A Different Sort of “Light” Show for Misia

It always amazes me how the assumptions and requirements that are made at the beginning of a project get somehow morphed by the time the process is finished.  The first item on the wishlist was that Misia would do a show in the round, and the stage would be in the middle of the arena.  For me, especially with my many Diana Ross in the round shows experiences, that was familiar territory.  However what surprised everyone, including the Japanese technical director once he started to advance the tour, was how little weight the center of a typical Japanese Arena roof could support.  Since much of the most populated areas of Japan get so little annual snow accumulation there isn’t much need for snow roofs.

The kneejerk reaction was to go ground support, but when we looked at the truss towers to do that and how they didn’t look very pretty, the next reaction was to come up with something that at least would make them a feature.  My suggestions are in the first drawing..  Then it quickly became obvious that ground support wouldn’t work in the schedule and furthermore it took us over budget in any case. 

So, taking the venue that would support the least load as our baseline, we worked out the parameters of what we could hang.  Luckily there was a lighter weight sound system that would do the job, though even that made the sound engineers nervous as to whether the system would have enough power to fill an arena.  It was determined that we could hang sound, truss and twelve moving lights, and, as long as they were light enough, the internally lit boxes that we all liked in the design.  Even the lighting of these was under threat, and a lightweight system based on dichroic glass boxes and bare high intensity bulbs was invented, since to get enough lumens from LED sources, for example, would have taken it over the limit.

The other assumption was “as above so below”, and this since we had boxes in the air that would be reflected in the shape of the stage.  But as many times as we tried to come with something that worked for the band, the dancers and the restrictions imposed by venues on aisle widths and so on, which tended to be conservative, since “in the round”  wasn’t common in Japan, nothing gelled until we started playing with circles, (looking back through the project files was interesting, one of the version folders was named “hexacircles”).  Finally the “cogwheel” shape emerged and since overhead light was pretty limited so did the idea to internally light the stage.  My first pass at patterning was along the lines of more cogs and clockwork, as if the stage was like the innards of a clock, but since everyone liked the kimono stencils we were picking for the overhead boxes I eventually used the same patterns.

The result, given the restrictions was stunningly beautiful.  With most of the lighting system and a lot of sound cabinets on the ground around the stage, no video, but with the important addition of lasers, our combined efforts to circumvent the problems we encountered yield a very different show, that now,  when one looks at the final show pictures, one simply can’t imagine it being any other way.