UK - With an unclear future for tungsten lighting, the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough has taken no chances in investing in a new range of LED fixtures. The theatre’s existing lighting fixtures were in need of an upgrade, with their pre-existing tungsten dimmers on their last legs; the timing was perfect to make the transition to LED.
The theatre turned to Stage Electrics, who were able to offer advice, guidance and demonstrations of the latest equipment available. “The Stephen Joseph Theatre approached us with a clear inclination that now was the right time for them to make the change to LED,” comments Andy Elsegood of Stage Electrics. “During the wake of the EU ECODesign stage lighting regulation changes, it would have been unwise to replace their longstanding tungsten equipment with new tungsten, so I was glad when they informed me they were already conside

UK - On 6 July, Roger Waters performed at Barclaycard BST in Hyde Park London. Water’s show is like BST itself, centred upon a huge widescreen presentation, but there the similarities end.
“BST sees the entire stage enclosure, backwall, sides and wings totally covered with LED video; right up to roof height 94 linear metres of it,” explains Alex Leinster of Video Design who provide all the video hardware and infrastructure. “But Waters’ show needs a much flatter screen, so we were asked to move the entire backwall section downstage as a far as possible.”
No simple task, Water’s show was the first night in a run of three, with the Cure headlining the very next night. “What Jeremy Lloyd of Wonderworks conceived as the solution to the BST festival set-up was flawless,” explained Waters’ video director Richard Turner. “We got pretty much just what we

USA - DCR Nashville is providing Claypaky Mythos 2 and Scenius spots for American singer-songwriter Halsey’s 2018 touring schedule, including festivals and her continuing Hopeless Fountain Kingdom World Tour.
The tour, in support of her second studio album of the same name, began last fall and will conclude this September. It is her second headlining concert tour.
Production designers Sooner Routhier and Robert Long of S Rae Productions designed the show, which makes extensive use of LED video. Large stairs have LED video on the risers, and a large LED wall upstage is comprised of two screens split at the centre. Above the stage are five straight trusses with lighting, which mimic the stairs giving a very linear look to the overall design. Craig Rutherford is the lighting director.
DCR Nashville has supplied the tour with 14 Claypaky Mythos 2 fixtures an

UK - The National Theatre's River Stage Festival is in full swing, bringing a dazzling array of acts to London’s Southbank with on-the-fly lighting by chief LD Huw Llewellyn on an Avolites Arena.
Now in its fourth year, the festival runs on weekends during July and August, bringing free performances of classical music, cabaret, dance and much more, to a temporary stage in front of the National Theatre building.
Avolites supplied the National Theatre with a full lighting control solution, which in addition to the Arena consists of a Tiger Touch II (TTII) and Fader Wing.
“The Arena is built for festivals and theatres and we’re pretty much both during River Stage, so it’s an obvious choice,” says Llewellyn. “There are so many shows and most have little to no tech time at all. The Arena is perfect for busking with lots of faders, a great FX engine

UK - Established in 2000 and having had a five-year hiatus, the Classic BRIT Awards was held at London’s Royal Albert Hall at the end of June. Featuring both British and international classical talent, it was hosted by Myleene Klass and Alexander Armstrong, with a Lifetime Achievement Award bestowed upon Dame Vera Lynn. Other Awards included Best Male Artist and Critics’ Choice Award for 19 year-old Sheku Kanneh-Mason, two Awards two Michael Ball and Alfie Boe and Soundtrack of the Year to The Greatest Showman.
DiGiCo’s native L‑ISA source control was deployed for the L‑ISA hyperreal immersive audio system, which was being deployed for the first time in the UK.
Britannia Row Productions were audio providers for the show, with sound supervisor for the event Colin Pinkin in charge of coordinating audio between the artist, production, broadcast. FOH engin

Belgium - The Belgian city of Genk in Limburg recently switched on a new civic lighting installation, Genker Ster (Genk Star). The piece of light art was designed by creative lighting and visual design practice Painting with Light and enables the community to enjoy the fun and excitement of this ‘architainment’ concept all year round.
The permanent lighting installation was the brainchild of Genk Mayor, Wim Dries. Ambient lighting has been part of the vibrant and forward-thinking city’s festive experience for the last decade, however the new stars can now make an atmospheric impact throughout the year.
Once the project was green-lighted by the city council, a tender was issued for a concept design and specification which was won by Painting with Light.
The design - comprising the 275 stars - was chosen both for its aesthetics, smart technolog

USA - The Minnesota Vikings have opened a new studio at their Twin Cities Optical (TCO) Performance Centre headquarters and practice facility. Featuring four distinct video-shooting areas, the studio, designed by Peter Provost of Provost Studio, is illuminated by a colourful lighting system created by Mike Grabowski of the Lighting Design Group that features close to 100 Chauvet Professional Ovation and COLORdash fixtures.
The studio offers maximum flexibility for broadcasting during the football season and throughout the year. An example of this can be seen its main section, which has a cutting-edge acoustic wall that rises to open to a 170-seat theatre for live audience programs.
With its ability to create a rainbow of realistic colours and change them quickly, the Lighting Design Group’s system supports the TCO studio’s combination of beautiful aesthetics and

USA - Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi holds a theatre summer camp each year and this year Elation Professional was a sponsor, making available both LED and discharge-based moving heads that allowed students the hands-on opportunity to work with state-of-the-art lighting gear.
Camp on the Coast: Creating Leaders in Life and on the Stage is a theatre camp that teaches more than acting, lighting, props and costume design, according to Phil Johnson, lighting and technical director at the Department of Theatre and Dance at Texas A&M. “It’s an immersive experience promoting creativity, comradery and healthy competition,” he says. More than 120 of the best high school theatre students from around Texas attended the camp, an intense two-week summer programme for students.
The camp usually puts on six plays in both a proscenium and black box theatre, p

Portugal - Rock in Rio is still one of the biggest music festivals in the world, and its latest edition, held in Lisbon in early July, relied on DiGiCo consoles supplied by Brazilian rental company Gabisom.
Gabisom has been sound provider for the festival since 2001 and has worked with the organisers in Rio, Lisbon, Madrid and Vegas, specifying and designing the audio system for 17 of its editions. DiGiCo consoles were chosen as house desks across the site, along with a Martin Audio MLA PA. FOH ‘baby-sitting’ duties fell to Gabisom’s Peter Racy and Eder Moura, with Thiago Borges manning monitors.
“We decided to use the SD7as the master console on the World Stage, the main stage for the festival, because of its superb sound quality, which we knew the guest engineers would be happy with,” says Racy. “It’s also really robust with dual engines, dual power s

UK - Liverpool’s famous Cavern Club has moved into the digital age by retiring its long-serving Soundcraft analogue desks on its two main stages in favour of a Vi3000 and Si Performer 2.
Director Paul Jones expressed the desire to remain with the familiar Soundcraft topography and emphasised that the iconic Cavern Club (including the organisation’s third venue, the Cavern Pub) will remain exclusively a Soundcraft house.
“We have replaced both our MH3 and GB4 [analogue desks], which have been here since well before I arrived six years ago,” he confirmed. “The MH3 still sounded brilliant, but it was time to move into the digital age.”
The order for both consoles, along with Vi Stagebox, expanding the capacity to 64 mic/line inputs and 32 analogue line outputs, was placed with local dealers Adlib, with whom they have had a close relationship since the la

Spain/UK - Television lighting specialists Aurora Lighting is supporting LD James Tinsley and the crew on the latest season of Love Island for ITV2.
Following the success of the previous series, the team has returned to the villa to build the setting for the latest batch of Islanders. Colourful and intense, the look created for the show provides the perfect backdrop to the on-screen twists and turns of the relationships evolving between the singles seeking love and a possible share of the £50K prize.
Working closely with lighting director James Tinsley and his team, Aurora has delivered a full location package to assist in creating the show’s setting. Along with a selection of Fresnels and PARs used for ambient illumination, of particular note is the creative mix of vibrant RGB LED flex and practical fixtures including the 2000m of festoon that frames the sur

UK - Harman Professional Solutions has been selected as the official audio supplier for Tottenham Hotspur FC at its new stadium.
The Premier League football club will soon be moving to its new 62,000-capacity home, which features a retractable pitch, cutting-edge video screens, a museum and club shop. To deliver an enhanced audio experience, Tottenham Hotspur has selected an integrated Harman Professional audio solution made up of JBL Professional loudspeakers, Crown amplification, and a Soundcraft digital mixing console.
The installation includes 156 JBL VLA-C2100 loudspeakers, 54 JBL VLA-C125 subwoofers, 196 JBL AWC82 all-weather loudspeakers, 140 Crown DriveCore Install amplifiers, and more than 3,500 JBL Control Contractor speakers installed across the facility. Audio will be mixed on a Soundcraft Vi2000 digital console and monitored via JBL LSR 305 reference moni

Having already completed his own European headline tour this year, Jamie Lawson has recently headed back out on the road supporting Ed Sheeran on stadium shows across the UK and Europe. This year’s gigs see him showcasing songs from his latest album, Happy Accidents, released on Sheeran’s Gingerbread Man Records label.
For both the headline and support tours Lawson’s front of house engineer Rob Simpson (NUB Sound) has opted for Allen & Heath dLive digital mixing systems, which he describes as having “unique clarity and headroom - and the best ergonomics in the business”.
The arena shows see Simpson behind a dLive S3000 surface (with Waves v3 audio networking card) at FOH, in conjunction with a DM48 MixRack. The same MixRack model is used by engineer Mark Ellis for monitoring, with a dLive S5000 surface fitted with M-DANTE card for virtual soundchecks and

UK - A.C. Entertainment Technologies, a Patron of the British Racing Drivers' Club (BRDC), supplied the event lighting for the club's annual British Grand Prix party at Silverstone Circuit.
Staged within the grounds of the BRDC Farm as part of the Formula 1 Rolex British Grand Prix weekend, the occasion attracts high-profile members and motorsport personalities. AC-ET has been a patron of the BRDC’s Young Driver Programme for over a decade, and supplied the lighting design for the Party ever since.
AC-ET worked closely again with the BRDC to create the lighting theme for the event, which this year saw the Club celebrate 90 years, and the upcoming 70th British Grand Prix at Silverstone Circuit. To commemorate it, the Farm grounds featured displays of historic cars which have played a key part in the history of Silverstone and Formula 1 over the past seven decades.

Belgium - Named to celebrate the region’s rich industrial heritage, De Factorij is a bustling new cultural centre and performing arts facility in the historic district of Zaventem, near Brussels. The centre, which opened in 2017, hosts a diverse programme of performances, exhibitions and events. Its main performance space is the 680-seat Ivo Maupertuis Theatre, a shell-shaped auditorium designed as an acoustically isolated box-in-box construction.
With quality, diversity and inclusivity at the heart of the venue’s vision for the local community, the management required “fast and efficient” control of its technical systems, audio included. Belgian systems integrator and audio specialist Amptec, already installing the cabling infrastructure for the new venue, was also asked to design and implement the sound reinforcement system for the main theatre.
Despite the

Europe - Italian composer and pianist Ludovico Einaudi has been filling the world's biggest halls for years with his mixture of minimalist neo-classicism and pop adaptations. This spring, the musician also visited arenas throughout Germany as part of his current world tour before journeying to Asia and North America.
In order to transport Einaudi's sparkling, dynamic piano works to the furthest corners of every location in the highest degree of transparency, the German service provider satis&fy relied on an L-Acoustics configuration including K1 and K2 system along with Kara and Kiva as supplementary side-fill and near-fill loudspeakers.
In contrast to his solo concerts, Ludovico Einaudi brought various musicians on stage for the current tour in order to bring his genre-defying compositions to life in an approach combining both conventional and unusual instruments

USA - Queens of the Stone Age are on an epic international tour and FOH engineer Jay Rigby (The War on Drugs, The 1975, Cage The Elephant) has specified a Solid State Logic L500 console supplied by Eighth Day Sound.
The most recent QOTSA tour started last June with an SSL L500 console already specified. Rigby and the monitor engineer Francois Pare joined the tour in April this year, and Rigby decided to stick with the SSL console. "I haven't looked back," he says. "I absolutely love it."
Choosing to start from scratch rather than try to adapt himself to the previous set-up, Rigby used multitracks from earlier shows to build a new show file. "I was able to go into the Eighth Day Sound warehouse and prepare as much as possible.
"The first show I did with Queens of the Stone Age, and the first time I met the band, was headlining at a festival

UK - The Piccadilly Theatre in London’s West End opened in 1928 as one of the largest theatres in London. In 2017, it underwent a major refurbishment, aimed at enhancing many of its original features using modern technology, as well as meeting modern sustainability targets.
Theatre owners Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG) wanted to completely replace the Piccadilly Theatre’s existing house light system with low-energy LED lighting, without detracting in any way from the theatre’s Art Deco heritage. This was to include emergency lighting throughout as well as provision for the recently restored dome ceiling, including new centre-piece chandelier. Integrator White Light was engaged to install the new system.
GDS supplied products from across its entire range to meet this extensive brief, including a number of bespoke special project items that avoided any compromise w

USA - The stately building at 1615 Vine - one of the first legitimate Broadway-style theatres in Hollywood - was purchased in 1999 by the Ricardo Montalbán Foundation as part of its mission to promote theatre education and the work of Latino artists.
In 2005, it was renamed The Montalbán and has served as an incubator of budding theatrical talent by hosting the Chauvet Professional Student Lighting Showcase.
Now in its fifth year, the annual interactive educational event, which was sponsored by 4Wall Entertainment, provides lighting students from Los Angeles-area college theatre programmes an opportunity to collaborate on design projects and have their work evaluated by noted lighting designers. This year’s group of designers included Jeff Ravitz, Matt Ford, James Schipper, Rachel Miller, Mark Devlin and Aron Altmark.
Aside from having the opportunity to rec

Italy - Giudizio Universale: Michelangelo and the Secrets of the Sistine Chapel is the immersive, multimedia stage show created by Marco Balich of Balich Worldwide Shows. For the show's lighting, Balich worked alongside award-winning designers Rob Halliday and Bruno Poet who selected a range of ADB and Claypaky lighting products (see LSi June 2018 for a full production report).
Now running at the Auditorium Conciliazione in Rome, the show features live theatrical performances, dance and aerial acrobatics. Vivid, 270° high-resolution projections of Michelangelo's work, created by live video design company, Luke Halls Studio are mapped across a 'vaulted' digital p

USA - From the waterfront in Portland, Maine to the West End in Portland, Oregon, America’s downtown districts are experiencing a revitalization boom. One of the most inspiring signs of this renewal can be found at 1601 Grand Boulevard in the heart of Kansas City, where the Church of the Resurrection - Downtown held its inaugural service on 2 June, making it the first new house of worship to open in Missouri’s largest city in over 80 years.
A modern $10.2m structure, the new 450-seat church has a flexible LED stage lighting system that helps it meet the diverse needs of its community. Designed and installed by Stark Raving Solutions, the lighting rig features a broad collection of Chauvet Professional fixtures.
“The Church of the Resurrection - Downtown was founded in 1990 and is based in the suburb of Leawood, Kansas, but it had been looking to open a satellite

USA - Spyscape, the contemporary and interactive museum dedicated to espionage that opened in Manhattan earlier this year, shows the many facets of the spy-vs-spy game. In doing so, it also reveals how L-Acoustics’ L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound technology makes the fantastic believable.
Deployed across two main rooms of the 60,000sq.ft midtown venue, the museum’s L-ISA complement comprises five dozen L-Acoustics enclosures of various models into two multi-channel setups (38.1 in one of them) that completely immerse large groups of visitors in an experiential espionage adventure, maximising storytelling and engagement.
Working closely with Spyscape creative director Ross Phillips, London-based audio director Nick Ryan and technical sound designer/immersive mixing fngineer Davey Williamson were responsible for the sound design experience the museum would present to

USA - Located in New Orleans, Audubon Zoo offers visitors an exotic mix of animal encounters from around the world and are renowned for their natural habitats. With the recent addition of their latest exhibit, the zoo would be opening a 42ft, transparent flyway entitled Criaturas de la Noche filled with more than 200 short-tailed bats. Needing a nocturnal lighting design that would entice its inhabitants to come to life, the design engineers worked with LEA-Inc. who provided a combination of Chalice RGBW recessed and pipe-mounted LED luminaires from Altman Lighting.
Mike Gonzales, LEA-Inc. controls specialist, comments: “We have done quite a few projects over the years with the Audubon Zoo, but nothing as unique and specific as this installation. The project was part of a $3m addition to the zoo called the Jaguar Jungle, designed to showcase animals from Sou

Europe - Currently in the midst of a busy worldwide touring schedule that includes festival appearances as well as their own shows, The Killers continue to be one of the biggest crowd-pullers in rock music. Since their formation in Las Vegas in 2001 the band have released five studio albums, all of which have topped the album charts, while their live shows help cement their reputation as one of the 21st century’s biggest rock acts.
Their FOH engineer Kenny Kaiser heard about Outline’s Newton processor via the engineer’s underground network and, recognising its potential, set about acquiring one for the current run of shows. London-based Capital Sound Hire are providing a complete FOH control and mixing package for Kenny and with Newton units already in their inventory they were happy to oblige.
Kaiser describes how he’s using the device: “Right now we are u

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