There are many ways fans and critics describe the music of multi award-winning playback singer Jubin Nautiyal, and almost all of them revolve around a single word, “soulful.” The Dehradun, India-born superstar has an uncanny ability to weave multiple emotions, such as love, yearning, loss, hope and regret into the single line of a song, each one resonating with more depth than the next.
Reflecting the myriad passions in Nautiyal’s music can be a challenge for a lighting designer, but it is one that Roosevelt Dsouza, his longtime LD, excels at, thanks in part to his inspired use of color. “Every song has its own way of conveying emotions, so I treat every song differently in terms of color,” said Dsouza. “Color choice is closely connected to feeling.”
Helping Dsouza create evocative palettes at many stops on Nautiyal’s tour of Australia is a collection of CHAUVET Professional Color STRIKE M motorized strobes. Although he uses the fixture’s two bright white LED tubes for strobing and audience lighting, Dsouza relies heavily on the fixture’s RGB pixel mappable face to create colorful effects that capture the spirit of the music being performed on stage.
Dsouza divides the 16 Color STRIKE M fixtures in his rig evenly between stage left and stage right truss structures. Each of these horizontal structures are arranged in three ascending rows, providing Dsouza with a variety of angles to create colorful multi-level effects.
Given the breadth of Nautiyal’s catalog and the range of emotions in each song, Dsouza adorns the stage with a wide variety of colors, from deep ruby reds, to translucent greens. However, his palettes are always smooth, rarely involving more than two or three colors at a time. Oftentimes, he will transform the stage with monochromatic varieties of a single color.
While conjuring up his rainbow of colors and textured effects, Dsouza remains careful to keep attention focused squarely on his client. All of his looks are created with the idea of having Nautiyal at their center. At times, this means downlighting the artists in brilliant colors, at others it may call for a vector of side light from the Color STRIKE M directed on the star as he performs on center stage.
“I am a big believer in keeping the artist at the center,” said Dsouza. “This has to be the justification of any looks I create.”
With Nautiyal seeming to be elevated off the stage on light, Dsouza more than lived up to this design vision, making his client’s moving, soulful songs even more powerful.
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