Why zactrack and Ayrton's Diabolo were essential to Peter Small's Design for 58th Street
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
Designing light for an immersive jazz club is a very different challenge to lighting a traditional stage. In 58th Street, the audience step out of a back alley and straight into a fully realised 1940s nightclub – chandeliers, cigarette haze, live band, roaming performers and a world that never quite “stops” for the sake of a cue.
In this conversation, international lighting designer Peter Small talks through how he approached building that world: from period-accurate fixtures and colour palettes to using zactrack SMART and Ayrton Diablos as invisible followspots. He explains how tracking shaped the show’s aesthetic and why authenticity – both technical and emotional – sits at the heart of the design.
Q: Can you give a short intro to you and your career?
A: I am a lighting designer, originally from Oxfordshire. I moved to London to train at RADA and graduated in 2014. Since then, I’ve worked across the UK and internationally. My designs have featured multiple times in the West End and Off-Broadway.
I don’t confine myself to one genre – I work across theatre, opera, musicals, dance, architecture, consultancy, product design and R&D blending lessons from each. I’m simply interested in light. I’ve also served multiple times as a judge for a major industry award focused on innovation in performance design.
Q: How would you describe 58th Street to someone who’s never seen it?
A: 58th Street is an immersive, 1940s-style jazz club experience. You enter through a small alley in Peckham, step through a door and suddenly you’re in a luxurious, period-accurate club: chandeliers, detailed ceiling, fully dressed environment.
You’re greeted by performers in character and costume, there’s live jazz, dinner, and an overarching narrative. It’s designed end-to-end – even the toilets and crockery are considered part of the world.
It’s not a rigidly cued theatre show; it behaves more like a real jazz club. There’s structure, but the set list and interactions can change, so it feels different each night. The lighting is tightly connected to that – responsive and intimate rather than “showy” for its own sake.
A performer at 58th Street at The Lost Estate. With the show designed as a live, semi-improvised exp Live musicians bring the atmosphere of a 1950s New York jazz club to 58th Street, forming an integra
Q: How did you get involved, and what was the brief?
A: I’ve been working with The Lost Estate for years across various shows.
This secondary home for them (their primary base is West Kensington) was procured specially for 58th and essentially rebuilt: new concrete, power, water, drainage. It wasn’t turned into a generic event space, it was purpose-built for this world. The bar is permanent, the layout is fixed, a mixture of install and temporary installation – you’d have to rip it all out to start again.
So the “brief” was really something we developed together over months: how to build atmosphere, control space and make the club feel genuinely period, while still being flexible enough for a live, semi-improvised jazz night. It was less “here’s a spec” and more a long creative conversation.
Q: What was your creative approach to the lighting?
A: The core idea was authenticity and fidelity. If it needed to feel like tungsten, we used tungsten. If LED could do the job invisibly, fine – but visible sources had to feel period.
Most of the rig is effectively architectural: wall lights, picture lights, chandeliers, integrated LED in custom fittings, practicals everywhere. If you can see a fixture, it should look like it belongs in a 1940s club – old PAT 23s sprayed gold, refurbished Strand units, custom-adapted footlights, etc.
We refurbished a lot of vintage gear (rewiring, repainting, new frames) and even went gel-deep: I tried to use period-accurate colours based on old swatch books and catalogues, then approximated those with modern Lee/GAM/Rosco where originals no longer exist.
We deliberately limited ourselves – for example, a three-colour toplight system, but with colours chosen for very specific emotional and period reasons rather than generic “RGB”. That restraint makes each choice matter more.
Q: How are the Ayrton Diablos used in the show?
A: Diablos are the only moving lights in the rig and they exist solely as followspots.
We use six Diablos: four in the corners and two more central. They mostly work in a handful of colours – warm, cool, open white with a tint, lavender, pink – and a few beam sizes (half-body, full-body, soft, hard).
Most of the time the fixtures themselves are hidden. One sits inside something that looks like a followspot box, so you’d assume there’s a person operating it.
We even “humanised” the behaviour: after getting everything technically perfect with zactrack, we added delays and imperfections so the spots sometimes feel late or slightly off, like a real operator on a long shift.
Q: Why did you choose Diablo for this?
A: Because it’s small, bright, and proven with zactrack.
I needed a unit that could hide neatly in the architecture, output a strong, clean beam, and play nicely with the tracking system. I also never use “true” open white – my open white has a subtle colour to mimic a carbon-rod lamp.
We also shaped the haze to look more like cigarette smoke than perfectly uniform theatrical haze – little chugs of atmosphere hanging in the room rather than a constant, invisible layer.
Peter Small and the creative team set out to recreate the atmosphere of an authentic New York jazz c A singer performing at 58th Street. To keep the zactrack trackers hidden from the audience, their po
Q: What zactrack system did you use, and was this your first time?
A: We used zactrack SMART, and yes, 58th Street was the first show I used it on. I’ve used it a lot since.
I chose zactrack because it’s the established name: used by Disney and big West End shows, with solid support behind it. I’d been invited to do the training at Ambersphere, which meant I understood not only what it could do, but also its limits and failure modes.
White Light, our supplier, already had zactrack SMART in stock, and Ambersphere’s support was excellent. When we first set it up, it “worked”, but not to the standard I knew it could. Ambersphere came down, lasered the anchors properly, adjusted data, and immediately the accuracy jumped. Now I always build in a dedicated calibration session with them – it’s part of the process.
Q: Why was zactrack so essential and why did you choose it over other tracking systems?
A: In one word: usability.
zactrack is well documented, well supported, and there’s a growing pool of programmers who know it. Other systems I’ve encountered often feel more opaque – unclear interfaces, cryptic parameters, less intuitive to tune.
The Ambersphere training was thorough and relaxed: we went through every menu, asked “What if…?” questions, and got straight answers, including when the answer was “No, the system can’t do that.” That honesty is vital. Combined with the fact that White Light already had a system and my programmers had real-world experience with it, zactrack was the obvious choice.
Q: How did Tracker placement work, especially with burlesque performers?
A: That was one of the hardest parts. Performers had different wigs, costumes and levels of undress, plus a burlesque number where they strip down to almost nothing. We had to find places that would stay on the body, stay hidden, and still be trackable: wigs, headpieces, chokers, fans, etc.
The programmer, Phil Burke, built magic sheets so the system could recalibrate per performer depending on who was on that night. For some, we integrated Trackers into headdresses; for others we used chokers or small costume additions.
Q: How did wardrobe cope with the Trackers?
A: We got wardrobe involved from day zero and gave them a 3D-printed dummy tag to design around. That helped massively – they could see the size and plan wig caps, headbands, shoulder mounts, etc.
We also had rehearsal wigs, headbands and armbands sewn specifically to hold tags in roughly the same positions they’d occupy in costume. That meant we could rehearse or calibrate without full show wardrobe.
Q: What did the cast think of zactrack and wearing the Trackers?
A: They embraced it – largely because we were upfront from the start. If you introduce the Trackers late, people feel like it’s an imposition. If you tell them on day one, “You’ll wear a tag and get a followspot wherever you go,” they accept it as part of the show.
In practice it feels great for them: they walk into the room and a light automatically fades up. It also loosens blocking – they don’t have to hit a crosshair; they can roam, talk to the audience and trust the light will follow. That freedom suits a jazz-club environment.
Q: What did zactrack enable that would have been impossible otherwise?
A: Simply put: the entire followspot-driven aesthetic of the show.
In a small club-style space, hiring four human followspot operators would be financially and logistically unrealistic. Without followspots, you lose a huge amount of drama and glamour.
With zactrack, we have six “virtual” followspots running almost constantly, following multiple people at once, handing off between fixtures, all while the rest of the rig remains fairly simple and period-authentic.
Moments like a burlesque performer running through the crowd in a tight, roaming spotlight, or a singer being picked out from darkness anywhere in the room, would be massively more complex – or simply wouldn’t happen – without zactrack. It’s not a gimmick; it’s foundational to how the show feels.
White Light’s Head of Lighting, Dom Yates comments: “We’ve been extremely impressed by the way zactrack has evolved and continues to grow in popularity among our customers. In what is a highly competitive remote followspot market, it has successfully established itself as a go-to solution for many productions.”
The Lost Estate has been crafting unforgettable, unique experiences since 2017, telling greatest stories ever told through live music, breathtaking theatre & immersive hospitality.
Currently running: 58th Street and Chat Noir (until 27th Sept 2027), and booking for The Great Christmas Feast.
Photos by Ollie Tomlinson, Michael Robert Williams, and The Lost Estate
Original Artikel by Ambersphere Solutions: read here
Credits:
Produced by The Lost Estate
Lighting Designer: Peter Small
Lighting Programmer: Phil Burke
Lighting supplier: White Light
Creative Direction: William Kunhart
Scenery: Darling & Edge
Costumes: Susan Kulkarni
zactrack mini supports benno!
zactrack mini supports benno!
