The Devonport Flagstaff Page 24
Catching up with
June 3, 2016
A bright, shining light – Anton Montaut Anton Montaut prefers to shine the spotlight rather than appear in it. The 33-year-old lighting designer recently finished working on the massive Chinese water-based production The Han Show and is about to head the lighting department at La Perle in Dubai. Both shows are created by Franco Dragone, the former artistic director of Cirque du Soleil. The Flagstaff caught up with Montaut while he was back in Devonport visiting his mother, Ngaire Saunders. “My mum was a drama teacher and used to drag me along to her classes, but I always found what goes on behind the curtain much more interesting. Being on stage never worked for me,” he says. While still at school, Montaut started volunteering at the PumpHouse Theatre in Takapuna and worked at an all-ages night club in the city. These days, he works on large-scale theatrical circus spectaculars overseas, mostly in lighting. An artistic eye and a sound knowledge of electronics is needed for those. “But I can also do sound, video and special effects like fog, smoke and pyrotechnics,” he says. The Han Show centres around a 10-million-litre pool. “There are jet skis, high diving from 26 metres up. It all looks crazy and wild on stage. My job is to light it well and make it safe and secure, every night,” he says. The show’s home is a purpose-built theatre in Wuhan, a second-tier city west of Shanghai with a population of 12-million. “The government is making huge investments in shows and malls to bring it up to a first-tier city and we were part of that,” he says. The show in Dubai will be similar in scale. “It has just been named La Perle, but the theatre for it is still being built,” Montaut says. Montaut’s skills are home-grown. After leaving Takapuna Grammar 15 years ago, he completed a one-year course at MAINZ and started working on Aotea Centre productions, including The Phantom of the Opera, Mamma Mia and The Lion King, as well as with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Royal New Zealand Ballet and New Zealand Opera. At age 22, Montaut took off for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where he landed a job within three days. A stint at London’s West End theatres followed, before he found work on cruise ships in the Mediterranean and Caribbean. Montaut likes to visit Devonport but says he has outgrown New Zealand workwise. “I tried to settle down here before going to China. I worked on corporate events, earning good money with a lot of Powerpoint presentations, but it wasn’t for me. There simply isn’t the infrastructure for the work I love to do now,” he says.
Light, sound, video and special effects are all in a day’s work… Anton Montaut
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