| Lighting Review
Diana Ross and the Road to Glastonbury | By Bernie Davis Photographs by David Horner
Lighting a Legend... Lighting design today crosses boundaries between disciplines more than ever, with theatre productions being streamed live or recorded for broadcast, and live events being televised in front of a paying audience. The skill is to not just try to satisfy both audiences but to deliver high quality to both, even when the needs might appear to conflict. I have watched Glastonbury over the years and it is very clear that some acts are saved for TV by some very skilled vision crew when the lighting designer shows little or no interest in their problems. But this is not always the case, and the results always show. I recently spoke to Ben Rogers and David Horner who regularly work together on live events – Ben is an accomplished Theatre Lighting and Video designer, and David a Lighting Designer and Programmer whose experience ranges from TV to Theatre to Live Events – and they recently brought Diana Ross to the Legends slot at Glastonbury.
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They were asked to work on her European tour, her first for fifteen years, and had developed a concept for how they wanted it to work. The important values were that she had to be front and centre of the performance, of course, and with the use of big screens the audience would have a good view regardless of the size of the venue. They then made the audience follow the concert through her eyes, so if there was an instrument solo she would look at the instrument and the audience would see a close-up of the instrument too. This meant that the lighting needed to work for those camera shots, and this almost makes their concert lighting a little more like a TV design. The show had to look good on social media, and so it had to look good on peoples’ phones. Such is the modern world! They wanted to make the audience know that they were part of the performance, and Diana Ross
wanted to be able to see them to engage with them, so the design included break-up washes over them and not just blinders, and of course they would appear on the screens too, making them feel more involved. The concert went on tour with seven arena shows and seven festival dates. For festivals they took just the floor package, and for abroad they just flew in and made it work with what they found. To ease the pressure they tag-teamed the dates, swapping show files as the tour progressed as they wanted to keep the look consistent even as it expanded and contracted around the different venues. Then came Glastonbury. Diana Ross was invited to perform and was of course given the famous Sunday afternoon Legend slot, with all that comes with that: a daylight time slot, with full TV coverage, and a massive live audience. Having said that, with such a large crowd most of the audience would be watching the Set & Light | Autumn 2022
