Red Bull Beat Battle in Johannesburg

29 June 2012

South Africa - What started off as 100 dancing crews competing across South Africa, came to a finale at the Red Bull Beat Battle, at Bass Line in Johannesburg on 26 May 2012. The live show was recorded for a European television broadcast.

AV Unlimited were commissioned by VWV to cater for the full technical production and used bright, striking effects to compliment the high energy performance. To achieve this they included 12 Clay Paky Sharpies and 24 Robe 100 LED Beams amongst other fixtures.

With no bars in the roof and no rigging points, the fixtures were flown above the stage and also positioned on the catwalk and on the stage.

AV Unlimited's Victor Vermaak was the technical production manager for the event. "When I heard we were going to do a Red Bull event I googled it to see what all the other countries and competitions looked like. I was quite intimidated by all the videos of extremely good looking events and know Red Bull won't settle for anything less," Victor explained.

"The biggest challenge was trying to deliver a world class event in the space we were given. There is no rated rigging point over the stage so we decided to use the very light-weight, but also extremely potent Robe Robin100 LED Beams. Problem solved. We used all 24 over the stage to create very rich and powerful looking effects."

Victor says the Sharpys worked perfectly on stage, even against the LED wall used as the stage backdrop. "In my opinion there is no fixture in the world that would have worked better and give such a perfect beam against the bright LED wall," he said.

(Jim Evans)