Lindsey Stirling has re-imagined holiday shows. In a diaphanous outfit sparkling with rhinestones, she whirls and leaps across the stage, grabs a trapeze and flips upside down in the air—all the while playing her electronic violin, not missing a beat. The musician has made a name for herself and takes it up another level since debuting her YouTube channel of videos in 2007, competing on America’s Got Talent in 2010, and launching her first world tour in 2013.
The Snow Waltz Tour, named after her newly released album, dazzled audiences across the U.S. on its November-December run. Her show is tailored to the family and features her original compositions and her remakes of popular holiday standards in a range of musical styles from classical to pop to Electronic Dance Music (EDM). The team behind the design includes Production Designer/Production Manager Alec Spear and Lighting Designer/Programmer/Director Andrew Nissley, who has worked with Stirling since spring of 2014. Spear joined the team in 2016 as a Monitor Engineer. In 2017, he took over playback and content direction, and began to contribute to the show design, along with Nissley and the artist. For this 2022 tour, Spear took on the additional duties as Production Manager. Upstaging provided the lighting and rigging, with additional fixtures from Kinetic Lighting.
Departure from Holiday Shows
Spear’s road experience influences how he designs a show and how he production manages the tour. “I’ve always relied heavily on my experience as a technician and touring crew member to design shows in a way that allows efficient load-ins and load-outs,” he says. “My experience on the road also gives me insight into how to best design and build a scalable production. In those ways, being a PM does help me make informed choices when designing. Specifically, to this show, and working with Lindsey in general, having the overall vision and aesthetic of the show in mind when making production decisions is a massive help to keeping Lindsey’s vision for the show true over the course of a tour.”
The artist is involved in all aspects of her productions, not only with a specific vision for each song, but for the overall show as well. Prior to the tour, Stirling sends Spear and Nissley some sketches and references images, which usually find their way into the final design, Spear notes. “Lindsey absolutely drives the ship visually as well as musically in every performance,” he adds.
Having worked together on Stirling’s shows in some capacity for six or so years now, Nissley says it is helpful to both know the general direction she wants to go in before they start. “For the last few tours much of this is Alec having an initial design concept, then numerous ‘what about doing this?’ messages back and forth over a few months to arrive at what you see in the show,” Nissley adds.
Design Process
Spear says, “When we began the design process for this show, the element we had in mind to showcase was the aerial performances Lindsey and her dancers have been training for. This was something that was in the works for Lindsey for some time, and Covid really gave the needed time to master these skills and bring them to the stage.”
The initial thought for this tour was to “step outside the usual Lindsey show concept” and specifically not use video. The LD explains, “Coming from the YouTube space initially and having made and directed many of her own music videos—as well as creating her own show content—it was a bit of a departure, but we’d had little talks for a while about making something that was more set-piece driven than using a lot of LED wall to fill up the stage.”
One major set piece includes the framework of a front of a house with a door that opens to serve as an entrance for the artist, and open space where windows would be to allow for more interaction. The band—featuring Drew Steenon on drums and percussion and Ryan Riveros on guitars and keyboards—is positioned on a landing above the house. Putting the band higher up allowed the designers to use fixtures in the space that would normally be blocking whatever video surface would be upstage.
There were other design considerations. As Spear explains, “This is the fifth year Lindsey has toured a Christmas show, and the third major redesign of the production in those five years. In all of those tours, Andrew and I shared the goal of making the show design effortlessly transition from EDM, strobe-heavy production and lighting-driven songs, to beautiful ballads, to intimate audience involved acoustic performances. The holiday show in particular runs through so many emotions, from nostalgic Christmas songs to rock and EDM driven original pieces. Extreme flexibility is key in the scenic and lighting elements of the show.”
Must Haves
Nissley adds, “‘Must have items were things from Stirling: the tree scrim, flower props, and house set, which are visually in the vein of holiday in a sense but stray away from the sort of ‘put-Christmas-trees-everywhere’ aspect of shows that happen this time of year. Everything else that makes it a Christmas tour comes from the songs, costumes, and personalities on stage.”
As Spear notes, the biggest design challenge coming into this year was to create a forest on stage, as large and enveloping as possible, that could transition from warm and happy to dark and mysterious. “We bounced through many iterations of physical 3D props, inflatables, LED pixel creations, and finally settled on a more traditional cut drop from ShowTex, backed up by a shimmery grey cyc curtain from Sew What? This ultimately allowed us the most visual flexibility and kept us within our space and time constraints in the theaters we are playing on this run.”
There are other fun moments adding to the family vibe, such as having Tour Manager Erich Jackson getting in on the act, dressed in a fabric Christmas tree costume and playing the role of a grumpy holiday helper to Stirling onstage. There is also a segment in which Stirling and her band sit onstage to play kid’s instruments. And then there’s a boat race during which the dancers pull boat props across the stage with ropes.
Ring of Light
Looming large behind the band and acting as a key set lighting element is what Nissley calls “the world’s largest influencer ring light.” The custom fabricated lighting frame holds 28 Philips Nitro 510C strobes. Nissley says, “We had the idea to hang rings of ‘insert fixture here’ over the band back when designing the Artemis Tour of 2019, and while that didn’t end up happening at that time, when we wanted to keep the strobe aspect of our normal album shows intact, it was revisited for this tour using the Philips Nitro 510Cs. In their full white mode, for not being a very large fixture physically, they’re insanely bright for the size rooms we play in, especially all concentrated into one place. The ring set piece was built specifically around this fixture; we’ve used these fixtures a lot in the past.”
The lighting ring also casts a glow on the aerial acrobats throughout the performance. Stirling and her dancers use a variety of trapeze and Lyra devices, which are hung downstage of the large lit ring, and controlled by TAIT hoists.
The automation in the production is purely to facilitate performer flying and aerial acrobatics, he adds, citing the three T Series Touring Winches from TAIT. “Marisa [Rinchiuso] and our friends at TAIT are always massively helpful in putting together a package that suits our needs. Our tour rigger of the last five years, Glenn DiNicola, operates the automation. Given his existing position in our touring camp, he was the obvious choice to take on an operator role that requires so much trust between performer and operator, and he has handled it flawlessly.”
Key Choices
In the rig beyond the ring are 112 Martin Professional MAC Aura, 26 Martin Professional Viper Profiles, 8 CHAUVET Professional Strike 1, and a few Chroma-Q Color Force 48 and Color Force 72 fixtures. About the MAC Aura, Nissley says, “In addition to the Vipers, the Aura is a fixture I’ve been speccing in rigs and using for a long time. There are 68 of them in standard mode comprising the curtain light (truss and floor), another 36 in extended mode are on four custom made ladders, and the remaining are scattered in the trusses for band light and automation markers.”
“The Martin Viper Profiles were picked for the 2021 version of this tour when post-Covid inflation and so many tours going out at the time made it hard for us to get a rig loaded full of brand-new anything,” the LD says. “Viper is an old reliable go-to, they’re fast enough for the EDM style parts of the show. I still love the gobo selection, and they last forever with not much maintenance.” When it came to the CHAUVET Strike 1, Nissley says, “In retrospect I wish I’d put a lot more of these in the rig. The red shift tungsten look is great, and also a good LED solution to big dimmer racks, DWE lamps, and the insane amount of cable they come with when we are a very small crew for a tour this size already.”
The Color Force 48 and Color Force 72 are “still a good linear wash,” and were also available as the Viper was, Nissley notes. “One set of these uplights the house set in the first act of the show, then moves over to the large flowers when the house leaves stage.” There are also 15 ACME Sunrise fixtures, a beam wash fixture. Adding extra lighting effects are 10 500W incandescent lamps hanging from the truss that are used in a few key moments. And then there’s a special custom lighting fixture, which Nissley calls ‘glow balls’—which he himself designed and 3D printed. “The four handheld glow balls that the dancers use manage to generate enough light to keep the entire stage in near blackout.”
Describing the need for the custom lighting pieces, Nissley explains: “There’s a choreography moment in ‘Angels We Have Heard on High’ where off-the-shelf items used in previous tours just didn’t have the visual impact; I wished they did. To get something bright enough to stand out, before the tour started, I got a bunch of 5V LED strip and battery components to construct something vaguely spherical and small enough for the dancers to hold. 3D printing is a very inexpensive way to iterate designs until it works, the result being something that looks like two tiered cakes of light stuck together, with a battery compartment and USB charging board stuffed inside. Despite only being used for about 30 seconds, it definitely got that tiny piece of the show closer to what I wanted it to be.”
While the show garnered great reviews for adding holiday excitement to the season, Spear has his own reviews for working with Upstaging, which is “always a great experience,” he says. “They are exceedingly flexible, with the goal of making the design as good as it can be. JB [John Bahnick] has worked with me on several tours now and it always ends up being a painless process. Upstaging delivers well-maintained gear and well-prepped rigs.”
Production Team
- Production Designer/Production Manager: Alec Spear
- Lighting Designer/Director/Programmer: Andrew Nissley
- Lighting Techs: Hannah Whorton, Teresa Capra
- Rigger and Automation Op: Glenn DiNicola
- Stage Manager: Wes Morrison
- Production Coordinator:Lindsay Fishman
- Tour Manager: Erich Jackson
- Set Carpenter: Jeff Irizarry
- Stage Tech: Noah Connolly
Vendors
- Lighting and Rigging: Upstaging/Rep. John Bahnick
- Additional Lighting: Kinetic Lighting/Rep. James Schipper/Dena Cerino
- Staging and Automation: TAIT/Rep. Marisa Rinchiuso
Gear
Lighting
- 2 MA Lighting grandMA2 full-size Console
- 2 MA Lighting MA2 NPU
- 2 MA Lighting MA2 8 Port Node
- 26 Martin MAC Viper Profile
- 112 Martin MAC Aura
- 15 ACME Sunrise
- 6 CHAUVET Strike 1
- 3 Chroma-Q Color Force 72
- 5 Chroma-Q Color Force 48
- 2 hazebase Base Haze XL
- 36 Philips Nitro 510C
