GLP helps DJ BoBo celebrate 30 years
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The two-and-a-half-week tour rehearsals – including four advance preview shows – took place in January at Europark Rust. Here, lighting designer Thomas Gerdon had the opportunity to put his design through its paces.
Explains Gerdon, “Everyone involved saw the rehearsal phase in Rust as a creative process. Ideas were brought along, but the specific design of the show developed in a collaborative manner during rehearsals. It was demanding, but it was a lot of fun."
It is Gerdon’s first lighting design for a DJ BoBo tour. However, his contact with the artist has existed for many years: “We have known each other since 2010. Since then there have always been points of contact. So much the better that this time I and my team can make a substantial contribution to the look of the show.”
As the name suggests, the Evolut30n tour is dedicated to the pop and dance artist’s 30th anniversary. From a technical point of view, this time the stage show consists almost entirely of video projections.
“Video mapping is actually very much in the foreground,” points out Gerdon. “This means that the huge stage – with a backdrop 50m wide – is completely white and serves as a projection surface for video content of all kinds. In terms of lighting, a highlight show was required for the occasion, but not in competition with the video mapping. That was one of our great challenges.”
The other element is that there is a total of three stages. A B stage sits in front of the large main stage, and even further back in the hall, at FoH level, is the C stage in the form of a huge turntable.
“Because of this arrangement, we decided not only to illuminate the stages, but the entire hall,” Gerdon continues. “However, finding the right fixtures was not easy. In some arenas on the tour schedule, the raked seating reaches under the roof. Here you can’t hang the audience trusses at a height of 12 to 13m, as in the Europapark Arena, because part of the audience would then be sitting above the lighting rig. So we’re talking more about 16 to 19 metres."
After discussions with Oliver Schwendke and Michael Feldmann from GLP, Gerdon was certain that he had found the ideal solution for the planned application.
And so 56 of the new GLP XDC1 IP Hybrid strobe/wash lights found their way into the design. The XDC1 offers impressive light output and colour reproduction quality in combination with two extremely powerful white strobe lines. Eighteen wash LEDs, each with 40W light output in three rows of six pixels each, can also be controlled on two levels.
“Two trusses, each 62 meters long, stretch from the stage to the end of the halls, which contain 60 moving lights in addition to the 56 XDC1s evenly distributed. However, it is the XDC1 IP Hybrid that allows us to illuminate the entire audience area brightly and evenly, even in large arenas such as the Lanxess Arena in Cologne.”
