Marie Ulven Ringheim is the Norwegian indie pop artist performing as girl in red. The Oslo-based singer/songwriter and record producer performed across North America March through April on her Make It Go Quiet tour. PLSN caught up with the show in San Francisco and talked with Lighting/Production Designer Jonny Kingsbury, Programmer Kai Colucci, and Lighting Director Derek Zanto about the production.
Jonny Kingsbury
Lighting & Production Designer
When Lighting and Production Designer Jonny Kingsbury first started chatting with girl in red about the design, the artist told Kingsbury that she was looking for something with a very “rock” feeling. “When you see her live, she is crowd surfing, head banging, lots of energy,” explains Kingsbury. “It’s an old school rock show at its core, so I knew that I wanted to design something that felt big. I also wanted to play with the idea of shadows on a backdrop, that’s where the triangles sticking out [on the backdrop] came from. I designed two towers of [GLP impression] x4 Bars that sit 14’ tall and they run narrow beams across the triangles. It creates these shadows that you see playing back and forth across the backdrop.”
Kingsbury chose Chauvet Professional Nexus 4×4 LED wash panels for the side bank of lights because he believed that they have an old school rock show vibe about them. “I knew Kai Colucci [Programmer] could do some cool stuff with the pixel effects as well, which he knocked out of the park. Strobes were a pretty essential part of this show as well, I love using [TMB Solaris] Flares when everyone else is using [GLP] JDC1s. They are consistently cheaper, pack a really good punch, and have the pixel effects.”
Kingsbury says he found it enjoyable working with the whole team, as everyone pitched in to help pull it together. “Tour Manager Andy Lewis, Production Manager Eric Wade, and I spent a lot of time in preproduction figuring out all the elements together. I view their collaboration as being very essential,” he notes, adding that LD Derek Zanto “was an all-star” on the setup and operation out on the road, especially because of the “tons of different configurations” at each venue. “There were a lot of strange elements I threw at him that he did great job of keeping consistent from show to show. We had a modular inflatable backdrop that I designed with Landmark Creations. This was a pretty new idea, so I know it wasn’t easy dealing with each variation of it. He had to pull off Velcro patches to allow air to flow in, or not flow, to different sections of the inflatable. It had to be 10’x20’ sometimes, and other times it was 14’x25’. I applaud him for keeping the look of the show consistent from venue to venue, even though I know it wasn’t easy to deal with. Every show that I do has such heavy collaboration on it, it’s really difficult for me to take credit sometimes, because I feel like I am such a small piece of a much larger puzzle.”
Kai Colucci
Lighting Programmer
Lighting programmer Kai Colucci notes that with most of the projects on which he works with Kingsbury, the setlist is usually—and preferably—decided on before he gets involved. “This way it doesn’t waste any time with unnecessary programming, content creation, and direction,” he says. “There were a few extra songs for girl In red that ended up not being used, but there was a total of 19 songs, with one that later became acoustic for the tour. And like usual, with projects with Jonny and Cour Design, I usually allot four to five days of previz time before rehearsals.”
Colucci says he had a lot of fun with the Nexus 4x4s. “I hadn’t used them in a while. I have a new Lua plugin from vldurnov that’s absolutely incredible for gridded fixtures rather than using a bitmap, and I had a blast playing with that and seeing what things I could come up with.”
Derek Zanto
Lighting Director
“The floor package with the inflatable backdrop was pretty ambitious to try to fit in several of the venues as well as build by myself. However, I went into the project early on trying to figure out ways to make the rig modular all while still trying to maintain the original concept of the design. The backdrop was able to be used in most venues we were in due to the several configurations of width and height. Basically, I had an A rig, which was the full design down to an E rig, which was only the first part of the [Chauvet] Nexus panels and the [GLP] x4 sitting on the floor backlighting the band.”
Zanto says most of the show was timecoded. “We only had one song and the outro that were manual cues. I did add in manual blinder hits and strobe hits to add to the show and create more crowd interaction,” he says. “I was never 100% positive what she was going to do or how she would interact with the audience, so staying vigilant was critical to the show.”
girl in red Tour 2022
Production Team
- Lighting & Production Designer: Jonny Kingsbury
- Lighting Programmer: Kai Colucci
- Lighting Director: Derek Zanto
- Tour Manager: Andy Lewis / JTW Touring
- Production Manager: Eric “EZ” Wade / EZ Services
- Lighting Company: PRG / Anthony “Looch” Ciampa
- Inflatable Backdrop: Landmark Creations / Anna Jungers
Gear
- 1 MA Lighting grandMA2 Console
- 18 Chauvet Professional Nexus 4×4 LED Wash Panel
- 10 GLP impression X4 Bar 20
- 6 Claypaky Mythos 2
- 2 Robe Robin 600 LEDWash
- 8 TMB Solaris Flare Strobe
- 2 Ultratec Special Effects Radiance Hazer
More Girl in Red 2022 tour photos by Steve Jennings:
