden) on board, Dragone reached out to Theatre Projects Consultants to complete the design team. Says Jules Lauve III, Theatre Projects Consultants’ principal, his firm served in getting all of the major players on the same page, conceptually, providing a kind of glue that made everything gel for four-plus year project.
“First you build the design team and then you build the building, right?” says Lauve, who mentions that Theatre Projects was also used as a consultant for The House of Dancing Water. “That show caused a sensation in Asia and suddenly all of these different developers were asking Dragone if they could do a show like that for them,” says Dawn Chiang, senior consultant at Theatre Projects Consultants.
“Franco appreciated our work on the production in Macau, so we got the call.”
The combined talents and experience of Fisher, Dragone, the acousticians, and Theatre Projects forged a spectacular production, full of acrobatic stunts, 1200 channels of audio, perilous dives into the theater’s deep and voluminous water basin, and spiral-like geysers erupting from 200 fountain jets recessed inside stage lifts. The ambitious show was starting to resemble Cirque du Soleil’s KÀ, the initial concept for which was “doing away with gravity,” as Fisher said in 2004 and the perfect precursor to the daring feats of physical skill witnessed in The Han Show.
“KÀ, perhaps more than any other show, started the next generation of moving elements and redefining what a stage is,” confirms Bill Gorlin, vice president and entertainment division chief for McLaren Engineering Group, whose main contribution to the project was concept development and schematic design. “Mark [Fisher] conceived all of that, and we did the engineering for it. KÀ had two moving stages: one that came out towards the audience and another that rose and spun and did all sorts of things. Some of that was an earlier inspiration to what led to the innovation in the Han Show.” Chiang adds to this, “In terms of complexity we started calling this ‘KÀ with Water… Mark understood this and took it in good spirit.”
In March 2014, the show’s producers conducted a worldwide search, to find the appropriate aerial acrobats, divers, synchronized swimmers, musicians, singers, dancers and others to fill 95 positions. By December 20, the 2000-seat theater had opened to the public, offering audiences a multi-dimensional visual experience with a cast from 14 different countries.
Chinese Paper Lantern
The Han Show Theatre was constructed as part of a large community developmental plan called the Wuhan Central Cultural District Initiative. The developer, Dalian Wanda Group, commissioned both the theater and nearby indoor amusement park, Wanda Movie Park, also designed by architect Fisher.
Says Dawn Chiang, the Han Chinese ethnic group encompasses nearly 92 percent of the population of the country’s mainland. “That’s nearly everyone in China,” Chiang says. “So the Han Show Theatre has an all-encompassing meaning.”
“The chairman of Dalian Wanda said that this show was going to be about the Han people,” adds Lauve. “It will tell the story of their culture, and we are going to call the building the Han Show Theatre.’ So, this theater is intended to be the cornerstone of the cultural development and the statement of Wuhan. I think it serves that purpose.”
The theater is impressive: it measures 100 meters high (from basement to roof) and 100 meters in diameter. This was no small undertaking and required a healthy investment from Wanda. “The client has published that the movie park and the theatre, together, have cost 900 million dollars, U.S., and that the park costs 450 million dollars,” says Lauve. “If you do the math, it’s a 450 million dollar theater.”
It’s worth every penny, judging by the building’s outward appearance alone. At night, the surface of D?ng Hú Lake is afire with the burning red lights emanating from the building. This gorgeous exterior “skin”, was designed to resemble a traditional Chinese paper lantern. (In fact, the name of the building project was, at one time, “The Red Lantern Theatre,” says Lauve.) Twenty-meter-high white columns at the bottom of the building’s exterior are meant to represent the tassels of the lantern.
The lantern’s form is shaped by 800 tons of circular and crisscrossing steel beams. Cable nets winding around the frame structure support 18,000-plus, two-feet-in-diameter concave red aluminum alloy disks fitted with red LEDs. These aluminum discs are said to represent flat, circular and ancient Chinese jade artifacts with holes at their center, called Bi disks.
“There’s a four-and-a-half minute light sequence that runs through the LEDs on the outside of the entire cylinder at night,” says Chiang. “It’s beautiful. Many developers wanted an iconic building and I think this one truly is.”
Water Show
The defining element of the show — water — is contained in an 8.7-meter-deep basin that holds 10 million liters of purified, chlorinated and temperature-controlled H2O — four-times the amount of water contained in a standard Olympic-sized swimming pool. The water is regularly drained to a separate storage tank for maintenance and then sent back into the basin in preparation for the show. (Galvotec Alloys, Inc., based in Harvey, Louisiana, developed a system to help protect against metal corrosion of equipment inside the water basin.)
“Ideally you want the water to remain in the [basin] all the time,” says Lauve. “It’s costly and time consuming to be moving the water back and forth. But there are times when you have to do regular maintenance or need to do repairs for major mechanical systems, lighting equipment, and the jets, which are mounted to the underside of the lifts.”
Various computer-controlled lifts, two for the dry stage and 11 wet lifts, change the dynamics of the space in seconds flat. When lowered to the very bottom of the water basin, the wet lifts allow access to scenic storage areas. Smaller lifts have been installed along the apron of the stage, allowing performers to step from water up to stage level.
An air effects system, which produces air bubbles in the basin or pool, provides a liquid canvas for attractive and unusual lighting looks. “Dragone has discovered ever since the O production, that if you aerate the water, you can actually have it capture light,” says Chiang. “There are a few Source Four types of fixtures for very specific applications, but the majority of the rig is moving lights. Low-voltage LED lights are in the basin. A couple of LEDs, at least, are adjacent to each water jet and there are lights that ring the perimeter of the basin to help color and texture the whole surface for general use.”
Swing Seats
The theater’s innovative use of mobile seating sections sets it apart from nearly all other venues. During the performance, a total of nearly 1,000 orchestra-level seats split down the middle, pivot at a 70-percent angle, and veer off to the left and right, revealing the water basin below. In addition, over 1,000 seats in the balcony area make a slow two-story drop, landing between the swing-seat areas.
“This project was real innovative,” says Gorlin. “Because the public is traveling on moving seating areas you need clean interfaces with the building’s architecture and the ability for people to exit at any point in the travel. It needs to be a relatively comfortable ride. It moves slowly — so slowly that the dynamics will never pose safety risks to the people.”
Not wanting to add layers of complexity to an already intricate engineering design, McLaren developed a structural system that “cantilevers out over the [basin],” says Gorlin. “Half of the weight of the whole system was supported at one hinge point upon which everything rotated. The seats in the back are at a high elevation and they rake down to a low elevation as you move towards the water. That reduction in depth was a significant challenge for us, as well. We had to deliver a lot of load to a location that didn’t have a lot of depth. Structural steel framing with a primary massive girder, kind of like the backbone of the system, helped to accomplish that.”
Gridiron Glory
Seating areas aren’t the only portions of the show that go mobile during the performance. The rigging machinations for the theater are coordinated via a six-meter by six-meter walk-able gridiron, which boasts mobile rigging beams, among other features. Working with McLaren Engineering Group, Stage Technologies developed the acrobatic rigging for the Han Show as well as the venue’s automation control interface. “The grid is essentially a working platform above the entire auditorium stagehouse from which you can do all sorts of rigging,” says Gorlin. “Anything that flies up and down is attached to the grid.”
“Tracks can be moved left to right and also have X, Y, and Z capabilities,” adds Chiang. “A motorized winch set allows performers to fly up or down and there are counterweight sets for scenery. Like many shows staged in Las Vegas, the control booth is about 100 feet long and has been designed for all the different stations necessary to run a show of this size. There are two auxiliary booths, house left and house right, that also have optimal sightlines to see up into the grid and down into the pool, as well.”
Mars Attacks!
Contributing a sense of sci-fi wonder to a show is one of the most monstrous mechanical inventions from the recesses of Mark Fisher’s imagination. Three 30-meter-high robot arms, located near the back of the stagehouse, each secure the show’s enormous LED video screens measuring approximately 7 meters by 11 meters and weighing 800 tons.
The arms have the ability to rotate the LED screens along six axes to offer audiences unusual and breathtaking viewing experiences. Although it was Fisher’s vision to include these mammoth machines, the chemistry between the set designer and theater director helped to fuel what may be the project’s most creative aspect.
“Franco Dragone produced Celine Dion at Caesar’s,” Lauve says. “When the new-and-improved Colosseum opened in 2003 her show featured an enormous video wall. What the Han Show Theatre does essentially, is take that static element, a giant LED screen, and slices it up into three pieces and articulates them.
“We did some significant mechanical engineering of the physics of an arm,” says Gorlin. “When you move your elbow, the elbow is doing something to the hand, which is affecting the fingers. When you move your shoulder, the shoulder movement is affecting the elbow. It’s all interconnected and it’s in a line.“
“The point at which it really becomes fun is when your hand can’t rotate the way a certain LED screen can,” says Lauve. “It not only rotates round and round, so that the top becomes the bottom and bottom becomes the top, but it also tilts forward and backwards and left and right.”
Securing the robot arms to the theater’s architectural structure was another significant engineering accomplishment. “You have a big arm that is reaching out in the direction of the audience and it wants to tip over,” says Gorlin, “so we needed a substantial structure that would keep it from doing that and have it grab onto the building at its strong points, but still be mindful of the use of space in the theater. When these arms reach out they are competing for space with the overhead rigging. One of the challenges was to have the arms reach out as far as they could but also, when they are not being used, retract and get out of the way of other theatrical activities.”
Gorlin commends Fisher for his ability to convey his concepts. “Mark was an absolute genius in his ability to conceive of what was doable,” says Gorlin. “He would present something and everyone would say, ‘How do we do this?’ He would then lead you through his thought process, incorporating architectural design, psychology, visual impression, and physics. By the time he was done with his explanation and as you worked through it, you started convincing yourself that it’s actually achievable.”
Storytelling
Additional visual are achieved via eighteen Christie projectors, placed on moving yokes, splashing texture and color across the set and creating scenic imagery that meshes well with the huge LED screens. “A lot of it is fantastical, broad brush, imagery covering your entire field of vision,” says Chiang. “It takes you in an instant to another moment, another world.”
“Theater is all about storytelling,” says Lauve. “It’s about raising people’s spirits and giving them a diversion for a few minutes to forget their woes or to challenge them and to provoke them to think about things and do it in interesting ways. That can’t happen if great care and attention isn’t given to offering an intimate experience or considering the relationship of the audience to the artist.”
