Lighting Design for the Art on Ice 2018 Tour

Art on Ice 2018 was titled “DAS ORIGINAL”. The production explored questions of art and originality through a concept inspired by the story of Wolfgang Beltracchi. His works formed the visual foundation of the show and transformed the stage into an oversized abstract gallery. Beltracchi himself also became part of the production.

The Lighting Design responded to the different styles of the artworks. Light, ice, stage and the visuals on the LED walls were adapted for each image and connected into one coherent visual experience.

The three very large LED surfaces displayed full-scale images by Beltracchi, whose motifs already established the visual starting point for each song. For me, the challenge was to give the light a presence of its own without competing with these images.

Above the stage, I used 140 Martin MAC Viper fixtures in an asymmetrical arrangement. They provided strong lighting accents and were complemented by vertical spotlights between the LED walls. Across the floor, more than 200 vertically positioned LED strips from Schnick-Schnack-Systems extended the stage design. Operating in single-pixel mode, they became a separate graphical layer within the overall image.

For the implementation, I defined 20 consistent primary colours across all fixtures. For each colour, I developed additional pastel palettes with different levels of white. As a result, large parts of the show were created through carefully balanced colour nuances and shades of white, always responding to the imagery on the LED surfaces.

Emeli Sandé, Pegasus, Tina Guo and Laura Bretan accompanied the production with live musical performances.

For the tour, I was responsible for the Lighting Design and worked as DoP for the television recording. Together with my team, I managed Preprogramming, Lighting Programming and Lighting Operating. The complete show was preprogrammed in a 3D studio within two weeks.