Last year, when Twain was in her residency at Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas where Kapoor was her show director, Butts conceived a "big, edgy, modern rock 'n roll look" for her farewell tour. "I wanted a big lighting rig, big pyro, lots of automation - the biggest possible system that we could easily move around the country," he says. "And that led me to Clay Paky."
According to Butts, "The only way to implement a rig of this size was to use super efficient small, high-power lights with a ton of features. There was no way I could have done this without Clay Paky gear, especially Mythos - I couldn't have done the show with standard, giant 1500-watt hard-edged fixtures. So I designed the show around the gear." VER supplied the lighting to Butts's specifications.
Fifty-six Clay Paky's new Mythos fixtures are touring with Twain. Butts had evaluated Mythos demo units last year and used a large number of them on Kenny Chesney's current "Big Revival" tour. "I had a lot of experience with them and knew they would work for Shania," he says.
Most of the Mythos fixtures are mounted on 10 upstage and 10 downstage truss fingers, which run perpendicular to the primary lighting truss, notes Nashville-based lighting director and programmer Andre Petrus. "The Mythos are great - super bright and with low power consumption," he says. "They act as beam or profile fixtures with color mixing optics and animation wheels."
Ninety-six A.leda B-EYE K20s are housed in six big automated aluminum pods, which can rise in the air or descend to the stage deck. Each pod contains 16 B-EYEs in a 4x4 configuration. "I knew that having big banks of them would be a major element of the show," says Butts. "I like their individual pixel control and organic shape."
Butts devised a different way to showcase 120 Sharpy fixtures: He integrated them into 12 30ft high moving set pieces. "I didn't wanted to be locked into a giant upstage videowall," he says. "So we designed chunks of wall that could spin and move on a track. Each piece has a 5-mil LED wall on one side and a vertical row of ten Sharpys on the other. The pieces can spread out or come together in any configuration. I picked Sharpys because I wanted to pack a lot of lightweight, low-power fixtures with a lot of punch into a small space. They were the perfect choice."
(Jim Evans)
