Ayrton Rivale and Domino lighting fixtures and grandMA3 full-size consoles played a role in DJ John Summit’s five-and-a-half hour show at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.
Chicago-based LEC was the lighting vendor for the performance, the kickoff of Summit’s Comfort in Chaostour. ACT Entertainment is the exclusive distributor of Ayrton fixtures and MA Lighting products in North America.
Jason Baeri, who served as the show’s Lighting and Co-Production Designer with Creative Director James Klein of Aeon Point, has an almost ten-year history of using Ayrton fixtures and is believed to have been the first Ayrton MagicPaneluser in the US. “I’ve been a big fan ever since,” he said. ”Ayrton makes a quality product and is always coming out with something new and exciting.”
Manuel ‘Manny’ Conde, the Associate Lighting Designer and Programmer, also has many years’ experience working with Ayrton products, with Diablos and Huracáns consistent performers at his gigs. “Ayrton fixtures are always straightforward with no guesswork,” he commented. “I love that I don’t have to rewrite their profiles, and appreciate their craftsmanship, output and the number of looks you can get from them.”
The overall look of Summit’s massive show was layered, Baeri explains, with an array of looks presented throughout more than 100 songs in three acts. “The lighting rig had to be flexible enough to expand and contract over time to give different looks over the five-and-a-half hours of the show.”
The 20-fixture Domino layer “was designed as an omnipresent guide light,” he reported. “John performed on a floating platform, and Dominos were placed below his riser for an underglow and upstage for silhouette and aerial looks. We needed a close-in wash that would work clearly and easily, and the Dominos had a huge zoom and clean, flat field that really punched.”
Summit’s show marked the first time that Baeri used Ayrton Rivales, which he commented as: “one of the most impressive fixtures I’ve ever seen. They were the workhorse of the rig with 50 on the floor, 100 in the air and a few more scattered as key lights.”
Baeri and Conde jointly decided to use three active and one spare grandMA3 full-size consoles running in MA3 software mode for lighting control. “They excel at the ability to deal with a large number of fixtures,” noted Baeri. “In addition to the Ayrtons, we had a couple of hundred pixel lines with hundreds of thousands of parameters, which were programmed on the system. No other console would have been capable of that.”
Conde has been using MA3 software exclusively for about two-and-a-half years. “The console creates a space for me to be more creative. I’m a big proponent of Recipes and Selection Grids, which make it so much easier to deal with so many fixtures and parameters; they’re both game changers.” Destin Klug was the additional Lighting Programmer for Summit’s show.
According to Baeri, ACT Entertainment was “an incredible help in every regard” during the project. “They made sure I could vet the Rivales ahead of time since I don’t like to put fixtures on a show before I see them, play with them and put them through their paces. They made sure I was very comfortable with them,” Baeri concluded.
