LD Daunte Kenner captures the essence of Mary J. Blige in design.
She’s the soulful queen of hip-hop, an embattled figure who has recently emerged victoriously from bouts against alcohol and drug abuse to become a successful and happily-married entertainer. Her concert sounds like a battle cry for troubled women everywhere, leading the charge against the emotional distress of everyday life in the trenches. She is Mary J. Blige. And the responsibility for lighting her shows falls squarely on the shoulders of Daunte Kenner. And if MJB has gone through a series of changes, Kenner can certainly relate. Talk to him about the show and the constant theme that emerges is one of change. Take, for example, the design process.
“Nineteen,” says Kenner with a smile.
That’s the number of iterations his lighting design went through before going into pre-production. But he says it in such a way that you can’t be sure whether the design was finished or they just ran short of time. But Kenner seems unflappable as he talks about working through the design with AT, formally known as Alan Thompson, the production designer, Huggie, the tour manager, and Kendu Isaacs, Mary’s husband.
Impress Me
Kenner, who works for Performance Lighting in Chicago, was brought into the MJB camp by longtime friend and Performance Lighting client Alan Thompson, with whom Kenner has worked several tours. Preparations for this tour began on a European leg where MJB spoke directly to Kenner about her vision for the U.S. leg of the tour.
“She basically told me, ‘I want this lighting rig to look like some other concert I would go to,’ ” says Kenner, whose voice sounds as if it should be on the radio. “She wanted to be impressed when she saw it, and she snuck in on me a couple times and video taped rehearsals. Then she watched them and she critiqued me,” he laughs.
Kenner’s own concept was to give the lighting rig a look that is reminiscent of MJB — curvy, sexy-looking. “Mary’s stage presence is stunning, so her visual support should be as well,” he says. At the same time, he wanted the front truss to follow the curve of the linearray speakers. Though the line-array never materialized, the truss design still works very well. It looked good when he drew it up in VectorWorks, and it looks great live.
Even after splitting the rig down the middle to accommodate a reverse Kabuki, the rig looks big, open and curvy. The set features a large riser for the drums and backup singers, sweeping bookend staircases and just enough soft goods to add a feminine touch. What it doesn’t have is a front truss.
“The design doesn’t work well with a straight stick in front of it. It’s designed so it looks very open, very large,” he says. “My thoughts were, if you are sitting at the top seat in the arena, I always hate when you look down and there’s a truss in the way. You can’t see the stage. So I nixed that. I want everyone to fully experience Mary J. Blige. I use the two side trusses…There’s a lot of side light in here, but it fills up very beautifully, you can’t really tell there is very little front lighting.”
Pre-Production? What’s That?
Given the size and complexity of the rig, and the complexity of the cueing during the show, you might think Kenner had lots of pre-production time for programming. “Oh Lord! Boy, do I wish I did,” he says. “There was no time for that. I went over to the UK with her, and there was just no time between running shows over there and advancing the changes, because the changes were constantly coming. Literally, up until they were pushing gear on the truck, I was calling back to shop going, ‘Hey, we need to add this, we need to subtract this, we need to change this.’ So the first time I actually saw the rig and was able to move a light on it was the second day of our twoweek rehearsal in L.A., which was constantly interrupted by radio shows.”
When he finally did get a crack at the console, Kenner, in addition to designing the rig, programmed it, with the help of Brad White from Avolites America, on an Avo Diamond 4 console.
“I’m normally a Flying Pig Systems Hog guy, or an MA Lighting grandMA,” he says of the switch. “I got really good reviews from Tony Trovato, who’s also working on this project. He also works for Performance Lighting. He’s a die-hard Avo fan. And I liked the console for the application. Avo was something I would normally use on a quick oneoff when I need to be able to program fast. I never considered using it on tour, but they came out with the Diamond 4, and it kind of incorporates some of the philosophies of the Hog world and some of the philosophies of the grandMA world, but it gives the ease of Avo. So…”
A big part of the set is the Main Light Industries SoftLED backdrop and a smaller —but still very large — Barco LED wall supplied by Screenworks. The SoftLED is used to frame the video wall with low-res imagery. The original idea was for Kenner to control all the video content using a media server, but due to time the idea was dropped. Instead, the video is run by a crew led by video veteran Mick Anger. In order to develop a coherent design among the various disciplines, Kenner worked closely with the video crew.
“All the color palettes have gone through me,” Kenner states. “I worked with Mark Argenti and Ian McDaniel (the content developers), and we tried to make sure that we were all on the same page regarding color and texture. Kendu is the driving force when it comes to that creative part. He picked most of the imagery and most of the content that was developed by Media Evolutions, and all we did was tweak it to make sure the colors coincide, making sure the timing was right. Video runs off time code, I don’t. So we had to make sure that I’m synched up, even though I’m not running time code.”
Working in Bronze
The colors for the show resulted from a collaboration between Kenner and Blige. The starting point was Kenner’s own concepts for each song, based on “what I thought was right for the moment.” Then a review session with Blige confirmed that their concept for colors was very similar, with one small addition.
“There was one color she wanted that took me an hour to figure out how to get. It’s bronze,” Kenner said with amazement. “Who ever thought you could get bronze out of a mover? But as you’ll see in the show, it is bronze.”
In addition to the moving lights, Kenner relies on the followspots for “mood lighting.”
“The only corrective frame I have,” he says, “is a CTO; a full cut just to really lay it on her. Everything else is just flesh tones; pink like a Rosco 33, standard video stuff and a Rosco 24. The upstage Lekos are half cut CTB, the downstage ones are quarter cut CTB and all the MR-16s are a quarter cut CTB, a CTO, with Lee 400 added to dramatically soften the light [One in each of the three cells – ed.+- The floor PARs, just to light the bands’ face, are a quarter cut CTB. Different tones of CTB to make certain things pop out and certain things sit back.”
With all the video imagery and displays, you might think Blige would be overly concerned about I-Mag. But Kenner says it’s not so.
“She hasn’t been very picky about it; Kendu has. There have been some issues here and there, but we found out it was a video equipment problem instead of gel. So it just took a second for me and video guys to work things out. We actually didn’t have a full camera run-through until our second dress rehearsal in St Louis. So that was when we had our first full trip.”
Eye Want Candy
According to Kenner, the video and lighting crews play well together, but it can be challenging at times. “They ask a lot of me,” he says. “Right now their biggest issue is the LED light level — the (Main Light Industries) SoftLED versus the hard LED. The SoftLED curtain just blows everything away. It’s just way too bright. We are still kind of playing with it, dialing it way down. It is so huge — 80 feet wide. There’s so much of it.”
SoftLED is not the only thing on the set in huge quantity. “There are lots of toys on this rig,” Kenner says with a grin. “Lots. Martin MAC 2Ks and High End Systems Studio Beams are the bulk of it. Studio Beams — battle tanks. Excellent! If you ever want to buy a wash fixture, that is the fixture to buy. 2Ks for the punch, Studio Beams because of their road worthiness. And I like them; they are pretty quick. On the floor we have High End Systems x.Spots, strictly for their gobo palette. It’s really hard to have those compete with MAC 2Ks for punch, but when they are used properly they are irreplaceable. Each stick of truss has a James Thomas Engineering Pixel- Brick in it, an LED fixture. They’re brand new; Scott Baker of Performance Lighting sourced them. Blaine at James Thomas Engineering was extremely happy to have them as part of the show. There’s also a PixelLine on each curved piece. The bricks work excellently as truss warmers, and they were a creative solution to our problem of toning 12-by-12 trussing with multiple colors. The PixelLines are just eye candy.”
And there’s plenty more eye candy in the show between the hi-res and low-res video, moving lights, moving truss, moving LED Wall and pyro by Strickly FX. All of the 28 songs on the set list are programmed cue-tocue, with plenty of on-the-fly playback to keep Kenner busy. But as busy as he is and as many changes as he’s been thrown, Kenner is a happy man behind the console and behind the scenes of one of his favorite acts.
“I’m a closet Mary J. Blige fan,” he says.
We won’t tell anybody.
