Rhino in the Room for Robe

Neushoorn – Dutch for ‘rhinoceros’ – is a busy, buzzing and vibrant music venue in the heart of Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, complete with two halls, a cafe area that’s also used as a performance space, rehearsal rooms and studios, plus strong educational ties with local vocational college, Firda, which focuses on music, drama, theatre and the arts, running both technical and creative courses.

The venue received a tranche of funding at the end of 2023 to upgrade its technical infrastructure, which has included purchasing a bunch of new Robe LED fixtures that are primarily rigged in the main hall, including 22 PAINTES, 12 LEDBeam 350s, 4 LEDBeam 350 FW (fresnel wash – for smoother edges and enhanced colour homogenisation), 6 Spiiders, 8 TetraXs and 16 LEDBeam 150s. These were delivered during 2024 by Robe’s Benelux distributor, Controllux.

The fixtures were on a list compiled by technical consultant and lighting designer Sebastiaan Groen (also a former employee), Neushoorn’s head of lighting Jorden Boersma, and their overall head of technical, Michiel Cornelisse.

The venue was a new build in 2015. Sebastiaan started as an intern in 2016 and was Neushoorn’s first full-time technician until 2019 when he left for the rough-and-tumble of freelance adventures, returning in 2024 to oversee the upgrade together with Jorden who also started in 2024.

Michiel joined the team in 2023, just as the funding was coming onstream, for which he co-ordinated and oversaw the budgeting. He was already familiar with the needs of the venue, being a professional sound engineer and through his connection as the principal sound engineering teacher at Firda. He therefore asked plenty of pertinent questions relating to the best options for bringing the lights up to date and in line with the shows coming through, and also thinking of what would work best for teaching the students.

The venue’s two halls are The Grote Zaal (Main Hall) with a capacity of 750, and the Small Hall, which can host around 350 people depending on the configuration. The cafe can further accommodate 150 people, and these spaces often run simultaneously, so it is a frenetic and vibrant environment with constant activity, producing over 500 unique shows and events a year.

Additionally, Firda uses the venue for teaching assorted course modules and for their own productions, so the programme is as diverse as it is interesting.

When it came to the crunch decision-making about which new lights to get to best fulfil their needs, Robe was “an easy choice,” revealed Sebastiaan.

Neushoorn previously had an installation of Robe’s first-generation DL series LED theatrical luminaires with 17 x DL4Xs, which arrived in in 2016 … and these fixtures are still going and have been moved to the Small Hall.

He pointed out this impressive reliability to Leeuwarden city council, who fund the venue, and explained that they needed consistency and reliability, which returning to Robe would give.

Conversely, lights from some of the other brands also purchased in 2016 had not done so well and were broken and needed constant fixing 8 years down the line!

The seeds of the upgrade process were planted back in 2021 – that’s when Controllux’s Maikel Sakkers originally met with Sebastiaan and the management team – but everything paused due to Covid.

Once reactivated as the pandemic was on the way out, Sebastiaan reached for the old list and then started updating it as, fortuitously, not only had new tech been launched since then, but some even more appropriate options had come to the market as Robe utilised time creatively during the pandemic to develop and refine all the product lines.

“PAINTES were absolutely perfect – made for a venue like this – small, punchy and fast,” stated Michiel referring to this compact and versatile fixture.

The team visited some other venues around the Netherlands which had recently invested in new Robe technology to complete their research and gather some firsthand opinions on how well the kit was working in situ and see for themselves what an excellent combination PAINTES and LEDBeam 350s make.

Most of the new lights are rigged in the main hall, including a floor package comprising Spiiders, Tetras and four of the PAINTES, and the sound system there is Funktion One to the delight of audiophiles. The small hall has been nicely revamped with the 17 x DLX Spots, four of which are in their floor package, together with the same quantity of new LEDBeam 150s.

Jorden mentioned that the new lighting rig makes tech’ing and lighting shows seriously easier, quicker, and more efficient as well as enabling more creative and intricate designs to be realised for productions and presentations.

Lighting control in the main hall is an Avolites Arena console, with a T3 for the area running the latest Titan Mobile software. Jorden will typically light around 50 percent of the shows coming through, and the rest will bring their own LDs or operators. He observes that Avo and Robe work extremely well together, a trend that is set to develop and further synergise with the 2023 acquisition of Avolites by Robe marking a new era.

Photos: Louise Stickland.