Her farewell tour is called “Rock This Country,” and country icon Shania Twain is doing just that as she bids good-bye to her fans from coast to coast. More than 300 Clay Paky lighting fixtures and two grandMA2 consoles are along for the ride, selected by lighting designer Mark Butts who also serves as the tour’s coproduction designer with Raj Kapoor.
Last year when Twain was in her residency at Caesar’s Palace, where Kapoor was her production designer, Butts conceived a “big, edgy, modern rock ‘n roll look” for her farewell tour. “I wanted a big lighting rig, big pyro, lots of automation – the biggest possible system that we could easily move around the country,” he says. “And that led me to Clay Paky.”
According to Butts, “the only way to implement a rig of this size was to use super efficient small, high-power lights with a ton of features. There was no way I could have done this without Clay Paky gear, especially Mythos. So I designed the show around the gear.” VER supplied the lighting to Butts’s specifications.
Last year when Twain was in her residency at Caesar’s Palace, where Kapoor was her production designer, Butts conceived a “big, edgy, modern rock ‘n roll look” for her farewell tour. “I wanted a big lighting rig, big pyro, lots of automation – the biggest possible system that we could easily move around the country,” he says. “And that led me to Clay Paky.”
According to Butts, “the only way to implement a rig of this size was to use super efficient small, high-power lights with a ton of features. There was no way I could have done this without Clay Paky gear, especially Mythos. So I designed the show around the gear.” VER supplied the lighting to Butts’s specifications.
Fifty-six of Clay Paky’s new Mythos fixtures are touring with Twain. “Most of the Mythos fixtures are mounted on ten upstage and ten downstage truss fingers, which run perpendicular to the primary lighting truss, notes Nashville-based lighting director and programmer Andre Petrus. “The Mythos act as beam or profile fixture with color mixing optics and animation wheels.”
Ninety-six A.leda B-EYE K20s are housed in six big automated aluminum pods, which can rise in the air or descend to the stage deck. Each pod contains 16 B-EYEs in a 4x4 configuration. “I knew that having big banks of them would be a major element of the show,” says Butts. “I like their individual pixel control and organic shape.”
Butts integrated128 Sharpy fixtures into 12 30-foot high moving set pieces. “I didn’t wanted to be locked into a giant upstage videowall,” he says. “So I designed chunks of wall that could spin and move on a track. Each piece has a 5-mil LED wall on one side and a vertical row of ten Sharpys on the other. The pieces can spread out or come together in any configuration.”
Petrus says the possible combinations for the modular moving LED/light walls are “almost endless. They can create a different look for every song.”
Seventy-two Sharpy Washes are also mounted in the truss fingers where they wash the stage and band and deliver “big, cool aerial beam effects,” says Petrus.
Two full-size grandMA2 consoles plus 6 NPUs and 10 8-port nodes control the show’s lighting. “A show of this size wouldn’t be possible without grandMA,” says Petrus. “We have so many fixtures and so many parameters!”
Previs programmer David Mollner spent two weeks previsualizing the show on a full-size grandMA2 before rehearsals began in Las Vegas. He took full advantage of MA 3D v. 3.005, which enabled him to visualize stage layouts in three dimensions. “Even during a show I have MA 3D running on my laptop as I’m working with the live rig,” he notes. It’s amazing what it can do! It’s always hard to ask software to move things on an arc path; MA 3D not only moved the set pieces on an arc path but also rotated each of the pieces individually.”
Crew
- Show Director/Co-Production Designer: Raj Kapoor
- Co-Production/Lighting Designer: Mark Butts
- Programmers: Andre Petrus, David Mollner
- Lighting Director: Andre Petrus
- Video Director: Jackson Gallagher
- Lighting Co: VER
- Lighting Crew: Angelo Viacava (crew chief), Tyler Trofatter, Eric Marshall, Chris Lanning, Zach Svoboba
- Video Co: VER
- Video Crew: Patrick Eaton (crew chief), Michael Muscato, Eric “Austin” Stengle, Sean Green, Michael Boggs
- Staging/Automation: SGPS/ShowRig
- Staging/Automation Crew: Chris Lohden, Shane Bandy, Andrew Johnstone, Will Gurski, Jake Murray, Christina Cohan, Mike Burgess, Tim “Squid” Fincannon
- Pyro/Lasers: Pyrotek Special Effects
- Pyro/Laser Crew: Gregg Pearson, Nick Zangari, Mark Jones, Brian Van Trigt, Amanda Pindus
- Tour Manager: Chris Littleton
- Production/Stage Managers: John “Bugzhee” Hougdahl, Steve Nimmer, Sean Robinson
- Riggers: Danny Machado, Bob Powers, Rick Wilmot
- Electrician: Carlos Oldigs
Gear
- 2 grandMA2 Full consoles
- 96 Clay Paky B-EYE K20s
- 52 Clay Paky Mythos
- 130 Clay Paky Sharpys
- 68 Clay Paky Sharpy Washes
- 1 Vari*Lite VL3500 Spot
- 8 Chroma-Q Color Charge Plus
- 8 Color Kinetics ColorBlaze 72s
- 8 4-lite Moles
- 4 DF-50 hazers
- 1 VER Revolution RS5 5mm LED display (40’ x 30’)
- 3 d3 Technologies 4x2 media servers
- 3 Barco 20K projectors
- 4 Barco ImagePRO II
- 1 Lightware DVI matrix (16x16)
- 1 Ross Carbonite switcher
- 1 tvOne multiviewer
- 1 Brainstorm SR-112
- 1 Evertz multi-frame unit