LAS VEGAS – Developer/partners Cirque du Soleil and The Light Group recently opened a new nightclub, Light, at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. Part Cirque show and part dance club, it features 38,000 sq. ft. of space and a 35-high high ceiling with acrobats spinning overhead and EDM DJs spinning up front. LDs John Lyons and Richard Worboys of John Lyons Systems (Hollywood, CA) had the extra challenge of illuminating an adjacent 50,000 sq. ft. outdoor Mediterranean-style pool/beach club area called Daylight. They chose more than 450 Elation Professional fixtures for both spaces.
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LAS VEGAS – Developer/partners Cirque du Soleil and The Light Group recently opened a new nightclub, Light, at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. Part Cirque show and part dance club, it features 38,000 sq. ft. of space and a 35-ft high ceiling with acrobats spinning overhead and EDM DJs spinning up front. Video is everywhere; 6mm video panels line the club’s massive walls, its ceiling and cascade downward to the DJ booth.
Lighting a space a huge as this, where beams need to highlight performers on a vertical plane as well as a horizontal one, and where the lighting must integrate with and work around video wall surfaces, wasn’t an easy undertaking, according to lighting designers John Lyons and Richard Worboys of John Lyons Systems (Hollywood, CA). Adding to this challenge, the LDs were also asked to illuminate an adjacent 50,000 sq. ft. outdoor Mediterranean-style pool/beach club area called Daylight.
To conjure up the visual experience the owners had in mind, Lyons and Worboys chose more than 450 Elation Professional Platinum and LED lighting fixtures.
On the inside at Light, this total includes 144 Elation Platinum Series moving lights (48 x Platinum Beam 5R, 44 x Platinum Spot 5R Pro, 12 x Platinum Spot 15R Pro, 12 x Platinum Beam 15R Pro, 28 x Platinum Spot 35R Pro). The Platinums’ beams thrust out in every direction, ricocheting off the club’s video-covered walls and ceilings like the aerial acts themselves. The Platinum Series use the advanced technology Philips MSR Platinum lamp, allowing the units to produce a powerful output relative to a their compact size, and they’re also fast-moving – making them ideal for illuminating Light’s cavernous interior, said Lyons.
“It’s not only a large space, it also has a large volume of air space. This empty space is necessary for the Cirque performers to do their stuff in mid-air,” explained Lyons. “So we couldn’t have a lot of objects in the way. Yet we needed the lightshow to be able to fill the voids. So we had to use fixtures that produced powerful beams and had the throw to fill that space, and were also able to move quickly with smooth movement, as the Platinums do. If you’re able to get enough of those in a space, then you can create some fantastic choreography in air.”
The lights combine with the video surfaces to “create a third –never yet done – lighting effect,” said Lyons. In addition to the LED panels, “there are also four high-power projectors that provide front surface projection on those areas where an LED panel was not possible. The content provided by Moment Factory was custom created and mapped to the irregular positioning of these surfaces. Used for media as well as a lighting fixture, the juxtaposition of these visual elements with the theatrical lighting creates a new sensory dimension.”
One example of Lyons’ and Worboys’ creative combination of lights with video is their use of Elation’s Event Bars — a 39-inch X-Y bar with four LED pinspot heads — to frame the projection and LED screens in the main performance space facing the audience. The Event Bars “are slim and powerful so their home between the cracks of the video panels is inauspicious until they power on and blaze the room with a choreographed blizzard of beams,” said Lyons.
Light’s interior also includes the Opti Tri White, Opti Quad Par and Opti 30 UV— all LED pars – plus two in-ground LED fixtures, Elar Inground RGB and Elar Inground WW. Explaining his choice of the Elation LED pars, Lyons said, “Here again, you have a room that’s a hybrid of a high-energy nightclub, Broadway show and Cirque du Soleil performance – all integrated into one experience. When you have something as dynamic as 25 humans performing in realtime, you need to be able to have the lighting horsepower to track them, follow them, and highlight them along with the props that are brought in. So we needed to have an inventory of flexible, lightweight, high-output colorwash fixtures.”
He added, “It’s a similar thing with the Elation Inground lights, which we use to highlight all the different performance positions. We have those permanently mounted so that anytime somebody steps up to a platform, we can paint them.”
The Platinums are also making a splash outdoors at Daylight, which uses 32 Platinum Beam 5R Extreme — an even faster, more “extreme” version of this extreme ACL beam effect. Another standout in the pool area is the new Rayzor Q7, Elation’s smallest, fastest moving head LED to date (11 lbs.) with RGBW Quad-Color mixing and four-zone chase effects.
“In an outdoor space you don’t have the opportunity to introduce a lot of atmospherics, and fog is what really makes lights look good,” Lyons said. “So we needed lights that had a lot of punch and were able to excite an outside arena with the same kind of feeling you get inside. We selected these Elation fixtures because of their high output and fast movement and the fact they could throw a beam a long way without help from atmospherics.”
Besides speed and output, the Rayzor Q7 was chosen for a more idealistic reason. “The Rayzors are a whole new concept, and I thought it would be a nice touch at a new club to introduce people to new technology,” said Lyons.
With all the praise the club’s lighting design has been getting, Light/Daylight’s owners are expressing positive feelings toward their LDs these days. “They hug me every time I see them!” says Lyons.
For more information about John Lyons Systems, visit www.johnlyonssystems.com
