Concept K creates total environment at Dystopia Festival with CHAUVET Professional

At its best, a techno festival should sweep away all sense of time and place, and the two-day Dystopia in Rennes, France did this in brilliant fashion, embracing everyone in an all-encompassing swirl of light, colour, strobing movement and music. At the heart of this experience was an inspired lighting design by the Concept K team led by Kelian Sevrée and Simon Fouillet that featured an artfully positioned and deployed collection of 24 CHAUVET Professional Color STRIKE M motorized strobe-washes and 12 COLORado PXL Bar 16 pixel-mappable motorized battens.

In addition to designing the festival rig, the Concept K team ran every lightshow during the festival and did the show direction as well. “We didn’t have any lighting advance for the festival, so there were no expectations from the artists’ side, but our main challenge was to light up the set in a way that would showcase it as effectively as possible,” said Kelian. “At the same time, we had to think to optimize the rig to create a lighting show that works both the audience and the cameras. Our Color STRIKE Ms allowed us to light up the audience with the ability to use strobe effects and enough power to illuminate up the entire venue.”

As for the rig’s 12 COLORado PXL Bar 16 fixtures, they were arranged behind the DJ both. From this central position, the pixel mappable battens with 16 individually controllable moving heads created a wide range of looks thanks to features likes their WRGBW color mixing, wide (5.8 ° to 47.9°) zoom range, and fast 200° tilt capability.

The COLORado battens helped us create a visual transition between the screen and the set while also providing a nice backlight behind the DJs,” said Kelian. “The tilt and zoom capabilities allowed our team to achieve wide beam spreads while keeping the screen visible.”

Drawing on the performance features of these and the other fixtures in their rig, the Concept K team was able to conjure up more than a lightshow, but an entire environment that everyone at Parc Expo Rennes, from the performers on stage to the fans, was happy to live in for two splendid days.