Chauvet Professional Underscores Educational Message At Mark Wood Holiday Concert

SIOUX FALLS, SD (For Immediate Release) – Legendary electric violinist and member of the original Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Mark Wood began his holiday concert at the Denny Sanford Arena with a stirring message for the 12,000 people in attendance.

“We’re going to burn up tonight,” said the virtuoso musician and Emmy Award-winning composer. “We’re here to celebrate the wonderment of music making. We’re inspiring these amazing kids and we’re inspiring the future.”

The “amazing kids” that Wood referred to were local music students who joined him and his band on stage for an exhilarating concert that blended new twists on holiday classics with electrified orchestral versions of rock standards like The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven.”  Matching the spirited music note-for-passionate-note was a big, bright and intense lightshow designed by Aaron Zimmermann of Proline Entertainment (Watertown, WI), that featured over 100 fixtures from CHAUVET Professional.

For Wood, the concert was about more than making music. He was appearing in Sioux Falls for Electrify Your Strings!™ an outreach program he started to encourage students, parents and teachers to embrace new ideas and new technology in school music programs.  The concert served as an opportunity for him to showcase the talents of students who had attended his three-day workshop, and as a fundraiser for local school bands and orchestras.

Zimmermann’s powerful lightshow, with its intense aerial effects and fast moving fixtures, not only conveyed the spirit of Wood’s music, it also underscored the evening’s educational message of merging creative expression with technology.  The LD and his lighting techs Paul Berger and Glenn Ottenbacher deployed 52 Rogue R2 Wash and 18 Legend 230SR Beam moving fixtures in their rig, as well as 45 COLORado 1 Solo zooming RGBW LED wash units.

Drawing on the Rogue R2 Wash fixture’s wide zoom range of 12° to 49° and smooth color mixing, the team used the powerful LED movers to create a variety of looks on stage and engage the audience with multi-colored overhead washes. Flown mid-stage and upstage, the Rogues provided an intense output that stood up well against the beam fixtures.

With their fully homogenized beam, the COLORado 1 Solo fixtures, which were flown on upstage truss and set on downstage edge, created vividly rich color washes that changed to reflect the mood of the music. The fixtures’ wide (8⁰ to 55⁰) zoom range allowed their coverage area to change throughout the concert as well, lending a variety of looks to the stage.

This seemingly endless array of uplifting looks from the lightshow provided a perfect accompaniment to the underlying message of Mark Wood’s Electrify Your Strings! program: With the right tools, there is no limit to what the creative spirit can achieve.

About CHAUVET Professional
CHAUVET Professional offers innovative professional lighting fixtures for the production and touring market as well as permanent installation in theaters, hospitality venues, cruise ships, clubs, television and architainment applications. For more information, please visit www.chauvetprofessional.com
About Chauvet

Chauvet, headquartered in the USA, is a leading global manufacturer of professional luminaires, truss and related equipment, fulfilling the needs of various industry sectors. Chauvet has four main brands: CHAUVET DJ, CHAUVET Professional, ILUMINARC and TRUSST. They share Chauvet’s unified strategy to pursue every market segment where it has a competitive advantage in terms of value, innovation and performance, with an emphasis on LED technology. For more information, please visit www.chauvetlighting.com