Colour Sound Dances The Light Away at Glastonbury 2011

Colour Sound Experiment continued its exceptionally busy festival season supplying lighting equipment and crew to 4 stages in the Dance Village, several areas of The Glade and assorted other places around the vast site on Worthy Farm, Pilton, Somerset that hosts the Glastonbury Festival - one of the largest and best known in the UK.

Colour Sound's Haydn Cruickshank created an overall production design for the dance areas - Dance East, Dance West, WOW and Cube Henge. Colour Sound supplied 22 crew and 6 trucks of equipment in total.

The Dance East and West designs featured a mix of Clay Paky Alpha Spot 1500, GLP Impression and Robe ColorSpot 700E AT moving lights, which were rigged off Supertowers at the upstage end and the tent poles further downstage and in the audience in both areas.

These were joined by Atomic strobes - absolutely de rigueur for any dance environment - Sunstrips, blinders, PARs, profiles and an assortment of other generic fixtures - with the aim being to produce visually stimulating lightshows for many continuous hours of operation - involving some long stints by operators at the consoles! Some of Colour Sound's new GLP Impression Spot One LED profile fixtures were used to great effect in WOW!

The East and West stages both had Chamsys MagicQ consoles for control, as did WOW, while Cube Henge lighting was run on an Avo Pearl - one of 13 different Avolites consoles supplied by Colour Sound for the event.

The East Dance lightshow was co-ordinated by Kester McClure, Chris Wilkes and Dan Williams. Dance west was looked after by Stuart "Woody" Wood, aided and abetted by Sam Campbell, WOW's lighting got into the groove with Toby Lovegrove and Ricky Andrews, and Cube Henge's with Stu Barr and Sarah Payne.

The Glade

Continuing it's great working and creative relationship and good vibes with one of the UK's favourite boutique festivals, Colour Sound lit several areas of the Glade, the main ones being the G Stage and Spirit of 71, with Jasper Johns getting back to his freestyle roots and co-ordinating the area wide lighting. He was joined by Alan Davis, Steve Coombes and Sam Akinwhale.

The kit included Robe moving lights. Colour Sound also supplied an LED video screen for the G Stage and a 10K projector for Spirit of 71, together with Hippotizer media servers to store and run all the content.

A selection of i-Pix LED products were utilised around the Glade, including BB4s, BB7s and BB16s all on the Spirit of 71 stage.

Club Dada Stage

Centrally located in the Shangri La area of the festival site, this was another significant area receiving the Colour Sound treatment, crewed by James Hind, Summee Holloway and Douglas Hale.

Located in a stunning 30 metre geodesic dome, the lighting consisted of 24 moving lights - including more GLP Spot Ones and a wide selection of generics and LED fixtures.

No Holes Barred!

Colour Sound created a cool visual ambience in a heterogeneity of bar, disco and beer selling areas run by EBC, all of which enjoyed brisk business as the weather cleared to reveal tropical temperatures at the end of the weekend after a slightly soggy start!

Lighting for these spaces was designed by Colour Sound's Fletch, who was joined by crew members Andy Melleney, Tony Wilson, Frankie McDade and Simon Garwood. A diverse selection of lighting kit included Robe ColorSpot 575 moving lights, complete with custom gobos.

Says Cruickshank, "It's always great to be involved in Glastonbury with its unique and special atmosphere. The site has become a lot easier and more workable in the last few years, which makes everything run smoother and faster for get-ins and de-rigs and technical elements generally".

For more information on Colour Sound Experiment, please call Louise Stickland on +44 7831 329888/+44 1865 202679 or Email [email protected] To contact Colour Sound direct, please call +44 208 965 9119.