UK - Cirque du Soleil has reopened its spectacle, Luzia - A Waking Dream of Mexico, at London’s Royal Albert Hall for a seven-week run. The show transports audiences to an imaginary Mexico where light quenches the spirit and rain soothes the soul.
With a combination of grand visual surprises and breath-taking acrobatic performances, Luzia brings the places, faces, and sounds of Mexico to the stage, taking its lead from the country’s extraordinary mix of influences and creative collisions.
Alongside a host of carefully chosen suppliers, live audio rental specialist Britannia Row Productions was brought in to ensure that the sound design in London could match the variety of visually striking performance routines that appear on stage.
Since 2007, freelance sound system engineer & designer, Sergiy Zhytnikov, has worked on a wide range of Cirque

USA - All Mobile Video (AMV) managed the pool feed for New Year’s Eve in Times Square, capturing audio and video of the crowd, its various stages, and the ball drop itself for the major broadcasters.
The company worked closely with production directors from multiple networks, such as ABC and Univision, to capture key events, including Journey’s performance for Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. When AMV built out its new all IP, Dante enabled Eclipse truck this past year, the company relied on intercom solutions from Studio Technologies.
AMV incorporated Studio Technologies Dante compatible beltpacks into the new Eclipse truck, including 25 Model 374A Four-Channel Intercom Beltpacks and eight Model 348 Intercom Stations. According to engineer-in-charge Ian Vysick, building a new IP-based truck meant AMV had to reinvent its entire workflow for

USA - Todd Weaver has mixed such hit productions as Good Girls, Doom Patrol, Stranger Things and I,Tonya. Throughout it all, Lectrosonics equipment has always been his trusted sound solution.
For his latest project The Menu - a film in which a revenge-bound chef (played by Ralph Fiennes of Voldemort fame) invites unwitting guests to his island restaurant for more than a gourmet meal - he deployed a combination of the company’s time-tested Digital Hybrid Wireless all-digital line. On the Hybrid side were original Venue receivers plus SSM micro belt-pack, SMV, and SMWB wideband transmitters. Heading up the digital arsenal were DSQD receivers and DBSM transmitters. Thanks to Weaver’s Dante skills and Wireless Designer software, this diverse roster of gear functioned as a seamlessly integrated system.
“The biggest challenge

USA - iHeartRadio’s ALTer EGO concert 15 January at The Forum in Los Angeles reflected the sold-out crowd’s joy to be back at a live event. Production designer Patrick Dierson of The Activity was delighted as well and lit some of the biggest names in alternative rock using a large lighting package that included Elation Professional’s Artiste Mondrian LED profile supplied by 4Wall Entertainment.
Coldplay, All Time Low, Imagine Dragons, Kings of Leon, Måneskin, Twenty One Pilots and Willow all rocked the venue with a surprise appearance by Avril Lavigne. Presented by Capital One, the show was streamed live on LiveXLive and broadcast on iHeartRadio stations. The Activity was first engaged with the event back in 2017 in what Dierson calls “one of the most fun shows in which we were ever involved”.
The Activity handles the overall production design of the show,

Ireland - Some 35 years ago, a young Irish singer was performing a gig when she met another aspiring musician who invited her to perform on one of his demo tracks. Decades later, Maria Doyle Kennedy and her husband Kieran Kennedy are still going strong with over 12 albums recorded, multiple awards, and their own record company. For good measure, Maria has also gone on to become one of the most prolific Irish actors, known throughout the world for her starring roles in hits like Outlanders and Downton Abbey.
In February, the duo celebrated their musical odyssey with a two-person show at Dublin’s popular Button Factory. Supporting their performance was a light show by Steven Douglas of Craorag Lighting Design that created a deeply evocative mood aided by some Chauvet Professional ÉPIX Strip Tour fixtures from the venue’s house rig.
For Douglas, whose

UK - Housed in a former sheep-trading market, now a grade II listed building, The Fleece is Bristol’s largest independent music venue and has welcomed the likes of Radiohead, Oasis, Muse, Jeff Buckley, Coldplay, Sea Girls, Amy Winehouse, Frank Carter & Rattlesnakes, Queens of the Stone Age, George Ezra and Ed Sheeran.
When the Covid-19 pandemic forced The Fleece into temporary closure, it presented a rare opportunity for a complete refurbishment – one that the management seized with both hands. The Fleece has been offering live music and club nights seven nights a week since 1982. The ambitious project comprised a full interior redesign including a new, larger stage with new LED screens, new lighting systems and a comprehensive KV2 sound system.
Technical manager Rich Munday explains that the previous PA had been in place and working hard for twenty years, so w

USA - Multi Emmy Award-winning lighting design company Darkfire Lighting Design has found its 125 Claypaky K-Eye K20 and K10 HCR wash lights with LED light sources to be workhorse fixtures for an extensive roster of television shows, including the long-running competition series, The Voice.
Oscar Dominguez, Darkfire’s founder and head designer, remembers being impressed with the K-Eyes when he saw them in a demo. “We had been talking about HCR fixtures, and these lights didn’t have a lot of gimmicks: They were a straightforward, beautiful wash light – robust, bright, with exceptional colour and without things we didn’t need,” he says. “They’ve been an excellent addition to our inventory and become a popular tool among our designers.”
LA-based Dominguez, who has been the lighting designer for The Voice since it premiered in 2011, thought

USA - Opera Philadelphia recently presented An Evening of Vocal Fireworks: Amici e Rivali (Friends and Rivals), a socially distanced outdoor concert held at the city’s Mann Music Centre for local music lovers, conducted by Maestro Corrado Rovaris.
While the amplified event was viewed live, outdoors on large-scale screens at the Mann Music Centre, the crew also recorded the performance for archival purposes. Producer Joe Hannigan of Weston Sound & Video selected DPA Microphones to ensure a cclear, rich, full and intelligible sound for both the House PA and multi-track recording.
The soloists, tenors Michael Spyres and Lawrence Brownlee (pictured), were arranged on either side of the conductor and miked with legacy 4023 Compact Cardioid Microphones on flamingo stands (today known as 4011 mics with floor stands and modular booms).
Hannigan and Maestro Rovaris

USA - The 380-seat McLaughlin Theatre at St. Ignatius Prep is long on charm and character. With an interior modelled after the Chicago theatres of the late 19th century, it provides an evocative setting for audiences. But its Bob Newhart Stage isn’t the most capacious in the city, measuring only 28ft wide by 18ft deep.
This relative lack of space can create issues when staging a musical that’s as grand as Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. But these challenges can be easily met, as director Kevin Bellie and his crew demonstrated at a recent production of the Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber classic.
Helping to capture the ebullience of the show on the small stage was an immersive and colourful lighting design by Dustin L. Derry that featured Chauvet Professional COLORado 2-Quad Zoom Tour fixtures.
“This was a fun project, getting to work wit

Belgium - Guitarist Isaac Delahaye says music is “in his genes” and, looking at his history, there’s no denying that. Raised in a musical family, Delahaye spent his childhood and teenage years learning, teaching, and performing with different hometown bands. After going to school for music and touring internationally through his 20s, he settled down as a guitarist with Epica, a Dutch symphonic metal band.
Delahaye has been performing with and mixing demos for the band for the past 13 years, but it wasn’t until recently that he discovered the KRK V-Series 6 Studio Monitors, which he now relies on for all his home studio mixing needs.
The guitarist was first introduced to KRK while visiting Gibson’s showroom in the Netherlands. Having heard good things about the brand, he wanted to test some products himself, and eventually settled on the V-Series. “Compared

Australia - When global streaming provider 5stream needed a configurable solution to streamline their scheduling and resource management, they discovered MediaPulse was the right fit. 5stream deployed Xytech’s MediaPulse to streamline the operations of their Broadcast Services division.
“5stream is a rapidly growing business. We previously relied on a homebrew system of Google Calendars, spreadsheets and custom CSV scrapers to manage over 1000 events each month,” says Mitchell Kalika, general manager at 5stream. “With increasing resource requirements and complexity across all our jobs, our existing system is no longer suitable, and we needed a solution to streamline our operations. MediaPulse allows us to effectively book and manage the large quantity of work and helps streamline and visualise complex broadcast workflows to reduce setup time for our MCR and Presentat

UK - Tower 42, one of the tallest buildings in London, recently enlisted Light Fantastic Production Services (LFPS) to upgrade the control system powering its LED display.
The top three floors of the distinctive skyscraper, visible from all sides of London, are lit up year-round with still images and animations representing charitable causes and topical dates in the calendar. These images are shown on a screen made up of 5,905 bespoke RGB pixels, which are programmed and maintained by the LFPS team.
LFPS were enlisted in 2021 to carry out a complete overhaul of the control system which powers the display. Having been in situ for over 10 years in a hostile environment 40+ floors above London, it was beginning to suffer occasional failures. The building’s owners were keen to maintain the screen in great condition, in line with its status as a London landmark.
The

USA - In October in the depths of the pandemic, a group of backers unveiled their plans for a new live entertainment centre
“It’s time to put a positive spin out there, to have hope for concerts in St. Louis and for employment,” one of them told the press at the time. Less than one year later, their hope and vision were realised with the opening of The Factory, a bi-level 52,000sq.ft indoor venue with the capacity to serve up to 3,000 fans.
Located in the heart of St. Louis’ popular dining and entertainment destination, The District, the new venue is now entertaining fans with a wide variety of shows, following strict safety protocols. Enhancing their experience is a dynamic and flexible lighting rig featuring Chauvet Professional Maverick, Rogue and STRIKE fixtures supplied by Logic Systems, which also installed audio, video, and rigging systems at The Factory

USA - Virginia’s famous Mariners’ Museum has upgraded its lighting control to a Strand Neo console from Signify.
The Museum, situated in the city of Newport News, Virginia, holds one of North America’s largest maritime history collections and is designated America’s National Maritime Museum by the US Congress. It has a wide range of fixtures in place ranging from incandescent stage and theatre lights to LED indirect and accent lights.
“One of the key areas within The Mariners’ Museum is our theatre performance space, and we use a lot of cues that sync with timecode to create dramatic lighting effects that help tell the stories we share,” explains Tim Kines, AV exhibit technician at the museum. “We needed to upgrade our control console to add dynamics and effects via a simple-to-use interface, and the Neo fits perfectly.”
In the exhibition areas,

Poland - Founded in 1993, The Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity was originally created as a one-off event to raise money for medical equipment, raising over $1.5m that year. Part of the WOŚP Foundation, the event has since grown to become Poland’s largest non-governmental, non-profit charity organisation, raising money for pediatric and elderly care and featuring annual Grand Finale live events in towns and cities right across the country.
2022 saw the 30th edition of the numerous events supporting the charity and their purpose this year was the purchase of medical and diagnostics equipment for eye diseases in children. The largest single event was held in the capital, Warsaw, where sound company Gigant Letus were commissioned to deliver, install, prepare and operate the sound systems for the various events and activities.
Gigant supplied and commissioned four se

USA - When three-time Grammy Award-winning country duo Dan + Shay hit the road in March of 2020 for their first official headlining US arena tour, they played three consecutive sold-out shows. Then COVID struck, grinding the trek - along with everything else - to a sudden halt. A year and a half later, the tour finally picked back up, rescheduling and resuming the 30 remaining sold-out shows on the three-month run, which carried an L-Acoustics K Series loudspeaker system supplied by technical solutions provider PRG.
Presented by AEG Presents, The Arena Tour was in support of the duo’s latest album, Good Things, with PRG supplying all audio, video, and lighting systems from its Nashville location. “This was our first tour with PRG, and as soon as I knew that they’d be our touring partner, I went to our production manager and said, ‘Hey, if we can have it, we’

South Africa - Having the right tools for the job is vital in any walk of life. When you are a radio presenter that means having the appropriate microphone. Prosound has helped GoldFM 104.3 to achieve this with an upgrade across all of its studios to Electro-Voice RE320 dynamic microphones.
Based in Welkom, GoldFM is a community radio station providing music and speech-based programming to Free State’s second largest city, while also streaming to the world. “It’s very much nuts and bolts community broadcasting,” explains Brian Emmenis, station manager and head of technical at GoldFM. “We can do a lot more than the bigger radio stations because they’re subjected to very stringent national rules. What’s of interest here is not of interest elsewhere so we cover local news and can make a proper fuss of it, we can take it one step further.”
“Brian has dec

USA - The Cincinnati Bearcats celebrated the end of a winning season with a 150-strong Verge Aero drone display, put on for the team by their sponsors and with fans invited to join the fun.
Taking place at Cincinnati’s 38,000-seater open-air Nippert Stadium, which is the Bearcats’ home field, Verge Aero’s military-grade-manufactured drones were positioned high above the crowd to spell out the team’s 13-0 winning season and display their logo. Backing up the show were more than 100 lighting fixtures and 384 rooftop fireworks, creating a spectacular celebration show.
Verge Aero’s Chris Lutts project managed the drones for the event, in collaboration with the University of Cincinnati Bearcats events team, their sponsor’s event team, and lighting and fireworks specialists.
“We actually only had around seven days to get our drones programmed, transporte

UK - Audiologic has announced its collaboration with Technically Creative to deliver an immersive experience at Yorkshire Wildlife Park.
The recently-launched Evolution restaurant at Yorkshire Wildlife Park provides an immersive experience, with diners embarking on a journey to a mysterious land where Jurassic Island meets the fantasy world of caves and mythical dragons, with sound, animatronics and visual effects. The restaurant forms part of the new ‘hub’ of retail and play, extending the park’s traditional offerings.
To achieve this experience, the audio brief demanded speakers which had to be discrete enough that they could be disguised within the scenic works as much as possible, whilst producing enough volume at high quality to fill the space, with a relatively limited number of them. With multiple seating areas delivering different background soundscapes,

Japan - Robert Juliat continues its collaboration with Japan’s Zepp Hall network of concert venues via its exclusive Japanese distributor, Sogo Butai Co.
The latest project, supplied and installed by Sogo Butai, was for the 2,900+ capacity Zepp Haneda in Tokyo and consists of a full complement of LED fixtures across the whole range of Robert Juliat’s LED portfolio: profile, single lens, followspots and cyclorama lights.
Sogo Butai lighting designer Yukiteru Hayashi chose the comprehensive selection of LED fixtures to include 24 Dalis 860 cyclorama lights, six Tibo 533CW 115W Cool White and four ZEP 664SX2 300W profiles, 28 Warm White ZEP 360LF2 300W and 10 Cool White ZEP 360LF2 300W Fresnels, alongside 6 Oz 600W LED followspots.
Four of the Oz followspots are sited in front-of-house positions and two in side positions. The profiles are rigged to a movable ba

UK - Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, and directed by Polly Findlay at London’s The Bridge Theatre last autumn, the European premiere of White Noise explored the subject of race in the 21st century from both a black and white perspective through a group of college friends.
Working on an ambitious set design by Lizzie Clachan, lighting designer, Jackie Shemesh, chose six Ayrton Diablo LED profile fixtures to deliver some extremely precise lighting effects and ambient washes, and worked hard to sculpt the huge set despite some difficult rigging angles and ensure the skin tones of the diverse cast looked correct on stage. The 27m-deep set included a thrust stage, an overhead catwalk, a series of side wall flats arranged in perspective to frame the stage, and an angled ceiling flat which severely restricted hanging positions and lighting a

The Netherlands - The Harbour Club brand is known worldwide. The latest evolution in this successful concept is the just-completed The Harbour Club Theatre, a new 300-capacity purpose-built performance and event space located adjacent to The Harbour Club’s flagship restaurant Amsterdam Oost. It extends the opportunity of sampling exquisite food whilst enjoying top-notch entertainment, starting with the show Vegas, starring Dutch magician and illusionist Hans Klok, plus a cast of eight dancers, four singers, three acrobats and a live band.
Lighting for this enew venue has been designed by Benny La Maitre, who put 24 Robe T1 Profiles, 28 LEDBeam 350s and six Spiider wash beam moving lights at the centre of the rig.
This is part of an overall production design encompassing audio, video, staging, pyro and SFX, all planned and co-ordinated by The Harbour Club tec

USA - During the holiday season, Legacy Production Group of Minneapolis worked with Street Factory Media to present Nature Illuminated at the Minnesota Zoo, a magical driving or walking experience that featured displays of larger-than-life inflatable animals. Their second year working on the project, Legacy used a lighting package of Elation IP-rated luminaires to compose picturesque environments and controlled the lighting scenes using a large Obsidian lighting control network.
The oversized animals - more than 30 specially crafted works of art illuminated from the inside with LED lights - were presented across five different zones on a nearly mile long loop, each zone with its own theme.
Legacy’s Tom Gorman, lighting designer and production manager on the project, explains the role of the Elation lighting system. “We didn’t necessarily need to light the

USA - When Portland’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall re-opened after a pandemic hiatus, those patrons attending the season debut of the resident Oregon Symphony were delighted to hear a striking difference in the sound of the orchestra. Following the installation of a Constellation acoustic system, they experienced for the first time a rich and balanced natural reverberance distributed evenly throughout the hall. On stage, the musicians could hear each other clearly despite disappearance of the massive and ungainly physical stage shell. The Rose City’s popular Italian Rococo Revival landmark had acquired a new and flexible acoustical signature.
With a current seating capacity of 2,776, the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall is one of a quintet of venues operated by the appropriately stylised Portland’5 Centres for the Arts. It was built in 1928 as a vaudeville house, transit

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