June in New York City was full of festivities as thousands turned up the heat and stepped up the beat for all things Pride! Pride Month, which commemorates the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Riots , honors the LBGTQ+ movement and its culture while presenting fun and empowering activities.
New York City has a reputation for doing Pride like nobody else, and this year's events did not disappoint. With street fairs, culinary excursions, dance parties, and the famous Pride March, the festivities culminated with Pride Island, a music-festival experience featuring live performances at Brooklyn Army Terminal (BAT) on June 25th.
PRG, a trailblazer in ground-breaking production solutions for live music events, partnered with Live Nation to provide gear and production services to create this memorable event. Thousands of attendees rocked out to live music, deejays, and headliner Christina Aguilera to conclude this year's "Strength in Solidarity" Pride Week celebrations.
To help overcome logistical challenges inherent to the event’s setting on an East River pier, which included access to the site, unpredictable weather conditions, and on-site power, Craig Goetsch, Live Nation Production VP, reached out to Jim Lehner, Sr VP, Global Special Events, PRG. "Live Nation trusts us for our production management skills, our multi-discipline expertise, plus, in this case, our knowledge of potential code issues with the Fire Department and the City of New York," said Lehner. “We provided technical design services, a supervisory crew, rigging, audio, lighting, and a video system that included an upstage video wall, and two large IMAG screens, and a camera package.”
Last year's Pride Island event on Governor's Island was smaller in size and used conventional staging. This year the event was moved to BAT to accommodate larger crowds. A semi-trailer served as the main stage, with wings that traveled on the trailer added to each end. This allowed the stage to be driven onto the pier saving the load in time that would have been needed to build a traditional stage.
Pride Island's Lighting Designer, Teddy Sosna, had many decisions to make regarding the rig design and coming up with creative solutions that worked for the deejays during the day and for Christina Aguilera, who was headlining the event. Sosna praised PRG, saying, "They've been fantastic. I really wanted to use the VL 3600s because they're bright as heck and IP (outdoor) rated. But they're still fairly new, so I wasn't sure we'd be able to get them – but PRG had a gazillion of them, and they were fantastic."
Aguilera’s Lighting Designer Kat West prefers a clean aesthetic and likes to add something new to every design. For Pride Island, she chose the JCD strobes from GPL which combine a powerful strobe effect with LED pixel mapping. West said, "Christina's music is so elaborate, and there's always so much happening when she's performing on stage; she (Aguilera) allows us to play around, have fun and just really be part of the music." Aguilera won the Advocate for Change Award at the 2023 GLAAD Media Awards, and upon hearing that she was headlining Pride Island, she told Billboard Magazine that she's "excited to celebrate the strength and resilience of all the individual members of the LGBTQIA+ community and their allies" with her performance."
To deliver the best-sounding show for the large outdoor crowd at BAT, the sound system also had to be designed for the wide range of performing acts. Jason Brace, PRG’s Audio National Product Manager was responsible for the overall design. "The sound coverage on the terminal is very narrow but having the show on a pier that’s essentially a parking lot, turned out to be perfect," Brace said. ”We used 12 L-Acoustics K2 speakers on each side of the stage with KS28 along the front with Kara Frontfills. It's all processed by the P1 processors from L-Acoustics, through LA Network Manager. And we did some pre-production work with Soundvision software, which made it easy to load it into Network Manager and get it into the amplifiers "
PRG was thrilled to have supported NYC Pride to create an electrifying experience at this year's Pride Island. "The collaboration with PRG has been exceptional. To have them here doing Pride Island is an absolute honor, especially at this time when not a lot of companies are comfortable partnering with LGBTQ organizations. We're so grateful for PRG's flexibility and happy they're here." said Morgan Marant, Event Manager, NYC Pride.