With the two co-headliners sharing a stage set and teaming up for some numbers such as an opening duet of Jay-Z's Can't Knock the Hustle, then going on to perform solo with their individual bands, the show's lighting fixtures had to be versatile. The lighting had to accommodate both Blige's "softer, more feminine" show and Jay-Z's performance, which "is very hard-hitting and masculine," said Patrick Dierson of Artfag, LLC, the tour's lighting director.
"They are two very high-profile artists, and the dynamic of her show versus his is a bit different," Dierson elaborated. "Her show is a lot softer, although it still has a lot of accents and pushes because she's a strong performer. With Mary J.'s use of the lighting, things tend to ramp up and ramp down, whereas with Jay-Z's, things tend to snap on and snap off - big, hard-hitting stuff."
Heart of the City required lighting that, like the two urban-rooted music genres it illuminated, could go off in different directions while emanating from a single source. Dierson and Artfag's Justin Collie, who served as the tour's performance environment designer, found this versatility - along with many other advantages -- in Elation Professional's Impression LED intelligent moving head colour wash fixture.
Equipped with 90 high-power Luxeon K2 LEDs, the Impression boasts an output comparable to a 575W discharge fixture - at a 50% energy savings --while being lightweight and compact. Its 30 red, 30 green and 30 blue LEDs can provide an infinite palette of colours via RGB additive mixing, along with smooth, quick colour fades. It is capable of panning 660° in under 2 seconds, and offers low heat production and long-life operation with 100,000-hour-rated lamps.
"One of the things we like about the unit is that even though it's a very digital light, it is capable of being somewhat soft," said Dierson. "You can coax it into doing whatever you want. Because its response time can be very instantaneous, you can do hard snaps, or it can be very soft and smooth. This flexibility makes it ideal for a show with two headliners."
(Jim Evans)
