Dubai-based ProTec handled all the technical elements, and the whole project - literally from the ground up - was managed and co-ordinated by the company’s Stephen Lakin, who collaborated closely with Damien McGurn, Hares Shehab, Rick Wade and Jason Strange.
Lakin’s involvement with the event began in the summer of 2001, following an approach he made to the Government where he presented his ideas to Sheikh Mohammed. In October he was awarded the contract, without it going out to tender. Then began a race against time to make the show happen for 1 March. No venue capable of staging a show of this stature existed in Dubai, so Lakin’s first job was to find a site and build from the ground up.
McGurn hired local contractors to build footings for the stage and for an 18m high x 140m wide protective windwall wrapping around the backstage and stage areas, constructed to withstand destructive winds of up to 200kph. They dug down five metres to accommodate the bases for the stage hydraulics. Being well below the water table, the concrete had to be 2.5 metres thick at this point.
Over 18,000 cubic metres of crushed rock roadbase, 15,000sq.m of Tarmac and 900 cubic metres of reinforced concrete were used to build the arena. McGurn also organized the building of five electricity generation sub-stations on site. The final piece - the stage roof - was supplied from StageCo, air-lifted to Dubai from Belgium in a specially chartered Boeing 747 freighter.
For the event itself, lighting designer Nick Jones created a ‘circular’ lighting scheme with seven elliptical trusses - all of which moved - five with scrim surfaces stretched across for projections. He then added eight triangular lighting trusses, two at each corner of the roof - which also moved. Each side of stage, Lakin designed two surreal lighting ‘spiders’, each with 12 jointed legs, made from Total Fabrications’ XO truss. A VL5 was placed at the tip of each leg, with Par 56 truss toners and banks of short-nosed ACLs mounted inside. The total lighting fixture count reached well over 2,300, including 340 moving lights deployed onstage and across the site. Six Pani projectors with AMD-12 slide-changers were used for the backdrop projections onto the wind-wall.
Lawrence Heron from PAI co-ordinated the over-stage truss motion control, utilizing 64 Columbus McKinnon Lodestar fast runner motors and a new 72-way Ibex computer-controlled system. Lighting control was looked after by an Avolites Diamond II console operated by Jones and three WholeHog 2s, one with an extender wing, operated by Phil Cole. There were also 11 racks of Avolites ART 2000 dimming on the show.
Audio for the event was designed by ProTec’s head of sound Nick Chapman. The aim was to make the ‘reinforcement’ sonically ‘invisible’, a goal achieved with 30 Sennheiser MKH 416 rifle mics and assorted radio sets for enhancing the solos. Chapman and Greg Pink mixed the 86 inputs using two Midas Heritage H3000 consoles.
Time aligning was done via a Fostex D16 24 hard drive, which also stored all pre-recorded material. The speakers were a mix of Turbo Flashlight and Floodlight. Two central clusters, six-wide and four-deep of Flash for the top two rows, and the same configuration of Floods on the bottom. These were joined by another 10 stacks of Floodlight on the floor.
The colourful two-hour show also featured five large automated scenic globes, all used by performers from the five dance companies involved (the latter also researched and sourced by Lakin and Shebab) to enter stage at the start of their individual shows. Before the finale - with all 250 performers onstage - the globes were ‘swallowed’ into a massive sixth globe amidst a dramatic lighting and pyro sequence.
This was followed by a seven-minute fireworks display, designed by Mik
