Netherlands – A massive dance festival in the Dutch town of Breda featuring big name DJs has raised the roof of the 2,500-seat Chasse Theater with powerful pure beam effects using Clay Paky Sharpys.
Rental house Looijmans Showequipment supplied the Sharpys – known for their unprecedented brightness and ability to create spectacular mid-air effects – to the debut ‘Dance Festival Breda’.
“The Sharpy’s enormous light output and fast movement has created a new standard in moving lights” says Eduard Looijmans from Looijmans Showequipment. “We’ve stocked Sharpy for more than two years now, and the market is still buzzing with desire to utilise their amazing features in stage designs.”
For the dance event – which featured Dutch superstar DJs including Funkerman and Gregor Salto – lighting designer Joep van Oosterhout rigged 14 Sharpys to an electronic flybar system surrounding the DJ booth.
“I’ve been impressed with the Sharpy since the first day I ‘hooked up’ with one!” says Oosterhout. “It’s my favourite fixture, outdoor, indoor, day or night, slow or fast, it doesn’t matter. The Sharpy’s speed, light weight, beam, and colour makes it a great fixture”.
“The Mainstage of Dance Festival Breda was called ‘Luxuria’, and despite the fact we held it inside a big theatre space I used lighting to create an atmosphere as if we were all outside at a festival. Using the Sharpys, I could create an enormous impact with only a few fixtures.”
Mounting the Sharpys to the electronic flybar system, Oosterhout has his team was able to create numerous different positions and angles giving the event a constantly changing look and feel.
Proving to be the must-have fixture for major dance music events due to it high-output, laser-like beam, the Sharpy offers 14 different colors and 17 gobos, allowing lighting designers to change the shape of the beam and create an array of spectacular mid-air effects.
“We utilised almost all of the Sharpy’s features – for instance when the flybar system was top rigged at 9.5 metres, using the 8-facet rotating prism created awesome effects,” says Oosterhout. “When the flybar system was at its lowest position of 1 metre high, the Sharpy’s speed and agility combined with gobos produced effects with real impact. Using Sharpys, the impact on the audience is much, much more!”
AED Distribution is the Clay Paky distributor for Netherlands