ITALY – This is Jovanotti’s year, with extraordinarily successful record sales and a triumphant tour, Lorenzo negli Stadi, which dominated the 2015 summer season and thrilled and captivated 500 thousand fans. Now the equally innovative, awesome Lorenzo nei Palasport 2015-2016 is here. The new show was conceived, designed and written specially for indoor venues, and kicked off on 19 November in Rimini.
All the scenery revolves around Lorenzo during the show. The set, the totally new videos and films, and the lights are combined together into a parallel show, integrated with the music.
Set designer Giancarlo Sforza created a new asymmetrical stage, whose shape recalls the expected outcome of the detonation of an explosive charge. Part of the stage juts out into the stalls, where Lorenzo can come into direct contact with the audience. The whole structure is lined with over 300 sq.m (359 sq.yd) of high resolution screens, which show pictures taken from the live performance, visual effects and videos. These screens form the heart and visual medium of the show.
The Canadian lighting designer A.J. Pen has been working with Lorenzo since the ORA tour. His devotion to Clay Paky products is total: “Clay Paky has always produced the highest quality lights with legendary optical features. I have been a Clay Paky fan since the days of the Superscan Zoom and Stage Scan.”
The way he views and conceives shows is very personal. He is very fussy, knows what he wants, and – more importantly – knows how he wants it. During the last three days, the project was continuously under development and A.J. Pen sorted out a lot of details, since – as he always says – it is the details that make the difference.
There are currently 32 Clay Paky A.leda Wash K20s in the Lorenzo nei Palasport 2015-2016 lighting design. “I have used these lights since February 2014. They are quite simply one of my most beloved appliances: an innovative, versatile light which is beautiful to look at. They utilize and offer all the benefits of LED technology”
These benefits include low power consumption, longer lifetime, small size and weight, and durability, along with a full range of bright colours and excellent shades of white.
The colour of each LED may be controlled separately. This feature not only allows you to create an endless range of colour variations, but also to use the LED arrays as a light palette in order to paint all kinds of visual effects that change dynamically both in shape and colour.
“By working with the built-in visual effects, and adjusting each parameter freely, we found a very personal way of customizing the pre-programmed effects to avoid the risk of them looking like a light demo during the show.”
The first lighting design included Mythos units, which were also used on the triumphant summer tour. “They are fantastic. I really like this light: it opens out very wide; it has gobos; it has a nice continuous animation wheel; it has colour mixing you can use for fades: and then if I want a Sharpy effect … boom, there it is, even more powerful. We use the Mythos’s narrow beam effect at three or four points during the show. This may then slowly transform into other effects and gradually have colour added. I can’t wait to use them again in indoor arenas, where they can be even more versatile.”
The show was produced by Trident Management and, as Lorenzo explained: “We will transform the indoor arenas into pulsating, cosy, high-intensity venues. The concert is divided into emotional waves: it gets off to a club-like, very tribal, dark electronic start, followed by a cosy, romantic, theatrical middle part, and a totally party-like, liberating final crescendo tending towards funk.”