Czech Republic - Every 360° stage comes with its own set of knotty challenges, believes Martin Hruška. The rigging is more complex, so is cable management. Then there is the issue of positioning lighting fixtures and video panels in a way that won’t impede fan viewing angles and artist mobility. Nevertheless, when the renowned designer’s client approved his plans to go with a costlier 360° stage for arena shows by Czech star Leoš Mareš, he was ecstatic. “The essence of Leoš Mareš is to connect with the audience,” said Hruška. “He is always going out on catwalks to connect to the audience. This is an artist who thrives on constant contact. Given this, I wanted a stage open on all sides in the middle of the arena, with two catwalks that extend out into the crowd.” Judging from the powerfully evocative looks that are supporting Mareš on his tour thro
North America - Coldplay have completed the North American leg of their Music of the Spheres World Tour, where Ayrton Domino and Perseo fixtures illuminated the stadium show from coast to coast. ACT Entertainment is the exclusive distributor of Ayrton lighting in North America. The tour has a sustainability theme, with each show powered exclusively by renewable, super-low emission energy. “Misty Buckley and Phil Harvey, the co-creative directors of the tour, developed a production design and creative direction inspired by Pythagoras’s Music of the Spheres theory,” says lighting designer Sooner Routhier of Sooner Rae Creative, who began working with Coldplay in 2019 on their Everyday Life album campaign. “There’s a specific diagram that displays the arcs and movement of the solar system and its celestial bodies that we leaned on for inspiration.
Germany - When Doering creative agency contacted LEDcave about their ambitious plans to create alternative visuals for German singer, rapper, songwriter and producer Clueso’s new music video Mond (Moon) where he sings together with German-Turkish musician Elif, LEDcave had a stellar solution in mind. “We have been in conversations with Doering’s team for the past two years about various creative opportunities at our LEDcave studios across Germany,” says LEDcave’s CEO Thilo Strack. “When this music video project came up there was no time for ‘star gazing’ - we knew our Berlin studio would be perfect, both creatively and technologically, for what the teams had in mind,” As LEDcave’s most advanced VP studio, the 2,500m2 Berlin space features a giant LED volume comprising a curved LED wall measuring 40m wide by 6.5m high made up of LEDitg
The Netherlands - Pop acts Kris Kross Amsterdam, Maan, Rolf Sanchez, and others performed at the main stage of the first edition of Toverland LIVE! in Sevenum, under Infinity and Showtec lights. Theme Park Toverland in Sevenum premiered the festival on Saturday, 21 May. Four stages were created in places where visitors could enjoy both the rides of the park as well as the live performing musicians. The Main Stage was set up right at the Port Laguna entrance area, which served as the tropical centre of the festival. Top acts Maan, Rolf Sanchez, and Kris Kross Amsterdam created a swinging show, supported by 18 Infinity iW-1915 RGBW washes and 18 sets of Showtec DWE Audience Blinders, which were provided by production company Xymio (Geleen). The lightshow was designed by Bas Baadjou from Imperial Lighting. The event proved a tremendous success and drew seve
The Netherlands - From September 2021 through to the end of 2022, Dutch girl band the Dolly Dots is saying a final farewell to its loyal fanbase, performing an array of hits and bringing back memories of their 1980s heyday to enthusiastic, sold-out audiences throughout the Netherlands. A Yamaha Rivage PM5 digital mixing system is helping them to roll back the years. Dolly Dots enjoyed a number of European dance/pop hits throughout the 1980s, a television series and a starring role in feature film Dutch Treat. Having gone their separate ways in 1988, the band members performed occasional reunion shows until the death of founder member Ria Brieffies in 2009. Now the remaining five - Angela Groothuizen, Angéla Kramers, Anita Heilker, Esther Oosterbeek and Patty Zomer, all now in their 60s - have come back together for one last tour. Backed by a five-piece band, le
USA - A major mural unveiling took place in downtown Minneapolis recently - heralded by a weekend of celebratory events - when a new 100ft high artwork of Prince, featuring three shots of the Minneapolis musician, was revealed for the first time. This $500,000 Crown Our Prince project, as it is known, has been under development for seven years, with the mural undertaken by Florida street painter Hiero Veiga. For the Purple block party to coincide with the reveal, local company Slamhammer Audio were brought into handle production, including the sound reinforcement. Having been a loyal customer of Martin Audio for the past two decades, they fielded a combination of eight Martin Audio W8LC Compacts, eight WS218X subs and a pair of W8LM Mini for front-fills. For delays - set at the FOH position, and shooting back towards the rear of the crowd - they turned to a pai
USA - Dead & Company are back on the road for their 2022 summer tour which kicked off in mid-June at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. The tour is powered by a system featuring Meyer Sound’s new Panther large-format linear line array loudspeaker. The band further augmented its repertoire of tunes while UltraSound - decades-long audio provider for the Grateful Dead and successor ensembles - assembled the largest system of Panther loudspeakers in North America, and the first to roll out on a USA tour. To cover expansive audience areas in a mix of sports stadiums and larger sheds, UltraSound is carrying a Panther inventory that allows reconfiguration for venue size. For stadiums, a typical deployment is four identical arrays - two main front and two side - each comprising 14 Panther loudspeakers, with four Panther-W wide coverage versions flown under 12 Panther-L long-
Spain - After postponing many of its scheduled 2020 dates due to the pandemic, this year Spanish artist Pablo López's Unikornio tour finally resumed and is enjoying great successes. Spanish full-service company, Ilusovi, is in charge of supplying sound and lighting equipment for the tour, which is one of the first in Spain to deploy a DiGiCo Quantum338 console. Although Lopez has increasingly played bigger venues, one console is used for both FOH and monitors. Max Miglin, the artist's trusted sound technician, manages both mixes and explains why he has chosen to use a DiGiCo Quantum338 for this latest tour. “Ilusovi had recently acquired a Quantum338, and I was able to get to know it up close on a course organised by the DiGiCo’s Spanish distributor, RMS Proaudio, at their facility,” says Miglin. “The Quantum338 has great processing power, so I’m delighted t
UK - Late Friday night, as they concluded their 90-minute set on Glastonbury’s acoustic stage, headliners Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott walked out for their first encore. Evoking an earlier time in Heaton’s career, they performed a soulful version of Caravan of Love, a song that was a No. 1 hit for Heaton when he was a member of the Housemartins. Embracing the music and enhancing its magical effect was a Patrick Sollitt lightshow that he ran on his ChamSys MagicQ MQ500M. “Caravan of Love, was my favourite look,” said Sollitt. “It was simple, nothing very complicated, just two colours that moved together in a very gentle balanced way. I think it topped off the set perfectly.” Working with a rig supplied by Fineline Lighting, Sollitt created a variety of other looks that captured the deep, and gently evocative mood of the 21-song set.
UAE - In September 2021, Dubai saw the opening ceremony of Expo 2020 as it began to host the world’s largest Expo event. From October 2021 until March 2022, Expo 2020 welcomed and hosted 192 participating countries to be a part of the journey. Adam Bassett and Simon Fraser from the lighting design consultant company on Expo 2020, Woodroffe Bassett Design, chose Follow-Me remote follow-spot and performer tracking solutions to be installed and used in three of the venues, The Al Wasl Plaza, the Jubilee Stage and the Dubai Millennium Amphitheatre. Al Wasl Plaza is a 67m-tall, 130m diameter structure with 252 video projectors and an immersive sound system. With a brief to transform the spectacular garden space into a venue, WBD designed a house lighting rig that is integrated into the structure with the clear direction not to detract from the beauty of the architecture.<
South Africa - Cape Town-based lighting designer Marius Coetzee collaborated closely with Bradley Hilton from Pixel Nation to create a subtle and highly visual canvas and intricate high-impact projection mapped show devised for the South African launch of the Audi e-tron electric series. Marius chose Robe moving lights - Esprites, LEDWash 600s and MegaPointes - to assist him in the task. The fixtures were supplied by rental specialist MGG to the Night of Progress event which was created by the Full Circle agency for Audi South Africa and staged at Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. This stunning building is located in the Silo district of central Cape Town and is the largest museum of contemporary African art worldwide. The museum is part of the conversion of a 57m-tall historic grain silo, originally built in 1921 and decommissioned
UK - West Midlands- based technical production specialist CPL (Central Presentations Ltd) supplied LED screens and all associated processing and vision control for two major stages - The Baillie Gifford Stage and Friends Stage - at the 2022 Hay Festival of Literature & Arts. This year Hay Festival celebrated its 35th year in style with over 500 ‘live’ events staged across 11 days which included an impressive line-up of in-person appearances from Hillary Clinton, Svetlana Alexievich, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Stephen Fry, Nicola Sturgeon, Minnie Driver, Monica Ali, Damian Lewis, Jimmy Page, Damon Galgut, Ben Okri and more, uniting readers and writers together in a series sustainable events designed to inspire, examine and entertain. Each of the two CPL supplied arenas featured a central 4.5m-wide by 2.5m - wide LED screen at the back of the stage, flanked by two 2.5m b
UK - Lighting designer, director and operator Jose Lorenzo uses Obsidian Control Systems’ Onyx lighting control platform on tours in the UK and recently ran a 78 show, three-month tour by 2021 Strictly Come Dancing champion Giovanni Pernice using an NX2 lighting console. The show, This is Me, toured the UK and Ireland from 1 March until 30 May and highlighted Pernice’s showmanship supported by a cast of professional dancers and singers. Early last year, Lorenzo, who started working with Pernice in 2019, transitioned from a more established lighting control platform to Obsidian’s Onyx. “Cally Bacchus at [Elation Professional UK distributor] Entedi asked me to demo an Obsidian NX2 console and I immediately loved it,” the designer stated. “It’s powerful, reliable, compact, and doesn’t cost 50-60K. It is ideal for touring and doesn’t take up much
USA - For the latest Broadway revival of The Music Man, the production team worked with PRG and Martin Professional to deploy an array of Martin lighting solutions, including MAC Viper, MAC Encore Performance and the new MAC Ultra Performance and Ultra Wash fixtures. Written by Meredith Willson and originally staged in 1957, The Music Man is a Broadway classic that’s won numerous Tony awards and has been staged by countless theatre companies - professional and amateur alike - in the past 75 years. In February, a new production of musical starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster opened at the Winter Garden Theatre. Director Jerry Zaks worked with scenic and costume designer Santo Loquasto and award-winning lighting designer Brian MacDevitt to strike a balance that simultaneously felt modern while retaining the old-fashioned quality of the original production.<
Singapore - Theatre consultancy Theatreplan is providing the technical know-how for the upgrade of the cabling infrastructure from the analogue tie-lines system to a digital IP-based network to serve sound, video, communications and lighting across all venues, plus new facilities for digital media at Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay in Singapore. Opened in 2002, Esplanade is a major centre for the performing arts, located at Marina Bay, on the bank of the Singapore River. The centre consists of a concert hall for 1,600 people, a theatre with a 1,950-seat capacity, a recital studio for 245 people, and a theatre studio accommodating up to 220. Having been appointed in 2019, Theatreplan’s work has continued throughout the pandemic and is on-going. The scope of work includes a feasibility study, a detailed site survey, technical design recommendations and development of a
Columbia - Maluma has a global following and record sales of over 18m and the Museum of Modern Art in Medellín, his hometown, recently unveiled a statue of the Latin artist, based on the wax figure of him at Madame Tussauds in Orlando, Florida. The star showed his love for his townspeople with Medallo en el Mapa, a passionate three-hour, 35-song concert at the city’s Atanasio Girardot Soccer Stadium. Although this landmark venue normally accommodates 45,000 fans, demand for tickets was so great that it was expanded to 54,000, making it the most attended show in the history of the big stadium. To make room for the larger crowd, a 360° stage was installed in the middle of the field, so the audience could fill the grass as well as the stands. Invariably, an open 360ﹾ stage brings its own set of challenges, but fans were still treated to a rewarding visual experience
Thailand - Country Group Development collaborated with Mahajak Development to equip its Capella Bangkok hotel with a suite of Harman Professional networked AV, lighting and control solutions. Capella Bangkok is a five-star hotel situated on a 13.8-acre lot overlooking the Chao Phraya River. In addition to its 101 guest rooms, suites and luxury villas, the hotel features three restaurants, a tearoom, greenhouse, grand ballroom and four multipurpose “atelier” specialty function rooms. “We were responsible for the audio, visual, lighting and control systems design for the ballroom, specialty function rooms and four areas of the background music system,” said Eric Wong, AV Consultant of Katakan Consulting Co, as reported by Mahajak. “The client wanted a versatile system capable of delivering sharp, clear sound without distortion for a variety of functions like se
UK - Nine Avolites consoles and four media servers were specified for this year’s Glastonbury. Avolites products lit nine of the main sites, including Temple, Totem, RumShack, the three Bloc9 areas, Theatre, Cabaret and Salon Carousel, and individual production teams brought in Avolites kit for additional performances on The Pyramid Stage and Other Stage. For Avolites, the return of Glastonbury, following a pause as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, has marked the festival debut for its flagship console Diamond 9. It was the demands of Bloc9 East, hosting ICON, the epic monument which debuted at Glastonbury in 2019 and featuring a 65ft head as its centrepiece, and a number of alternative performances, that led the D9-215 to be used to control the lighting for his stage. Offering intuitive and integrated control of all visual aspects of the show, the compact version of the
China - With over 10 years of experience in advertising, photography, film and television production, the Shanghai MuShang Advertising Co is familiar with the use of technologies to enhance customer experiences. Its latest brainchild, MuShang XR stage, uses cutting-edge technology including Brompton Technology LED processing, ROE Visual screens, Mark Roberts Motion Control cinebots, Unreal Engine and disguise media server hardware, to deliver visual creativity and high-quality productions. “We’ve been working in the creative industries for over a decade and know all too well the complexities associated with large-scale, outdoor production settings,” explains Henry Sha, the founder of Shanghai MuShang Ad CO. “From manpower to lighting equipment, to tons of things in between, we wanted to bring a more efficient and cost-effective way of doing productions to our clients
UK - For the 16th edition of the annual Performance Marketing Awards ceremony at London’s Grosvenor Hotel, Bristol-based production specialists Pytch were tasked with creating an impressive array of visuals for the awards ceremony, hosted by television personality Joel Dommett, as well as for the club-like, high energy afterparty. Responding with a lighting concept anchored by an assortment of carefully curated Chauvet Professional fixtures, the company’s design team was able to create a colourful, immersive, and multi-level visual production that endowed the stately hotel’s ballroom with a stylish air of contemporary elegance and festiveness. With little to no scenic elements upon the actual stage to carry the visual communication and branding of the awards ceremony, Pytch was ultimately given something of a blank canvas to work with, as the design team relied o
USA - The Dollar Loan Centre in Henderson, Nevada is home to the Henderson Silver Knights of the American Hockey League and the Vegas Knight Hawks of the Indoor Football League, seating over 5,500 fans for those sports. In addition, the Big West Conference announced last year that the NCAA Division I men’s and women’s basketball championships would be held there starting with the West Coast teams of the March Madness series. The $80m-plus arena officially opened on 8 March this year as Covid began slowly releasing its grip on live events. AV systems designer and consultancy Anthony James Partners specified a DiGiCo S31 as the new arena’s front-of-house audio mix console, which was installed and integrated by C.V. Lloyde Audiovisual. “I’d like to say it’s just cost, but the fact is that DiGiCo consoles deliver for both the budget and sonic quality,” says J
Estonia - The Estonian Traditional Music Centre (ETMC) is a venue which hosts international concerts, conferences, receptions, dinners, and parties. Situated next to the historical Viljandi Castle ruins, the former 18th century granary was transformed into a contemporary concert hall and cultural hub almost 15 years ago. It incorporates two concert halls - the Grand Hall with a capacity of 400, and the Chamber Hall with seating for 80 - and boasts an extensive concert programme, including the renowned Viljandi Folk Music Festival. To celebrate the return of live events, ETMC has recently invested in a selection of new gear, including High End Systems SolaFrame Studio fixtures and an Ion Xe console from ETC. In 2019, more than 100 concerts featured on ETMC’s roster, and it hosted an additional 250 events arranged by visiting organisations. Naturally, the pandemic led
Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem has returned to the West End 11 years after its last record-breaking, sell-out run. Mark Rylance reprises his role as the ebulliently irresponsible, anarchic Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, ably supported by the rest of the cast. The play is back at its West End home of the Apollo Theatre with a sound design from Autograph’s Ian Dickinson, this time featuring Reference Series loudspeakers from EM Acoustics. “I did the show the first time around when it was at the Royal Court, followed by its subsequent West End iterations, so I knew exactly what was required,” explains Dickinson. “The Apollo is a beautiful theatre on four levels so, as ever, the priority was flawless coverage across all seats in the auditorium. The actors don’t wear microphones, so the PA system is there to deliver clear playback of the music and numerous effects used in t
USA - Country artist Kane Brown returned to his hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee, on May 7 to play his first-ever stadium show at the Finley Stadium. Lighting and production design for the sold-out show was by Trevor Ahlstrand who used Elation lighting on the milestone event, including the company’s popular IP-rated powerhouse luminaire Proteus Maximus, all supplied by DCR Nashville. Brown’s popularity has grown exponentially since debuting only a few years ago. Ahlstrand has collaborated with the artist since the first headlining arena tour, Live Forever in 2019, and served as lighting designer and programmer on the stadium show. Nick Chang served as lighting director. Following the Live Forever tour, Brown managed to get in six shows with a new design from Ahlstrand before everything shut down due to COVID. The current touring design, which contin
