An area the size of 500 football pitches, 100 stages of all shapes and sizes, more than 200,000 visitors – the Glastonbury Festival of contemporary performing arts in England is a gigantic open-air event where popular acts such as Coldplay, Shania Twain, Dua Lipa, LCD Soundsystem, Little Simz, and many other artists from all genres performed at this year’s 2024 instalment. Shangri-La – a festival within a festival that is entirely dedicated to creativity, arts, and underground and independent culture – has been a special area for many years now. It is where the NowHere stage is located and where fans of electronic music feel like they’re in a club. The sophisticated lighting set-up, for which lighting designer James R. Dickson from Elixir Lighting opted to use the Cameo OTOS® H5 and ZENIT® W600 SMD, played a major part in creating this atmosphere.
It takes nearly 30 minutes to walk from the famous Pyramid headliner stage to Shangri-La. Most attendees, however, are happy to make this journey, because this is where the true heart of the festival lies: art and performance installations, counterculture, diversity in action, and plenty of insider bands and DJs, curated by Chris Tofu, Robin Collings, and Kaye Dunnings and team. The Shangri-La area is a place of cultural exchange not found in this form at any other festival – with the NowHere stage as its electronic musical epicenter.
“The NowHere stage is very different from the festival’s other stages. Everything here revolves around electronic music and creativity,” acknowledges James R. Dickson, who – together with his company Elixir Lighting Ltd – is responsible for the lighting design, operation, and provision of lighting technology on the medium-sized stage. “Our job was to create a nightclub in the middle of a green field. To do this, we put the lights on the stage as well as on the sides of the viewing area to enhance the lively nature of the dancing crowd.”
For Dickson, the Cameo OTOS® H5 IP65 beam-spot-wash hybrid moving head plays a key role in the lighting design on the NowHere stage. “The OTOS® H5 is an extremely flexible and powerful effect light. We use it for beam washes, gobos, and whenever momentum and movement are needed. It also has an IP65 rating for unproblematic use outside.”
Dickson arranged the OTOS® H5 in pairs on the sides and interspersed each one with a ZENIT® W600 SMD outdoor SMD-LED wash light, which is used for strobes and wash effects. From here, both Cameo models radiate light onto the audience and the square array of 225 tube lights (15 × 15) above the audience’s heads that mimics a club ceiling. “The ZENIT® W600 SMD fixtures are the perfect lights for audience lighting,” states Dickson, who puts all 504 SMD LEDs to full use – from colour macros to pixel-based control. “The ZENIT® W600 SMD really comes to life as soon as the sun sets.”
Further information from Cameo: www.cameolight.com
