Thursday comes home with Rogue

USA - Typically, when legendary bands reunite, it’s usually for a national tour, big festival or high- profile TV special, but post hardcore pioneers Thursday have never been about following the tried-and-true commercial track. When they got back together recently after a six-year breakup, the New Jersey-born group, which is widely credited with putting emo music on the map, came back to the place where it all began – the Starland Ballroom in central New Jersey.
A revered part of New Jersey’s vibrant music scene (the founding members of Bon Jovi are said to have met here), the Starland Ballroom occupies a special place in Thursday’s history. It was here that they celebrated the success of their 2003 breakthrough album War All The Time, which reached No. 7 on the Billboard Top 100 Album charts.
For their homecoming reunion, the band wanted a lightshow that conveyed the deep emotional weight of the occasion, without distracting from their musical performance. This is precisely what Cody James of JDI Productions delivered with help from Chauvet Professional’s Rogue series fixtures.
“The band spent some time talking to us about the emotional aspect of the two shows they would be doing at the Starland Ballroom,” said James. “This was the first time in six years that they would be performing at their hometown, where there were so many memories. They didn’t want the lights to distract from the show, but they wanted to reflect the emotions involved in this reunion.”
With this in mind, James designed a rig that kept the stage clear of actual fixtures, relying instead on back lighting and side lighting to accent the performers on stage. “We had it so everything came from behind them or far off stage left and stage right,” he said. “This left the band plenty of room to perform without the lights being distracting or taking away from what they do.”
James selected eight Rogue RH1 Hybrid and six Rogue R2 Wash fixtures for this task. He arranged four RH1 and four R2 fixtures on cases at just about cab height and positioned them in a line upstage. He also hung two RH1 fixtures on 2’ truss towers positioned on either side of the downstage deck and had one R2 Wash positioned on the floor downstage right and downstage left.
“The RH1 Hybrids gave me a lot of different interesting looks without taking away from the artists’ performance,” he said. “The speed of these fixtures also kept up with the music. I used a lot of their custom colour effects and went from beam to wash zoom very smoothly, so it looked like I had twice as many lights. I add the R2s to my rig mainly for the colour saturation, which gave us emotional depth.”
(Jim Evans)

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