Europe - Lighting designer Andre Beekmans from design studio The Art of Light buckled up for hardcore techno rave action with Scooter on their Thirty Rough & Dirty tour celebrating 30 years of dance music!
Andre’s technical rider specifies several Robe moving lights – 78 x Pointes, 45 x Spiiders, 82 x Tetra2s and three Fortes used as follow spots on a remote follow system – all picked for their speed, functionality, and robustness for a genre of music that seriously challenges the build quality of any piece of lighting kit!
Andre – whose clients include Armin van Buuren, Afrojack and a string of other high profile dance artists – started working with Scooter in 2022 on a stadium tour of German-speaking countries.
One of Andre’s starting points for Thirty, Rough & Dirty’s production lighting design was Maarten Hoogland’s set which includes six large LED screens complete with LED headers which largely dictated where the lighting positions were, so Andre filled up all the gaps with fixtures, mostly rigged on custom ladders between the video surfaces!
In addition to using lights he knew could keep up with the furious pace of the music, it was important to have bright fixtures to punch past the large amounts of LED screen onstage.
The 82 x Terta2s outline the set and all the LED screens. He wanted Tetras specifically for the dramatic lensing effects and the power of the movement enabling big sweeps of light to flash across, up and down the performance space.
As they had the relative luxury of time ahead of the tour at lighting vendor TDA Clair GmbH’s facilities in Bottrop, Germany, he was able to craft numerous Tetra2 looks and to really maximise the fixture’s features.
“Scooter shows are very colourful and lively,” stated Andre, “So having the Tetra2s to hand I was able to create some real optical and brain teasing effects.
“Pointes have everything we needed - prisms, fast colour changing, and rapid movement and they are small, lightweight and unobtrusive.”
Spiiders have long been one of his favourites. They were added to the big looks as beams and at other times were zoomed out to bath the whole stage, band, and dancers in smooth, rich colours.
Two of the three Fortes are positioned on the front truss with one upstage centre, all linked together and used as follow spots via a remote operating system.
The show is mostly run from timecode which makes operating a bit more flexible, Andre programmed the show and was out on the first six gigs, then handed over to Rik Verschuren as on-the-road lighting director and operator for the rest of the tour, with Maxim Rath touring with the band for all the summer festival shows – both employed by The Art of Light.
Scooter will be playing festivals over the summer which will involve a special set up and adaptation of the design, with UK touring dates scheduled for Autumn.
