Robe - Leaderboard - 27 Aug25 - Jan26
ISE 2026 - Banner - Oct 2025

Lighting

Details
UK - Ibiza Classics, the collaboration between DJ superstar Pete Tong and music conductor Jules Buckley leading the Heritage Orchestra in the run up to Christmas returned to the UK arena circuit this year.
“It’s the show that keeps on giving,” says tour director Paddy Hocken. “In terms of production we regularly refresh the design, as do Pete and Jules, with the set list each year. There are nine new songs in the current tour for example, that’s what keeps it fresh and is why people come back time and time again. Because of the gap since 2019 when we completed the last full tour, lighting and video have received special attention, with both providing a big contribution to the show’s energy.”
That enforced 20-month hiatus has impacted the production in other significant ways as Hocken explains: “It’s been a mixed bag putting this together for me and J

Details
The Netherlands - The Theatre of Vista College in Heerlen hosted the eleventh edition of Nieuwe Honden. The student-run production featured a plethora of lighting fixtures, consoles and accessories, and LED Screens from Infinity, Showtec, and DMT.
Nieuwe Honden 2021 was the biggest production of the year for the Arts, Theatre, and Media Department of Vista College. The previous year’s production of Nieuwe Honden was live-streamed as an alternative to hosting a live audience due to coronavirus restrictions. However, this year’s edition, which ran from 9-11 November, returned to welcome sold-out attendances.
An important theme of the Nieuwe Honden production was collaboration, meaning everyone was dependent on one another and had to communicate effectively. This theme was not only limited to the Art, Theatre and Media courses at Vista College, but also
ISE 2026 - Banner - Oct 2025

Details
UK - “For Mischief’s Magic Goes Wrong, it is the show that is comedy chaos on stage,” opens its lighting designer, David Howe. “It must never be the lights that go wrong!”
Co-written by Mischief and international magicians, Penn and Teller, Magic Goes Wrong, first opened at London’s Vaudeville Theatre in 2019 before touring the UK since July ‘21. A West End version returned to London in October with a relaunch at the Apollo Theatre that will run until February. The comedy play is presented as a fundraiser and features a string of inept magicians doing their best acts to raise money for “disasters in magic”. The result is a fast-paced variety show with high production values and great audience interaction.
David Howe has been involved in the production since 2018. “The show is a deliberate overly theatrical comedy; a colourful, glitzy

Details
USA - To provide the Seattle Space Needle with a versatile and modern outdoor lighting system, installation specialists LVH Entertainment Systems and lighting designer Erik Crowell with Niteo deployed Martin Professional Exterior Projection 500 and 1000 fixtures.
Built in 1962 and inspired by the Space Age, the Space Needle is a staple of the Seattle skyline known for its stunning views from the flying saucer-like observation deck. In 2017, the Space Needle announced an ambitious multi-year renovation project that aimed to modernize the visitor experience while also honouring the tower’s history. As a homage to the original concept art from the 1960s, the Space Needle now features a floor-to-ceiling glass interior and expanded glass panels on the upper-level observation deck, which provide enhanced and uninhibited views of Seattle and the Puget Sound.
However, the

Details
France - The Monumental Tour, a visual and musical performance created by French DJ and music producer Michael Canitrot and visual activists AV-Extended - played a spectacular final location at the end of November at the Chateau de Pierrefonds in the picturesque Oise region of France, northeast of Paris.
Delivered in conjunction with French cooperative bank Credit Mutuel and other sponsors, over 100 Robe moving lights supported the mapped projection show specially devised for the set produced by Michael for this closing show.
It took references from the history of the imposing Castle, originally constructed in the 12th century, and extensively rebuilt in the mid 19th century at the behest of Emperor Napoleon III, and wove these into an all-encompassing, immersive, and beautifully rhythmic electronic musical experience.
The Monumental Tour has has combined stream

Details
UK - The London New Year’s Eve fireworks display has attracted millions to the city every 31 December. Although safety protocols restricted crowds in London on the eve of 2022, the celebration was as popular as ever, garnering its customary huge audience of BBC viewers (see LSi January 2022, coming soon, for more on the London's NYE display).
Developed by Jack Morton, the global brand experience agency, working in partnership with the Mayor of London’s office, the celebration features an impressive 13-minute firework display, kicked off by the ringing of Big Ben’s bell, and a Durham Marenghi lighting design that covered the entire downtown.
Since it spanned such a wide area, the NYE lighting was divided into two sections: Central London and the Old Royal Naval College. Associate designer Paul Cook, ran the lighting in the first section, which included t

Details
UK - The ALPD has named 11 new fellows who will join its membership for life. A further two honorary members were also welcomed into the ALPD fold.
The ALPD fellowships are bestowed in recognition of the immense contribution each individual has made to the association and to the lighting community as well as the industry as a whole. The presentations will be made during the association’s Lighting Dinner, to be held at the Park Plaza Hotel, London, in February.
Johanna Town, ALPD chair, comments: “It is an extraordinary year for the ALPD, which has followed on from a truly extraordinary period for all of us in the lighting profession, the theatre community and far beyond. It is for this reason that we wish to celebrate and thank our new fellows and highlight the lifetime of work they have given and the opportunities they have created for others.”
The new 2

Details
UK - A spirited drum and bass performance by BRIT Award winners Rudimental marked the official end of this year’s Sundown Festival, but the buzz created by the three-day event at Norfolk Showground lasted far longer with inventive pictures and ebullient comments flooding social media. The euphoria was easy to understand, given that music fans were starved for live festival experience following the 2020 pandemic lockdown.
Sundown Festival 2021 delivered all they were looking for, serving up three days of ‘colourful costumes, raucous fun and performances by more than 65 different acts, all in a safe environment’. Providing a colourful visual setting for this welcomed experience was a lighting and production design by Bigabox Productions that featured a broad mix of Chauvet Professional fixtures on three of the festival’s four stages.
Selected from Bigabox’s o

Details
UK - TSL Lighting has invested in Elation Professional’s Paladin Cube, a compact LED floodlight with IP65 protection that marks the company’s first purchase into Elation’s product range.
TSL is a stage lighting company that operates across the UK and beyond. In operation since 2006, the company provides quality lighting, rigging and design for a wide range of live events, working from a modern facility and warehouse in Basingstoke.
“We chose the Paladin Cube for its size, shape, output, availability and price,” stated TSL managing director Sam Tamplin. “We’re happy with it and think it'll be a good little workhorse fixture for us indoors and outdoors.”
The Paladin Cube is a compact LED floodlight with IP65 protection that has versatile use as a wash light, blinder/strobe or eye candy effect. It houses nine 15W RGBW cells for a full spectrum of col

Details
The Netherlands - Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) is one of the leading technical universities in Europe. The school’s auditorium, the heart of the campus where students attend lectures and presentations of all types, recently received a lighting upgrade of Elation luminaires specified and installed by AV company Houben Souren.
Houben Souren was contacted by TU/e after university personnel had heard about a recent LED lighting installation at the Maastricht Exhibition and Convention Centre (MECC), an auditorium lighting system potentially similar to what they required.
“The university was interested in the installation and the types of lights we used there [Elation Fuze Profile and Colour 5 Profile] so we invited them to Maastricht to see the project for themselves,” explains Tijs Verfurth, operations manager at Houben Souren. “It turned out to be a

Details
UK - The panto season is back with a bang after waiting in the wings during 2020 as the country squared up to COVID-19, reigniting all things panto like slapstick comedy, toilet-brow innuendo, gawdy sets, psychedelic vibrance and total craziness for which it’s known and appreciated, with lighting designers around the country delighted to be back working on this peculiarly English and highly expressive genre of performance.
None more than Andy Webb, who chose an all-Robe LED moving light rig for UK Productions’ spectacular Cinderella staged at the Waterside Theatre in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire.
For Webb’s first time working in this theatre - following five successive panto seasons up to 2019 at Blackpool’s Theatre Royal - the lighting rig was specified so he could present a new televisual style of panto lighting, with lots of fabulous neutral skin tones

Details
UK/USA - WILA Lighting has announced its expansion into the US market. WILA Lighting’s growth into the US market has been facilitated by its close affiliation with Experience Brands, a global lighting conglomerate comprised of medium-sized production and innovation facilities that work closely with its specific markets. The goal of the group is to combine the experience, capacity, and capabilities of the individual businesses to achieve maximum service and performance to the customer.
Benefitting from Experience Brands worldwide distribution network, extensive product facilities, and shared infrastructure, WILA Lighting will complement the extensive Experience Brands’ portfolio, to fulfil project requirements across a range of sectors.
Earlier this year, WILA achieved recognition for its green credentials with the confirmation of its status at the highest level o

Details
USA - Pentatonix, the three-time Grammy Award winning a cappella group, just wrapped their 18-date Evergreen Christmas Tour 2021 where 45 Ayrton Khamsin-S profile luminaires served as the main fixtures for the show. Ayrton is exclusively distributed in North America by ACT Entertainment.
The Evergreen Christmas Tour 2021, in support of the new Pentatonix album called Evergreen, kicked off 27 November in Baltimore and wrapped on 23 December in Grand Prairie, Texas. It was their first Christmas tour since 2019, the coronavirus pandemic having side-lined last year’s event.
Production and lighting designer, Travis Shirley, who heads Travis Shirley Live Design in Houston and Nashville, has been working with Pentatonix for the last nine years. “It’s been quite a journey,” he says, “seeing them grow to where they are selling out arenas around the world. After

Details
UAE - The United Arab Emirates marked 50 years as a nation with 50 days of celebrations, culminating in a spectacular live show from Dubai’s Hatta Water Dam in the Hajar Mountains featuring a floating stage and drone-launched fireworks, produced by live event specialists, LarMac Projects.
The show charted the country’s history in the lead-up to its inception in 1971 and across the subsequent 50 years.
For the country’s Golden Jubilee, the creative team - led by artistic director and designer Es Devlin and LarMac executive creative producer Jo MacKay - knew that the boundaries of possibility needed to be pushed to their limit.
The initial show was live streamed on 2 December and followed by 10 additional performances that took place between 3-12 December, featuring specially composed songs and poetry, drone-launched fireworks, a light show, water displays a

Details
USA - Earlier this year, the filming of Marvel Studios’ newly-released Spider Man: No Way Home found lighting programmer Scott Barnes once again firing up his Hog 4 lighting control setup, as well as bringing some new Hog 4 HPU Hybrid Processor units for the production.
Well-known for his use of Hog 4 control on Marvel’s films and other movies, Barnes said he approached the shoot for No Way Home quite similarly as he has in the past, but with ‘the biggest addition and MVP of the show being the HPU processor’.
Barnes explains, “I was fortunate enough to beta test the HPU during the pandemic lockdown, and even more fortunate to get the very first two off the assembly line to bring onboard Spider-Man. My systems tech, Derek Page, provided our standard Rack Hogs, I provided two HPUs, and then he ended up adding another HPU towards the beginni

Details
USA - The millions of viewers around the world who tuned into ABC’s broadcast of New Year's Rockin' Eve with Ryan Seacrest, enjoyed all the familiar sights of this Times Square event. But for the team responsible for lighting the talent on the stand-up platforms during the show, ringing in 2022 represented a big departure from tradition.
“This was the first time in the show’s 50-year history that host positions weren’t lit with HMI fixtures,” said Mike Grabowski, lead designer for The Lighting Design Group, which was responsible for lighting the platforms at Military Island, and the Bertelsman building, as well as the Powerball setup for the broadcast.
In place of these fixtures, Grabowski and his team lit host Ryan Seacrest and other talent with 12 Chauvet Professional onAir IP Panel2 soft light fixtures, which, like the rest of the rig, were supplied

Details
Venezuela - The latest hit single from Justin Quiles La Botella has inspired a challenge among his legion of devoted fans that calls on them to dance to the rhythmic sways of this song with a bottle on their heads without having said bottle fall.
While his fans may accomplish this feat with varying degrees of success, maintaining a sense of equilibrium seems to come quite naturally to this Puerto Rican born star, not only in his smooth moves on stage, but also in the way he balances different musical influences in his reggaeton sound.
Both were on full display this December when Quiles made his first Venezuelan appearance in six years, giving a concert, with production managed by Oz Shows, at the Universidad Santa María in Caracas.
Moving effortlessly with him throughout his 16-song set was a vividly colourful light show designed by Jeremy Danis of Oz S

Details
USA - Dancesport is a growing discipline at all levels. From local dance competitions to a myriad of popular dance shows on television to its inclusion in the 2024 Summer Olympics, the world has embraced dance as sport.
Dance America Productions, an independent production company based in Tampa, FL, specialises in dance events of all types and has worked many of the genre’s competitions for years. Owned by Nina Kimbrough, a dancer herself, the company carries lighting, sound, pipe and drape, and LED video wall, plus the all-important portable dance floors that range from 2,400-6,000sq.ft.
Kimbrough uses a system of Elation LED luminaires (SixPar 300 and Cuepix Blinder WW4) with a clever airwall mounting system to provide high-quality lighting at dancesport competitions around the country. “The dance floor is the stage so it needs to be lit properly,” Kimbrough s

Details
USA - Busking your way through an Atreyu tour requires many skills and attributes. High on that list is flexibility as the band weaves a mix of different musical influences into their metal-driven sound.
Cody James has demonstrated such nimbleness in his time running lightshows for the quintet, supporting them note for note as they rip their way through their multifarious musical blend. His adaptiveness was on full display in Atreyu’s 29-city Fall Baptize tour, which ended on 16 December.
Not only did James keep pace with his client’s music, he also adapted his show to a wide range of stage configurations, as the tour wove its way through a diverse mix of venues, from the Palladium in Worcester, MA and the Majestic in Detroit, to the Skyway Theatre in Minneapolis and House of Blues in San Diego. Helping him accomplish this without a hiccup was his ChamSys MagicQ MQ

Details
Spain - The second edition of the Umbra Light Festival in Victoria-Gasteiz took place between 12-14 November. The festival was born with the intention of introducing both visitors and citizens to the world of urban lighting art, in such a way that the public could experience and interact with the latest artistic and technological expressions of this field. The festival encompassed artistic expressions of digital visual art, interventions in urban space and new technologies.
The festival took place in the historic centre of the city (La Almendra), where a total of 19 artists were able to present their works and filled the city of Vitoria with light, colour and music.
Digital illustrator Coaner Codina transformed the central Plaza de la Virgen Blanca into a colourful underwater space. An imaginary and dreamlike world brimming with light and colour that covered the ground

Details
Austria - The Vienna State Opera House in Austria - also home to the Vienna State Ballet - has invested in new Robe Forte HCF LED moving lights and Forte HCF FollowSpots.
Vienna State Opera purchased 10 Forte HCF luminaires and four Forte HCF FollowSpots which work in conjunction with a customised RoboSpot control system, explained deputy head of lighting Robert Eisenstein.
The Opera House has a busy repertory schedule, and these Robe luminaires - delivered via Robe’s Austrian distributor Signal - replace the old manual-focus generic FOH tungsten fixtures with brighter, more adaptable, and more sustainable lights, and have upgraded the traditional follow spots in this impressive 1,709 seat and 567 standing capacity Renaissance Revival styled venue which opened in 1869, when it was the first building to be erected on the Vienna ring road!
With a throw distance

Details
UK - London welcomed in 2022 with a spectacular city-wide display, sending a message of thanks and hope to the nation and the world. Jack Morton, the global brand experience agency, helped to develop the original concept and worked in partnership with the Mayor of London’s office and a dedicated team of experts to create an extraordinary experience for the second year running.
The 13-minute show designed for home-viewing was broadcast live on BBC One and watched by a global viewing audience of millions.
Jack Morton’s creative show team worked in collaboration with On the Sly for the music production, Titanium Fireworks for the pyrotechnics design, and Skymagic for the swarm drone sequences.
Patrick O’Mahony, creative director of Skymagic, comments: “We were delighted to collaborate again with Jack Morton to design and deliver the drone light show for Lo

Details
USA - When it comes to the lights in his rig, Dominic Lopenzo doesn’t hesitate to say that he is completely partial to beam fixtures, or more specifically the beam function in Chauvet Professional’s Rogue RH1 Hybrid.
“Beams have become my favourite, because they add so much energy to a room,” he said. “I find myself going to them often.”
Partiality to beams might not be unusual in a concert/touring designer, but Lopenzo is speaking as technical director of Grace City Church, a 750-seat house of worship with a distinctly modern touch located in Lakeland, Florida..
“Many people have described our services as being like a concert, and to our worship team and me that’s a huge compliment,” said Lopenzo, who comes from a concert background and still works at the House of Blues in Orlando in addition to doing his lighting duties at the church. “We

Details
Ukraine - For Olya Polyakova’s The Queen of the Night show, staged at Kiev’s Palace of Sports in October 2021, a large array of Claypaky lighting fixtures gave a high-energy look to the concert and accented the royal design motif employed by the popular performer.
Yuriy Andrushchenko, drector of Feyeria, supplied lighting designer Vlad Cherepin with 62 Claypaky Sharpys, 54 Sharpy Plus, 32 Mini-B LED moving lights, 32 Tambora Battens and eight Scenius Unico spots for the concert.
“The central element of the set was a star-shaped crown suspended from trusses on moving motors, where we put the Sharpy fixtures,” says Dmytro Andrushchenko, stage designer of Feyeria. “Sharpys were very well suited to this application because they are small and easy to install and have a great effect in a large hall.”
Vlad Cherepin chose Sharpys, he says, “because
  1. The Brook goes green with GLS and Chauvet
  2. Claypaky Xtylos Aqua lights Nobel display
  3. Live events supply chain ‘back on the brink’
  4. Queen Relived powered with MagicQ
  5. Elation launches Proteus Excalibur
  6. Lakaz creates home vibes with Chauvet
Page 156 of 1201

Latest Issue. . .