Gearhouse SA built the 30m wide stage, which was covered with an elegant In2Structures dome roof with clear skins and featured a set, lighting and visuals design created by Tim Dunn. They also supplied audio, power and AV to the event, the evening concert section of which was broadcast live on SABC 2 directed by Sean Pearce and produced by Brad Holmes of The Bassline.
The event started at 8am and included political speeches - including an address by President Jacob Zuma - and traditional African performance and music throughout the day, running into the evening's R'n'B and rock oriented show.
Gearhouse's site crew of 35 was project managed by Michael Lewis. They started the site build on the Friday, a week before the Saturday show.
The onstage LED was all Lighthouse R16 panels supplied by another Gearhouse company, LEDVision, along with two Lighthouse side screens for IMAG.
The onstage video visuals were run by Marcel Wijnberger from Gearhouse Media, who used two MA VPU video servers triggered by a grandMA full size console. Content was fed to two Barco Image Pro video processors which shaped and fitted it to the strips. He created impromptu visuals for most of the daytime action onstage, reverting to a pre-programmed show for the live televised concert evening section.
Dunn used over 100 moving lights on the show - the majority of them Robes - ColorSpot and Wash 2500E ATs and REDWash 3-192 LED wash fixtures - with some Martin MAC 2K profiles and Spots.
There were four follow spots on the front of house tower, which were called by Hugh Turner, while Dunn ran the lightshow using a grandMA full size console.
Adriaan van der Walt mixed FOH. The sound design also had to cater for a whole gamut of performance styles from traditional African to playback. The system was an L-Acoustics V-DOSC, with the main 12-element left and right arrays flown from two V-Towers and eight SB28 subs a side ground-stacked on the stage deck and run in cardioid mode, a standard preset on the LA8 amps powering the whole system. Six 6 dV lip-fills were added for extra coverage around the front of stage. The consoles were two Yamaha M7 CLs, one at FOH and one for monitors, which was run by Frikkie Souls, with eight mixes of Clair AM wedges and floodlight side-fills.
The event was sponsored by the Department of Arts and Culture, African Union, The Gauteng Provincial Government and the city of Ekurhuleni.
(Jim Evans)
