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The Playground calls on Chauvet Professional for “La Meta” design honoring Daddy Yankee’s legacy

Puerto Rican rapper-singer-songwriter Daddy Yankee played the final five concerts in his career, dubbed “La Meta”, at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico, located in his homeland’s capital San Juan. The design team from The Playground - Curtis Adams (show and creative director), Trevor Ahlstrand (production designer), and Sooner Routhier (production designer) - collaborated on the show.

Working with lighting programmers Will Flavin and Dane Kick and drawing on the power of a 4Wall Entertainment supplied rig that featured over 500 Chauvet Professional fixtures, the designers tried to capture the essence of the artist’s career. “To make the entire design cohesive, we were inspired by the shape of the language within Daddy Yankee’s branding and career, which gave us an incredibly fun playground to dream within”, says Adams. “Daddy Yankee asked us for his biggest show yet, so we were driven to discover ways to engineer the performance space creatively and artistically.”

“Given that these were the final shows of Daddy Yankee’s career, we were tasked with creating his biggest arena production ever”, adds Routhier. “Our design spanned the entire arena, allowing the audience to feel totally immersed in the show.” In keeping with their goal, the design team wanted to avoid flat video walls, believing that they would be too limiting. Instead, they focused on creating an environment that drew on all production elements. Wrapping the video screen around the stage allowed them to maximize space, while developing new depth for visuals and the performance. The design also had to work well on camera.

“We viewed the rig as multiple systems or areas of lighting, sometimes each with a few fixture types”, says Ahlstrand. “We had our B-stage where we started the show with embedded LED as well as hybrids surrounding the stage. Our audience towers contained both strobes and profiles. There were also pods over the stage with more hybrids and linear LED units, as well as floor lights with profiles and strobes for the band and dancers. Finally, our back wall possessed a lot of visual fire power with all the vertical LED bars, horizontal profiles, and many more strobes.”

The visual power of the large, deeply textured rig, which had an upstage video wall trimmed at 57-feet from the arena floor, came into full play at the moment when the Daddy Yankee bust appeared - one of the show’s greatest gimmicks. “‘La Meta’ is a celebration of Daddy Yankee’s career, chronologically highlighting each of his eras, and the evolution of Reggaeton. In our fourth act, we cement his status as the G.O.A.T. with a massive stone bust of him coming out of the stage”, explains Adams. “This was engineered by Matthew Whitehead and his talented team at AirWorks. We wanted to create an iconic moment frozen in time, so we were inspired by one of DY’s trademark poses.”

“To emphasize the statue’s regality, the inflatable statue featured cracks of Golden Kensuzi, and a hollow golden chest cavity with a throne made of dancers”, he continues. “The giant scenic element begins at the fourth act and remains the centerpiece for the remainder of the show, as it comes back to life crying golden tears, continuously evolving, and transforming with the help of the wizards at F9.”

Making a key contribution to the show were the rig’s 192 Color Strike M fixtures, some of which were used as side lights and on an upstage row for dance light, as well as for slow motion effects. Other units of the motorized strobe-wash were positioned behind the video screen, while the remainder lined two sides of each audience tower to provide crowd lighting as well as visual sweeps.

Adding to the rig’s firepower were 313 Colorado PXL Bar 16 fixtures. “We used them as vertical towers to shine through the screen going as tall and as wide as we possibly could in the venue”, says Ahlstrand. “This gave us a huge matrix of pixels to visually accent the music both vertically and horizontally throughout the show. Will and Dane both were able to create very dynamic and unique effects without the looks ever feeling repetitive.”

Rounding out the Chauvet Professional fixtures in the rig were twelve Maverick Storm 4 Profiles. Placed on the deck, these fixtures created floor effects.

(Photos: Chauvet Professional/The Playground)

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