USA - Since 1977 the Oakville Centre for the Performing Arts has offered a wide range of programming. Long a local hub for culture, it has undergone numerous changes over time. Among them, renovations aimed at improving the experience for audiences and deepening the functionality of the venue for technicians and incoming performers.
The Centre has also added significantly to its audio infrastructure over time, most recently with the purchase and installation of two DiGiCo SD12 consoles (one 72-channel for monitors and one upgraded to 96-channels for FOH) and KLANG immersive in ear monitoring software for the facility’s 485-capacity, AEG Liebherr Auditorium.
Another significant change, explains Andrew Moyer, coordinator of technical services, has been the increase of both community and professional programming - from roughly a dozen shows a year previously to approxim

UK - Midas is the power behind Ian Xiang’s Lightopia in London, a festival featuring 47 groups of Chinese lantern installations - 1m LEDs - projection mapping, acrobats, musicians and much more.
The first time a Western design company has worked with Chinese manufacturers to build a set like this, tailored to UK audiences, Lightopia was spawned at the Edinburgh Diwali in October last year moving to Manchester just in front of the festive window.
With different USPs in each location, the festival made its London debut at Chiswick House & Gardens in 2020 where it runs through to March.
Exploring the theme Harmony, Lightopia fuses art installations with human experience/interaction across zones including 12 Star Signs, the Rose Garden, Tree of Life, the Light Tunnel and 3D Mapping on the 18th century villa itself.
Making us

UK - Martin’s new VDO Atomic Dot hybrid lighting and video fixture made an immediate impact at Edinburgh’s Hogmanay Show as the Scottish capital welcomed in the new year. Joining the Edinburgh Street Party, and working at the Waverley Stage - which saw appearances by Keir Gibson, The Ninth Wave, Marc Almond and Porkpie - lighting designer Sam Jones specified 30 of the versatile fixtures as part of a Martin package.
With its vantage point at the end of the Waverley Bridge overlooking Edinburgh Castle, the designer’s biggest challenge was the bitter cold Scottish weather -mitigated by two heaters which accompanied him at FOH. “As is common in the industry, the timescales were very tight, along with all the commotion that comes with a street party,” he said.
Since the Waverley stage was fairly small, with little space to rig fixtures, he approached the design w

Poland - On 24 November 2019, crowds gathered at the Gliwice Arena in southern Poland for the 17th Junior Eurovision Song Contest.
Polish TV network TVP S.A. was the show's main organiser, with support from Gigant Sound/Letus (sound), TSE (lighting) and WIZJA (LED screens).
Together, they took on the task of designing the show from scratch, based solely on the guidelines provided by EBU. The entire project, its design and deployment, was a major success for the country's pros, who delivered a top-flight show both to the 8,000-strong audience at the venue and millions of viewers in Europe, Asia and Australia.
Pre-production began in early 2019. Initial scenography and lighting design drafts were produced in April, while the following months were spent on comparing and refining numerous approaches to the end result, as well as finding the best technical solutions

UK - Having just equipped the luxurious five-star Blue Waters Resort & Spa in Antigua with Harman’s JBL Professional loudspeakers and Crown amps, Colin Pattenden (of CP Sound) kept up the Afro-Caribbean vibe back in London at the pioneering Pier One Club, situated in the more down-home location of Canning Town’s backstreets.
Once again, he found the solution in JBL, but this time the requirement was the polar opposite to that in Antigua in terms of sonic power. Pattenden had worked with venue owner William Lule for nearly two decades, and when the latter wanted to relocate his pioneering venue from Dalston - to an out of the way location which would not be as problematic in terms of noise as the heavy populated Kingsland Road - he found the site in a remote area of East London.
With a trained ear and a discerning clientele for the heady Afro Beats mix CP Sound

Greece - The week-long Summer Nostros Festival (SNFest) is an international multifaceted arts, sports and education festival held in Athens every June, that is free for all to attend and welcomes people of all ages.
Like every year, SNFest 2019 was hosted by the Stavros Niarchos Cultural Foundation. This is the organisation responsible for the entire construction in 2017 of the Stavros Niarchos Cultural Centre in Athens where the festival is held, for the third year, right on the Athenian sea front. The venue, which also hosts the Greek National Opera and holds cultural exhibitions all-year long, and houses the national library, has already racked up numerous awards both for its innovative, environmentally-friendly construction and its hosted exhibitions.
For this year’s SNFest, Mega-Sound (part of the Oikonomopoulos Group) - Clair Brothers’ distributor in Greece,

Canada - Jon Stanners, one of two owners of Winnipeg-based production and design company Red Rover Entertainment, turned to an Elation lighting package on Canadian singer Jessie Reyez’s Being Human On Tour outing. Soundbox Productions of Ontario served as lighting vendor for the tour, which played dates in Canada and the US.
Not only did Stanners design a lighting system that fit the budget, he made sure the rig was an appropriate fit for the 500 to 2000-capacity venues the tour played, not to mention the transportation used to haul the gear. “The design was created to have the most impact for these small venues but also had to fit in a single trailer with everything else,” explains Stanners, who has worked with Reyez for the past two years and handled design, programming and operation for the tour along with lighting production management. “Part of fitting i

USA - The Institute for Creation Research (ICR)’s new Discovery Centre for Science & Earth History in Dallas is benefiting from an advanced, integrated lighting control system from Strand. Specified by The Lighting Practice, the system seamlessly combines the needs of multiple exhibit zones, user requirements and technologies.
The control system exploits Strand’s ability to integrate entertainment and architectural lighting in one, seamless system. It combines Strand’s powerful NEO Rack playback controller (with a second as backup), which is responsible for playback of the exhibits’ show lighting, with Strand’s flexible, scalable Vision.Net platform, which looks after the various area lighting zones.
The system includes a mix of individually addressed track lighting units, in-grade uplighters in the exhibit floors and various accent luminaires highlightin

Europe - Singer-songwriter Rea Garvey is no stranger to international audiences. This is ensured not only by numerous TV show appearances, but also by his extensive musical output. For the past 20 years the Irishman has been delighting his audience with multi-faceted pop rock and his distinctive voice.
His most recent solo album, Neon was released in March 2018, and in the autumn of the same year and through summer 2019, Garvey presented the new songs on a large Neon tour. At his side for many years has been lighting and stage designer Christian ‘Rocketchris’ Glatthor.
Glatthor - known for creating multi-layered, haptic spaces on stage - designed a variable set with many surprises. With the help of 60 FS20 Fusion Sticks FS20 from Fusion by GLP, he picked up on the Neon theme from the album and the tour. The majority of the Fusion Sticks were suspended from e

UK - Elliot Griggs chose Robe’s T1 Profiles to provide key lighting for Amélie the Musical, a new production first staged at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury, which then undertook a nationwide UK and Irish tour and then played at The Other Palace in London.
Griggs was asked to light the show, directed by Michael Fentiman and based on the five-times Oscar-nominated 2001 French art-house romantic comedy film, Amélie. The lead character has an eccentric upbringing and a vivid imagination which she uses to explores the complexities of love, loneliness, existence and survival in the big city.
The T1 Profiles - used in addition to the touring lighting rigs at each venue on the tour - are being supplied by leading theatrical rental company White Light, investing in their first T1s for this production as they were essential for Griggs’ lighting plot.

Europe - Ed Sheeran wrapped his 260-show Divide Tour last year, which featured a large complement of Claypaky Mythos 2 and Scenius Unico lighting fixtures. Mark Cunniffe was the lighting designer for Divide.
Cunniffe created a set piece for the tour comprised of LED tiles and lighting with a massive curved crown above the stage and tall columnar centre piece. The elements at times resembled a goblet and a tree. Four automated triangular pods resided in the underside of the LED structure; each pod was on three variable speed motors controlled by Kinesys.
Cunniffe used 118 Mythos 2 spot and beam fixtures in the crown, base and across the front of Sheeran’s riser; 10 Mythos 2 were mounted inside each triangular pod.
“One of the driving factors behind choosing Mythos 2 was the size,” says Cunniffe. “I knew I could hang it on its side, it’s relatively light

UK - There are few cities blessed with a more spectacular landscape than Edinburgh, over which Edinburgh Castle presides and forms a natural centre piece for events and celebrations in the city throughout the year.
Through November and December 2019, the city was treated to the inaugural Castle of Light, a celebratory visualisation of Edinburgh’s history portrayed by a combination of mapping, projection, lighting and audio, which treated visitors to a journey through thousands of years of the city’s back story of which its citizens are so rightly proud.
As part of the lighting design, nine of Ayrton’s Perseo-S fixtures made an impressive impact on the show, in particular during the finale of this promenade performance. At the top of the Perseo-S tick list is an IP65 rating making it a suitable choice for intensive outdoor use.
NL Productions (NLP) w

Australia - Artists including Queen + Adam Lambert, Olivia Newton-John, John Farnham, Alice Cooper, Delta Goodrem, 5 Seconds of Summer, Tina Arena, Ronan Keating, Hill Top Hoods, Amy Shark, k. d. lang and many more entertained 75,000 music fans – and a worldwide TV audience – all helping Fire Fight Australia raise over A$10m for bushfire relief during a high energy day of performance at Sydney’s ANZ Stadium.
Throughout the day, the heroic efforts of people uniting and the dedicated commitment of the firefighting community were highlighted in the context of the massive fight to save lives, homes and land.
Dave Jackson, Jeff Pavey and a crew from Queensland and New South Wales-based rental specialists Creative Productions provided the lighting which included nearly 130 Robe moving lights including BMFL Spots, Blades and WashBeams and Spiider LED wash beams.
T

Indonesia - FOH audio engineer Sony Soebowo chooses tools from Waves Audio, including the eMotion LV1 Live Mixer and Waves plugins, mixing for two of Indonesia’s most popular performers: the band Naif, known for their retro sound and style, and Raisa, Indonesia’s popular pop/R&B star and winner of numerous awards.
Soebowo’s setup includes a Waves eMotion LV1 live mixer running on a Waves Axis One computer with a SoundGrid Extreme Server-C, a SoundStudio STG-1608 for FOH I/O and a SoundStudio STG-2412 for stage box I/O. He usually makes do with a single screen, as he uses DCAs (Digitally Controlled Amplifier) as his groups function since the mix is already set - resulting in little need for major tweaking during the show.
For recording and playback/virtual sound check, he uses Waves Tracks Live. The bands use IEMs, and as backup, or if there are wireless frequ

UK - Last month, JL Lighting was the technical supplier for a large-scale event at Magazine London on behalf of Volkswagen and The Fresh Group.
The event, which welcomed both Volkswagen employees and pre-bookers to the venue and The Intercontinental O2 at different stages over two days, celebrated the Volkswagen brand and showcased a new generation of electric vehicles in the form of the ID.3.
Volkswagen commented: “The event went really well and the feedback so far has been very positive. With JL Lighting’s tireless efforts and commitment the end result worked as we envisioned.”
Jack Linaker, MD of JL Lighting, adds: “We were thrilled to be working alongside Volkswagen and The Fresh Group to bring this event to life. The JL Lighting team were hard at work as the technical supplier, providing lighting, sound, power, rigging and video across five venue

USA - When Jason Martin, coms A1, and Dave Cheramie, coms A2, were tasked with integrating a new, modern intercom system for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo at NRG Stadium, the duo found a solution to meet all of their production needs with Pliant Technologies’ CrewCom wireless intercom system.
For the 125,000sq.ft stadium, it was crucial for Martin and Cheramie to deploy a coms system that could provide dependable wireless communication and extensive range throughout the three-week long event, which is streamed live to FOX.
“When searching for a coms system for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, no other solution compared to CrewCom,” adds Martin. “It was a no-brainer to deploy the Pliant system as other systems we tested failed to perform in the large stadium with its high, domed ceiling. The competing systems also presented multipath interference is

USA - Kool & The Gang’s production manager and FOH engineer Ed Irons uses DPA’s 4099 Instrument, 2011 Twin Diaphragm Cardioid, 4011 Cardioid and d:facto 4018 Vocal Mic to deliver Kool & The Gang’s signature sound to live audiences around the world.
“Once we heard the DPA mics, we were hooked,” he says. “The horn section for Kool & The Gang is a franchise sound. With the 4099s, it is so easy to dial in on the fullness of the group. Most notable is the ease with which I capture the true character of each instrument; whether it’s a sax, trumpet or trombone - they all sound awesome with DPA.”
Kool & The Gang utilises three 4099 Loud Instrument Mics and one 4099 Extreme on their horns section, along with two 4011s for mic’ing the percussion rig. Most recently, they began using the 4099 Instrument mic on bass. “Although the 4099s sound gr

USA - The Greater Cleveland Sports Awards in late January honoured local athletes of every level, from the pros to high-school.
Reflecting the connection between local athletes and their community, the event featured a runway-like path that extended down the middle of the Cleveland Renaissance Hotel’s elegant ballroom, giving the sports honourees and performing talent who walked down it a chance to be closer to crowd.
Lining both sides of the runway and endowing it with a colourfully attractive touch was a collection of pixel-mapped Chauvet Professional COLORado Solo Batten fixtures supplied by NPi Audio Visuals Solutions.
“The runway path ran from the built-in stage at the venue to the centre stage since the program was done in the round,” explains NPi’s Alex Kay, who was one of the project managers for the event. “We lined up 18 of the COLORado Batte

Australia - NanoLumens has announced the completion of a new LED installation in the heart of Karrinyup Shopping Centre, an upscale retail venue located just outside of Perth. The installation, known as The Timepiece is suspended from a two-story ceiling above a central vertex within the shopping centre and consists of a four-sided clock sphere and a rotating double-sided pendant.
The shopping centre is managed on behalf of UniSuper by AMP Capital
“The Timepiece concept came into being during a pivotal moment for Karrinyup Shopping Centre,” said Courtney Ross, general manager - commercial for AMP, Retail. “The design intent is inspired by the transitional time of the $800m retail development of Karrinyup and aims to draw inspiration from both the classic heritage of the Centre’s core, as well as the modern retail transformation taking place around it.”

Croatia - The Vridilo Je show was a high-profile tribute concert in Spaladium Arena in Split, starring the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra (ZPO) and dedicated to the late singer, entertainer, and Croatian superstar Oliver Dragojević, who passed in 2018 following a career spanning over 50 years.
The event was organised by his family, management and record label, and was an emotional occasion for his many fans.
Lighting designer Sven Kučinić used the opportunity to specify Robe’s new Esprite LED spot moving lights - with the transferrable light engine - for the first time, 24 of which were delivered the day before to Croatian rental company ELDRA which supplied lighting and video equipment for the concert.
Kučinić was asked to design lighting and set by the record company, having worked with Dragojević on numerous occasions both live and on television and in

USA - When French record producer and DJ Gesaffelstein launched his impressive stage set at Coachella last April it created a blueprint for the Against the Night, Across the Time US tour that was to follow towards the end of the year.
Positioned behind the artist was a 32ft high monolith covered entirely in Vantablack, a fragile material reported to deliver the world’s blackest black, erasing any visible features on a 3D surface and making objects very disorienting for the brain. The UK-designed material was being used for the first time in a live performance context.
Show producer, Matthias Leullier, from Live Nation France, worked alongside LD Pierre Claude to turn the concept into reality, the latter in turn dipping into his GLP toolbox. He requisitioned 54 x JDC1, hybrid strobes as the main fixtures (running them mostly in SPix Pro Mode4, using 62 DMX chan

China - Sing! China is a TV singing competition broadcast by Zhejiang Television. The show is contested by aspiring singers drawn from public auditions. The latest season of the show recently came to its climax with a spectacular Finals production staged in the Beijing National Stadium, known globally as the Bird’s Nest. Watched by millions on TV, the show attracted a live audience of more than 60,000 in the stadium itself.
The show’s production values were of the highest order, with its designers sparing no creative efforts in presenting the artists in an incredibly dynamic and high-quality presentation. On stage, a 360° rotating decoration with a four-sided screen was deployed to present every detail of the show and this year, the team fully upgraded its follow-spot technology to further enhance the audience experience.
In a large capacity stadium like th

UK - Eighteen of Zero 88’s new RigSwitch cabinets - for controlled and synchronised power switching - have been installed at P&J Live at The Event Complex Aberdeen, a new multi-million-pound flexible entertainment, exhibition, event and conference facility delivered by Aberdeen City Council in partnership with Henry Boot Developments (read more on the development in LSi February 2020).
The building was designed by architects Keppie and constructed by the Robertson Group. Theatre Projects were commissioned to define and specify the site-wide technical infrastructure for Hall C and Conference Suites 1 and 2, and the tender for electrical contractor for these areas was wo

Qatar - Painting with Light (PWL)’s creative director Luc Peumans was asked to design an eye-catching lighting scheme for the opening ceremony (OC) of the first Qatar eSports WEGA Global Games. The OC event was staged in the Khalifa Stadium in Doha and attended by 14,000 eSports fans.
Show artistic director Steven Martin from The Cintamani Stone: ArchitectofEMOTION (TCS-AOE) asked Luc onboard for their pitch, and they were awarded the project by Doha-based event company The Planners LLC.
Working together for several years now, the experienced team at The Planners combined with TCS and Trimex has become a major player in the Qatar market for these types of shows and events.
Luc was excited to be part of an all-Belgium technical design and imagineering team including OC technical director Ludo Vanstreels from Trimex with whom PWL has also worked on several previo

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