Alexander entered the varied world of Technical Entertainment in 1999 with a City & Guilds 1810 qualification under his belt and started gaining extensive experience through a couple of touring shows and various other projects.
The ‘calling of the sea’ offered the next set of challenges. Contracts over the next six years provided work on Victoria, Aurora, Oriana, Arcadia and Artemis. Modernisation (via refits) and bringing a new ship on-line (Arcadia) were among the many challenges experienced within the Entertainment Department.
During time spent working with the creative team of CMC whilst remaining with P&O he was to advise on the technical specifications for new show ideas and to improve on ways to keep the old traditions alive. A varied input to show operation led to successful and extensive programming of lighting boards with a great flair and finesse for moving lights. This lighting side materialised into full lighting designs for production shows, whilst still undertaking the programming.
During the recurring contracts with P&O Cruises, progression to Production Manager was inevitable and this happened in late February 2002. Re-introducing Pyrotechnics to P&O with the new safety standards and setting up Chemical and Environmental Compliance policies for the on-board entertainment department have been some of the noteworthy production manager challenges.
In June 2006 career prospects and planning for the future saw Alex leave his sea legs behind for a while and start trading as 4Kandles Lighting.

2007 brought contacts from far and wide allowing lighting design work on various productions and shows, with the hi-light being the UK tour of Lady Salsa.

2008 saw a return to the sea and P&O as one of the Lighting Designers for Headliners Theatre Company, nine months of short-term contracts completing successful designs and programming followed, with many a fun time thrown in for good measure. In amongst these designs time was found to work on other projects including ‘all year round’ Pantos at Butlins working with the creative team of Oddpost Entertainment, providing many an enjoyable opportunity.

2009 brought more work with Oddpost Entertainment lighting other shows at Butlins, supplying a varied and enjoyable range of shows for the children; along with the continuation of the 2008 contracts from P&O.

2010 saw a chance come along to prove that his design skills and moving light programming could still keep up with the fast paced footwork of Salsa dancers once again, touring ‘The Kings of Salsa’ round the Baltic countries; every day encountering differing lighting rigs and foreign speaking crew, a good job he’s always up for a challenge!

An initial career interest in electrics was further updated with the latest amendments of BS7671 and also BS7909 and its uses put to good effect with a few projects later on in 2012/13, let alone in these upcoming years as electrical safety becomes ever more prevalent.

The big challenge of 2011 saw ‘The Kings of Salsa’ show head to the good ol’ US of A and a two month tour of one-nighter style engagements, bouncing state to state and performance space to space, from 300 seat theatres to 3000 seat auditoria; a nightly lighting challenge to say the least, thinking six venues ahead on the odd day off, pre-planning lx kit hires et al. To top it all off, from the third week in, Alex also accepted the duties of Production Manager / Technical Director, so as well as keeping lighting vibrant, SX & wardrobe supervisory duties befell to him, just to keep things fun!

2012 saw the further forays of a skill developed back in 2009 aptly coinciding with lighting, that being the specification / programming & use of media servers, primarily aimed at the low-budget corporate market, where ‘bang for buck’ was everything. This moved onto experimentation with building mapping, enduring challenges of all sorts along the way.

The latter half of 2012 saw his introduction to Kings Place Music Foundation, working as a casual member of the LX team, working on classical concerts / conferences and interesting performances alike, whilst utilising his electrical & maintenance knowledge to keep equipment in working order. These casual engagements continued until June 2014 when a full-time contract was entered into with Kings Place, to take on its lighting department with the aims to re-build it into a successful entity and modernise / overhaul the venues lighting capabilities across multiple spaces, which Alex took on with relish and established some very reliable industry and manufacturer contacts along the way.

Among noteworthy achievements whist at Kings Place would be the specification and installation of LED-engine based automated lights in the form of the Robe Robin DL range; whereby all existing automated units had reached end-of-life usability when assessed in a cost effective maintenance structure.

The later part of 2014, all of 2015 & most of 2016 seems to have flown by at Kings Place, making improvements all the time, leading a team from the front and at times revisiting the original ‘snagging’ list to tick-off certain items still left there!

September 2016 saw Alex’s departure from Kings Place following an inter-departmental restructure across ICT and Technical departments, streamlining roles, resulting in LX, SX & AV managerial positions being made redundant.

So it is to the future that Alex now turns, seeking interesting challenges and projects with which to apply his varied skill-set and caring attitude, as that of an all-round lighting practitioner. Be it from the incoming 3-phase mains power supply through to a full-scale creative lighting design, Alex can address these topics, complete tasks and ably assist where needed.

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• 4Kandles Lighting – Bringing Light to Entertainment.
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