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IIImagine choose Chauvet for their mix of music and light

At the cavernous North Hall of Koninklijk Legermuseum - Musée royal de l’Armée (Royal Military Museum), a wide collection of aircraft from different eras remains frozen in time. Mathias Roelandt and his brother - along with their team at IIImagine, including lighting operator Michiel Goedertier - turned the museum’s Aviation Hall into an electronic music space for three performances.

Setting up a stage amidst the aircraft, they wove the entire hall into their shows with the help from over sixty Chauvet Professional fixtures supplied by AB Sound. This was not the first time that the IIImagine team has transformed an out-of-the-ordinary location with music and light. Prior to their show at the Aviation Hall, the brothers and their team performed at venues like the historic Liège-Guillemins railway station, and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, where they performed between Rubens paintings.

“We feel we have more freedom to explore ideas in spaces such as The Aviation Hall compared to a black box stage”, says Mathias Roelandt, who performs music in addition to creating the light shows. “On a conventional stage you have only two things: the music and whatever physical limitations there are on the stage itself. In a space such as this, however, your options are much more open.”

“Rather than having to create imagery as we do on a conventional stage, we are able to draw very rich imagery from our surroundings”, he continues. “Our music and lighting reflect the space we are at. So, the entire show would be different at an aviation museum than it would be at an art museum.”

Key to helping IIImagine creating an engaging atmosphere at Aviation Hall were the rig’s eighteen Maverick Force S Spot and six Rouge Outcast BeamWash fixtures. Evenly positioned on both sides of the rectangular-shaped hangar-like hall at the top of the wall where it meets the base of the building’s half-circle 60-meter high ceiling, these fixtures covered the space in light. Alternating between white and color palettes they sent currents of energy through the hall as they flashed to the beat of the music.

The Force S Spot and Rogue fixtures lit up the entire space, including the planes and the people dancing. “In this show, it was important to light up more than the stage, the lighting had to be all around everyone”, says Roelandt. Highlighting the stage were the rig’s fifteen Color Strike M fixtures. Arranged tightly around the stage, these motorized strobe/wash units filled a variety of roles in the design. In addition to backlighting the performers, they worked to shake up the entire building with strobe flashes.

At other times, the Color Strike M fixtures along with the rig’s eight Well Panels, Maverick Force S Spots, and Rogue fixtures energized the space by bathing it in vibrant colours, typically red or blue mixed with white. “We avoid using more than three colors”, says Roelandt. “It tends to get too busy when you do.”

Sometimes, the design team would move away from colors and mellow out the space with the warm white glow from their eight Strike Array 2 fixtures. “We used these fixtures as lights on drones to fill the hall with a natural glow”, says Roelandt. “I like to walk the streets of Ghent, my hometown, at night and see the glow of lights on buildings. It creates a majestic feeling, and so I wanted to replicate that at times during this show.”

(Photos: Chauvet Professional/IIImagine/Simeoptics)

www.chauvetprofessional.com

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