GERMANY: gerdon MEDIADESIGN’s Thomas Gerdon created a lighting extravaganza at Dortmund’s Mayday Festival, in what has become an essential fixture in the calendar of Germany’s electronic dance music fans.
Gerdon has been igniting the Mayday dancefloor since 2012 with far-reaching concepts for promoters I-Motion, often integrating LED fixtures from the GLP catalogue.
“It is always a challenge to produce an entirely new design every year — especially as it should never remind guests of something they have already experienced previously,” he said. “For this reason, I try to use new and innovative products, and find ‘tools’ that give me the opportunity to create new looks.
“I also ensure that the design works within the [oval] shape of the venue, because I want it to look like one big architectural unit, and not simply a big lighting rig placed inside a venue, which is the case with most rock show events.”
To that end, Gerdon used nearly 100 different sized fixtures from GLP’s popular X4 series, characterised by their high output LEDs and convenient baseless designs. To light the downstage edge of the stage he deployed 18 of the tiny impression X4 S moving heads, while 24 of the large X4 XL dominated the giant mechanical centrepiece which hovered over the dance floor, moving up and down. Gerdon also turned to 48 of GLP’s new X4 Bar 20 100cm long versatile, high performance battens — again equipped with a 7:1 zoom ratio — for use as mid-air beam effects in the stage rig.
With Rando Lorenz working alongside as Lighting Director, some 50 DJs kept the near 20,000 crowd enthralled relentlessly throughout the night, across five different floors. This represented all genres from trance to hardstyle, tech house, techno and minimalist and included international names such as Dash Berlin, Robin Schulz and Adam Beyer.
Lorenz was unequivocal in his reason for choosing the X4 series: “What I like about this product is that it is really mellow. The colour mixing works great and you can produce really high quality colours. The Zoom and speed of movement are more than fast enough and the optical quality in general is really nice. The reason I use the impressions is because of their lighting quality — and as always, I was very happy with their performance.”
Header photo credit: Ralph Larmann
