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Spanish festival triplet lit with Robe

Lighting and show designer Eduardo Valverde from Madrid-based Pixelmap Studios was this year’s creative director of the ‘Love the 90’s’ festival, which was staged in Madrid, Seville and Valencia. Valverde’s brief included imagineering the stage layout, set architecture including LED screens and the lighting.

Prominent on his lighting plot were around 150 Robe moving lights including Pointes, MegaPointes, LEDBeam 150s and LEDWash 800s, complete with three RoboSpot systems run with BMFL Spots, all supplied by rental company Fluge. Due to the different venues, the rig design varied slightly for all of the shows.

This year the stage design took on a new dimension as Eduardo Valverde and his team created a near 360° experience with a 45 metre wide stage and a 30-meter runway thrusting out from the front that sliced the near-stage audience into two, with a circular B-stage at the end.

Flying above this B-Stage was a 9-metre diameter ‘disco ball’ made up of curved trussing, rigged with lights and a think ring of LED. For some acts, the DJ booth was located on the B-stage, putting the performers right in the middle of the fans.

This 360-degree concept - in which production ‘wrapped’ around 270 degrees of the stage - leaving room only for a small amount of backstage and technical space at the back, was the starting point for the lighting as it meant there were multiple viewing and camera angles which needed to be covered with lights.

There was also a vast amount of LED screen flown around the stage - 380 square metres in total - including several ‘lozenge’ shaped pieces of screen, and there were also some circular lighting trusses which further defined the architecture and maintained the ‘curvature’ of the production aesthetics.

In Madrid, the show was staged at the 17,000 capacity WiZink Centre, a venue with serious load capacities in the roof. For the Valencia and Seville editions, a 20-metre-high ground support was installed and all the major production and architectural elements - including the disco ball - were flown from this.

Lighting was divided into three zones. The first one was above the main stage and included an overall mothergrid in the roof, with sub-hung circular trusses providing additional lighting positions. This zone also included the lozenge shaped video screens.

The second zone covered the runway. Trusses were flown above to provide lighting positions to cover the catwalk itself and the audience areas both sides of it. The third lighting area was around the DJ booth on the B-stage and the trussing ball that mimicked the disco ball of the 1990s, which itself was rigged with 48 Robe LEDBeam 150s to create dynamic beam effects. In addition to the Robes there were around 50 x LED floods on the rig plus 400 or so LED battens. 

The most challenging element of this project was controlling and running over 600 fixtures of which at least 400 were moving or ‘intelligent’. Apart from the environment being virtually 360°, from the operating position it was impossible to see what is happening on all sides, so the set-up, programming and tech periods were complex.

Joining Valverde on his FOH crew were lighting programmer and operator Juan Manuel Lázaro and project manager Carlos Fernández. The lighting crew chief was Bochi Piaggio, the production’s own video artist team - producing their bespoke content - comprised David Inlines, Sergio Puig and Carlos F. All of Fluge’s Robe stock has been supplied by San Sebastian-based Spanish distributor EES.

(Photos: Aarón Alborés)

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