In the Lighting Technology working group, we have several subjects and collections to research. Two members of the group are researching old Strand technology, and particularly the Strand Galaxy Nova lighting console. In this article, we give some interim results from our research. Written by Bastiaan Schoof.
On 4 April 2026, Bastiaan Schoof visited Controllux in the Netherlands. This is a company that is the Dutch distributor of ADB, Robe and a lot of other lighting brands. This company also used to be distributor for Strand for a very long time in the NL, Belgium and Luxembourg. And for a very short time, they were also the European distributor for Strand and Quartzcolor, between Genlite selling Strand and Philips buying it. Parts of Strand in Europe didn’t have an owner at that time, so Controlluxstepped in to help Strand out, becoming the owner of Strand in Europe for a short period of time.
At this time Enrico Daamen, one of the two bosses of Controllux and associate partner from Canon II, acquired a lot of material from Strand Germany, mainly because the German branch closed. This material included a lot of documentation fromStrand and other sources. All the inventory of the German Strand distributor went to the Netherlands in that time, in addition to the documentation and material Enrico already had because of his Benelux dealership.
Strand Galaxy at Controllux on the wall
After the German office ceased, Enrico stored most of this material in the Netherlands, and that is the reason we asked him to be an associate partner. He also has a small private collection of Strand and Quartzcolor equipment next to the equipment and documentation that is stored in his company.
When Chris van Goethem (BE) and Bastiaan Schoof (NL) visited Enrico in September 2025 to ask him if he wanted to join Canon II as associate partner, he also showed his private collection to us, including the documentation. This confirmed that he has a lot of interesting material for our research.
Strand Galaxy from Rose Bruford Collega at Plasa London
For the lighting technology working group from Canon, we were looking into information about the Strand Galaxy console. Bastiaan Schoof joined Nick Hunt (Rose Bruford, UK) in his research of this important lighting control, where a lot of control concepts were first made widely available that are still being used today. This was the reason to visit Enrico again and look into his documentation of Strand.
He showed a lot of paper files, in boxes and in drawers – but before he showed that, he first showed what he still had left from the Galaxy hardware. The operating part is hanging in the warehouse on the wall. He said he threw away the computers that came with it, “too bulky”. But, he still has the infra-red remote control for the Galaxy. That equipment looked brand new and never used. The remote consists of two receivers and a sender. Next to that, he also has a separate Galaxy floppy drive to save the shows. It has an M->D (Memory to Disc) and a D->M button. Nick recalls that after a long day’s (or night’s) programming, it was easy to confuse the two buttons, and great care was needed to avoid over-writing the Galaxy’s memory with the contents of an old disk.
After that he showed some of the Galaxy documentation from a filing cabinet. He had files with a lot of manuals (operator’s handbook, user’s handbook), and other documentation of all the Galaxy versions. There were a lot of technical drawings as well, mostly showing in detail the dimensions of the different consoles.
He even showed a kind of written manual from someone in Dutch about how to start and save shows, how to soft patch and “auto mod”. Next to English version, he also had some manuals in German (Systemkurzbeschreibung).
Also, there were some documents with information about where all the Galaxy consoles were installed. One list was called: Galaxy Installation Reference list” and it is from March 1983. Another list that also said “Company Confidential” showed it is from December 1986. That document also gives the number of channels for every console in that list.
I took photos of a lot of the manuals, papers and lists – documentation that tells a lot about the Galaxy, Galaxy 2, Galaxy 3 and Galaxy Nova. We definitely have to go back to see some of that in more detail.
We found a user in Nijmegen through the mention of a Galaxy 3 console in an article we found on our Canonbase repository from the Strand magazine Lights! In 1992. There was a photo of this user, and we were able to track him down and make contact all these years later. Enrico later showed the original quotation for the installation of the console in the photo. Often, historical research is about making connections that begin to tell the story of the past.
We also found the Circus Theatre in the Netherlands bought two Galaxy consoles:
Enrico also showed me some boxes labelled ADB Archive, but they also included many photos of Siemens lighting equipment (boards, dimmers, cables, cable runs, and so on) and photos from theatres, stages, neon signs, documents aboutBühnentechnische Tagung in 1977… It consists of about 24 large folders of photos.
Enrico said he had no relationship with Siemens, so he gave me the five boxes and I took them home. Mostly, the photos are from German theatres from Bremen, München, Salzburg, Berlin, Aachen, Krefeld, Köln, Baden Baden, Karlsruhe, Wupertal, Frankfurt, Darmstadt and so on. But also from Manilla, Madrid, Venice, Utrecht, Vienna, Graz, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Prague, etc. – too many to name them all here.
All photos are interesting, some are with the technicians, some also with the stage and a set on it (Aida in Cape Town) and some of models of a newly built theatre in Essen, as well as some photos from where Siemens installed neon tubes on the front of a theatre.
This archive looks like something that needs separate research. The first conclusion is that at that time this manufacturer delivered a system custom made to the fit control room where it was meant for. Also, the manufacturer appears to beresponsible for all the cable runs and installation of it. This looks like something to dive deeper into – there is always something new to explore!
Most photos are of really good quality, looking like they were made by professional photographers. It is a lot of work to digitalize, but it is worth it. We have asked the Allard Pierson Institute to ask for their advice on digitizing such images.
Some rough photos of the material can be found here – these are not the finished digital archive, but they give an impression: https://photos.app.goo.gl/nGuw3Kbrs7f76yq17
In this post, we will introduce you to Work Package 2 – Lighting Design, highlighting its role in the CANON II project and sharing what we have been working on over the past few months. Written by Isabel Nielen.
The task of the Lighting Design Working Group is to investigate lighting design as a new area in the documentation of technical theatre, the possible ways of documenting design and designers and how can we represent the designs and their results in the online CANON data base. At the end of the project, we will also provide guidelines about the archiving process for designers, professionals, students and researchers to use.
The Lighting Design Working Group initially focused on researching the characteristics of a lighting designer’s artistic and working process, asking what are the phases a lighting designer goes through when working on a design, and which moments are important to document? At the same time, we realized that we also needed to know more about the context of a production – for example, large venue, small venue, for children or for adults? What was the budget? Which company is producing it? Who is the director? Will the production go on tour? Is it an indoor or outdoor performance?
With this first step, the Database working group set to work adapting the existing Canonbase so that, in the future, lighting designs and lighting designers can also be archived with all the necessary detail included.
In January, during the workshop in Amsterdam, we examined various designs of the Dutch lighting designer Henk van der Geest. Henk van der Geest passed away in 2019 and his total paper archive has recently been added to the Allard Pierson Archive. When we saw some projects from the paper archive it became clear that paper alone is not always very helpful for understand a lighting design. Photos could help a great deal and interviewing the designer would be valuable to give a better understanding of the designer’s artistic choices and the look and feel he or she wanted to achieve on stage. In the case of Henk van der Geest interviewing is of course not possible anymore, but you could interview people who worked with him.
We are now developing guidelines for interviewing and example interview questions. We have tested the guidelines with four test cases, interviewing Floriaan Ganzevoort, Caroline Mathieu, Isabel Nielen and Harry Cole. From these test cases,we are fine-tuning our guidelines further. When finished, they will be part of the help pages in the Canon database.
Part of the Canon project is the requirement to document 4 cases. The cases should be diverse, so we can use and test out different archive methods. The working group selected the following designers, chosen to represent a variety of time periods, nationalities, working methods, and so on:
1- British director who worked with gas and early electric lighting, Sir Henry Irving (1838 -1905) https://canonbase.eu/wiki/Item:Q259
2- Swedish Lighting designer Hans-Åke Sjökvist (1943-2023) / Torkel Blomkvist
3- Dutch Lighting designer Henk van de Geest (1952-2019)
4- German / Czech lighting designer Pavla Béranova
5- Belgium Lighting designers Peter van Praet / Mark Van Denesse (set designer Annette Kurz)
With this list we can research various ways of archiving.
During the coming months we will continue with researching and documenting our archive processes based on the selected cases. And besides that, we will continue with smaller testcases. We also have to start to add the lighting designs and designers into the Canon database.
The members of the lighting design group are Nick Hunt (Rose Bruford College, UK), Isabel Nielen (lighting designer, Institute Lighting Design, NL) Bastiaan Schoof (teacher AHK Amsterdam, Institute Lighting Design, NL) Anders Larsson ( Stockholm University of the Arts Sweden), Caroline Mathieu (lighting designer, researcher VUB/RITCS BE).
At the moment we are reorganising the lighting design working group as Anders Larsson sadly passed away in May 2026. Anders was the head of the Lighting Design Workgroup.
Work Package 5 – also referred to as the ‘data group’ – is a group of people who focus on the development and use of Canonbase. Canonbase is the database of the project, that maps and visualises the history of technical theatre in a new and innovative way; it is the main engine behind the CANON II project.
The database currently contains sources, historical events, people, theatres, equipment, manufacturers, methods and collections, and links them to each other and to other existing information sources.
By the end of Canon II, the data group’s main goal is to have an updated and tested data structure in Canonbase. By doing so, contributors can document lighting design, set design and lighting technology in the database, while also linking them to related lighting/setdesigners, productions, theatres etc.
Along with a new structure, the data group will develop new help pages, guidelines, tools and training materials or update existing ones to ensure users are well supported when contributing to the database. Finally, the data group will also work on elaborating queries, layouts, end-user tools and visualizations within Canonbase.
The further development of the Canonbase structure is based on the input from the other Work Packages. They define what kind of information they want to capture in the database and the data group translates this into a new structure. This results in new items, properties and value lists in Canonbase. During and between meetings, the new proposed structure is discussed and further worked on. Simultaneously the data group checks the existing structure and improves it where needed.
Over the past few months, the data group been working on developing a new structure for documenting scenography and lighting design in the database. As a result, new items, properties and value lists related to these fields have been created. So far, the main focus of the new structure has been on the relationship between a design and its designer, the production and other designs.
While updating and expanding the structure of Canonbase, the data group creates new help pages and guidelines on how to put things in the database and update existing ones. For example, the structure on documenting people (designers, architects, authors, etc.) was completely checked, this resulted in an updated help page on how to document people in Canonbase.
New help pages for documenting designs and productions were created (and are still being further developed).
Picture: Structure_brainstorm: a snippet from the online brainstorm board of the data group, where we try to pin down the new elements (items, properties and value lists) in the Canonbase structure.
Picture: Canon_image_ID: a snippet of the Canonbase page on the Taras Shevchenko Ukraine National Opera in Kiev (Q34041). The images showed are stored in the new repository and added to the page of the item via the property ‘Canon image ID’
Since the start of CANON II, the data group has been working on a new repository. Previously, images, videos, documents etc. were stored directly in Canonbase. However, due to some limitations, a decision was made to move them to a separate repository in WordPress. This new repository allows for larger amounts of storage and ensures that Canonbase continues to run smoothly (which could previously be a problem). After testing and writing guidelines, Chris van Goethem introduced the repository during the online project meeting in March. Now, the other project team members started uploading documents to the repository.
Picture: Canonbase_current_view: the current view of the Canonbase website of the National Theatre in Prague (Q12648).
Picture: Canonbase_new_view: a first look of a draft version for the new view of the website for the same item, the National Theatre in Prague (Q12648).
Finally, the data group has been working on a new block-based view of the Canonbase website. This redesigned structure aims to make the platform more visually attractive and significantly easier to read, especially for users who are less familiar with the Wikidata-structure on which Canonbase is built. In this new layout, related information is grouped into clear, coherent blocks. This allows to structure the diverse information in a more user-friendly way.
In the near future, the data group will continue to work on the new structure for documenting lighting design, set design, historical stock sets and lighting technology in Canonbase. Meanwhile, project team members from the other Work Packages will start testing theparts of the new structure that are already created in Canonbase. Aside from this, the data group is continuously improving the help pages, cleaning up the database, etc.
The members of the data group are Chris Van Goethem (RITCS, Belgium), Nick Hunt (Rose Bruford College, UK), Ondrej Svoboda (Czech Cultural Institute, Czech Republic), Jan Purkert (Czech Republic) and Emma Reynders (EhB, Belgium).
In January 2026, after our first start-up Canon II meeting in Brussels, the team met again in Amsterdam. It was a chance to dive deeper into our research, exchange ideas, and visit a few fascinating institutions along the way, including our associate partner, the Allard Pierson museum.
We started with a visit to the Dutch National Opera & Ballet, where Cor van den Brink and Coen van der Hoeven welcomed us warmly. The lighting designers, working for the NO B lighting department, gave us a fascinating look at how opera lightings designs are documented in practice. We saw a wide variety of drawings, material lists, notebooks and photos, as well as the digital file structure used to store and reuse lighting designs. Later, we learned that this is actually a standard method used by many European opera houses.
Afterwards, we continued the discussion at the AHK Amsterdam – Academy of Theatre and Dance, where we met for a project meeting and reflected on what we had seen.
Next day we visited the Allard Pierson archive in Amsterdam Zuidoost. In a rather plain-looking building on the edge of the city, we were warmly welcomed by Lisa Lucassen and Gonneke Janssen, two collection specialists working with the Theatre Collection.
We split into two groups for a guided tour of the archive. Lisa and Gonnneke had already laid out some designs by Henk van der Geest for us, based on materials we had requested in advance. There was a lot to explore: drawings, lists, and original documentation, including th “PanCan” – a kind of moving mirror stage light. During the visit, we also looked at theatre spotlights from the collection and saw a book by Nicola Sabbatini.
Besides our own meetings at the AHK, one of the highlights for me was the visit of the Baron van Slingelandt model theatre at Allard Pierson museum. Made in the 18th-century as a chamber theatre of Baron van Slingelandt. This miniature stage was used in living rooms to demonstrate how theatre worked. With real set changes and lighting.
Artist Arne Hendriks has created his own version of the principles of the Slingelandt Theater that visitors can touch, explore and work with themselves. It was a great reminder that theatre heritage is not only something to preserve, but also something to experience and keep alive.
March 2026 post from Sweden by Anders Larson.
At the beginning of the year, it became clear that STTF, the Swedish OISTAT, together with a number of theatre technical organisations and universities, had received approval for the Erasmus+ project Canon II and would be able to start the three-year work. The kick-off meeting for the project was in Brussels in September 2025 and the first physical project and working meeting was held on 14 – 17 January of 2026, which this time was in Amsterdam.
In the Canon II project, SLF (The Association of Swedish Lighting Designers) is responsible for building up in-depth knowledge and information on how lighting design could be documented and archived for the future. One of the reasons why SLF will be responsible for this is that after the passing of the two lighting designers Hans-Åke Sjökvist and Torkel Blomkvist, the Music and Theatre Library had to take over a large amount of drawings and other documentation, and this will also be the focus when the group gathers for the second physical meeting, which will be in Stockholm on 10-14 June this year.
During the meeting in Amsterdam, the entire project group was able to learn, among other things, how the Dutch National Opera & Ballet works to manage its documentation from the productions that are performed at the opera. They showed an overview of how it has been done previously, mainly in paper form with photos and printouts of direction and running charts from the various productions.
Nowadays, they have increasingly collected all documentation in a digital archive, but this was more like a systematized file management system for all information about a production, than a fully designed digital system to future-proof the lighting information about a production.
As well as looking at how we interpret archives from the past, the Canon II project will produce guidelines that will help theatres and designers now who need to document their work.
