Barbadian pop/R&B artist Rihanna’s latest release, Unapologetic, is being supported on the road by the Diamonds World Tour, with lighting design by Guy Pavelo of Willo Perron & Associates, under the creative direction of Willo Perron.
Pavelo worked with Perron on Drake’s tour last year and started working with Rihanna when she appeared on the most recent finale of The Voice, the performance for which he programmed the lighting. “I’d done smaller design work before, but mostly programming, so this tour really represents a step toward more design work,” says Pavelo. “It’s the beginning of a good thing for me.”
Pavelo credits Perron with thinking way outside of the box, a way in which he also likes to work, though he notes it’s not necessarily the path of least resistance. “We don’t do our projects the easy way,” he jokes. “It takes that extra time and those extra minutes, and requires a heavy crew with the same type of mindset. At the end of the day, the final details really do matter.”
And the details of Rihanna’s Diamonds World Tour include Perron’s initial idea, which basically held until the final design approval, of a camping pot. “You take a lid off, and there’s another one, and then you take the lid off again, and there’s another one inside of that, like a nesting doll,” says Pavelo. “The stage itself is quite large, actually scaled down from what our original designs were, so it can fit into arenas during hockey season. Part of the idea was a stadium-looking show, but indoors, so it’s a broad-looking production. We’ll probably tweak some things for the larger stadium shows in Europe.”
The production has quite a bit of automation overhead, done by SGPS ShowRig, who also did the rigging, including 16 8mm 4'x10' WinVision moving screens, Pavelo says, “all on full track with custom mini whirligigs from SGPS, and it’s an immense amount of moving weight overhead.” Forward of the 8mm screens is a 60'-diameter, 8'-high 18mm semi-circular screen that can also track up and down. Further forward for the downstage fascia is a 80' wide by 10' tall 25mm Big Bear LED screen that traverses the entire fascia but does not move. Also, built into the rolling stage at different heights is 25mm screen.
“The many video panels’ movement is really the big gag of the production, even right at the top of the show,” says Pavelo. “It makes a huge visual impact.” Along with that, in the decks themselves, we have 10 lifts, a 15' turntable that’s full hydraulic rotary but also comes up 5' out of the deck and retracts into the basement, plus ribbon lifts, band lifts—it’s a lot of movement.” The New York Times agrees. Its April 29 review of the production describes it as having “so many moving parts onstage at the Prudential Center here on Sunday night…the large screens of various shapes and sizes that flashed images that changed with the mood; even the stage itself, which had a big rotating circle at the center.”
An SGPS ShowRig Automation System takes care of all the automation control. All Access Staging & Productions built the staging and decks, including custom inlay decking that Pavelo says gives it a “Greco-Roman marble-type theme for the stage work.”
Six Green Hippo HD media servers run content—both I-Mag and original content led by content director Jesse Lee Stout—through the MA Lighting grandMA 2 console, which also runs lighting. Pavelo also programmed the video. “One cue stack runs the show,” he says. “I used MA grandMA 3D for previz also. Just loaded it in, and it was spot on.” The show is completely run on timecode. VER supplied the video equipment, while BTV provided members of the video crew.
"All Of The Lights" For Rihanna
So where does the lighting go, with so much happening in the air? “The automation takes up so much space and restricts where I can put fixtures,” says Pavelo of his lighting design, which he also programmed, and comprises Martin Professional MAC Vipers, MAC III AirFX units, MAC 101s, and Clay Paky Sharpy units, all supplied by Upstaging.
“I have HUD truss and Swing Wing, and for both, we had to create offsets with pipe to extend out the video panels so we could fit fixtures onto the truss and still be able to actually stack it to get it into the trucks,” says Pavelo. “Otherwise, many of the fixtures would actually hit the video panels.” One-hundred MAC 101s share hang time with 10 of the 16 video panels—10 each that sit on the back of 10 of the panels.
“The MAC Viper is going to be the next MAC 2K, like a standard,” says Pavelo, noting that he uses six of them way upstage center, complemented by Martin Atomic Strobes. At the stage upper right and left corners are two additional stacked trusses, with seven each Sharpy units, Martin Atomic Strobes with Atomic Color scrollers, and eight MAC III AirFX units. Downstage center is another truss with nine additional MAC Vipers and six more Atomic Strobes with Atomic Colors. “That’s kind of at the backside of the curved video fascia, and it’s broken into three sections,” says Pavelo. Far stage left and right are two more trusses with six MAC Vipers each, and the downstage fascia has a forward-facing diamond-shaped truss of two 40' legs that have 12 more MAC III AirFX and 16 Sharpy units. Three flown truss spots (in addition to four out in the house) are Robert Juliat Victor units.
Pavelo has even more lighting on the floor, which he says is “really the big set, all the way upstage, like a ground row.” Here are 11 MAC III AirFX, 10 MAC Vipers, 28 Sharpy fixtures, eight Atomic Strobes, and 24 MAC 101s. Additional Sharpy fixtures also sit in some of the stage decking itself. Twenty-four Kupo fixtures from TMB in a 1x4 strip configuration overhead, as well as 16 ICD Elements KR10s, round out the lighting.
The biggest issue, even for specific lighting cues, remains the tightness of the rigging and automation. “There are literally a couple of screens that are within inches of each other,” says Pavelo. “The panels move all the way to the downstage edge, so that lighting the dancers, at times, becomes difficult. You can potentially have 20' of video wall move into the way of lighting the people on the stage, so that’s definitely a challenge. We can’t use a big flood or wash in front, because it corrupts the video screens. Then sure, we can make the beam tighter, but the dancers can move out of it too easily and still not be lit. When the focus is right, it’s bang on, but if it goes just a little tiny bit off, it’s way off. I ended up using the wash fixtures in a more beam-type configuration for 90% of the show. So it’s an interesting marriage of the video and lighting.”
Pavelo, who started as a spot op, worked as a crew chief for several years, and spent some time in the lighting department at Disney, says his main goal is making the show work to tour well. “We’re always trying to move forward in technology and push objects to their limit, but I also bring an old-school realistic approach to the table as well,” he says. “Now that I can design shows, I try to keep in mind how the guys are going to put it together.”
Rihanna continues her tour worldwide into November.