Aruba’s Soul Beach Music Festival Shines With CHAUVET Professional

The Soul Beach Music Festival in Aruba flourished this year with performances from Usher, The Roots, and Mary J. Blige, and lighting from over 100 CHAUVET Professional fixtures.

Erik van Oorsouw of Elite Productions designed the lightshow for the five-day festival.

“I have been the designer for the Soul Beach Festival for some years,” said van Oorsouw. “It is a wonderful festival with so much talent on stage. The challenge from a lighting design standpoint is to create different looks over the course of the festival so the stage always appears interesting, while also reflecting the music of each individual artist.”

Van Oorsouw used 16 Maverick MK2 Washes, 24 Maverick MK2 Spots, and 19 Rogue R2 Spots in his rig, positioning the majority of the fixtures on three horseshoe-shaped truss structures that ran across the center of the stage. 

“The Maverick Wash fixtures provided my basic color foundation,” said van Oorsouw. “Changing the colors we got from the washes changed the whole look of the stage. I was very impressed with the color rendering and huge zoom of the Maverick Washes.”  

Using the Maverick MK2 Spots and Rogue R2 Spots, van Oorsouw directed beams from different height levels across the stage and decorated the stage via the fixtures’ zoom optics and rotating gobo wheels.

“The Maverick and Rogue spots accented the music,” said van Oorsouw. “The washes were my basics and the spots were there for the special looks that reflected the music. For me it is a lot of fun to add flourishes to the stage with these powerful spots.”

In addition, 44 COLORado 1-Tri IP fixtures served as truss warmers on the festival’s bandstand shell style stage.

 “The COLORados brought the trussing into the overall design,” said van Oorsouw. “They also added a great deal of warmth to the stage and pulled the audience’s attention to the performers.”