Colour Sound New Stage Ready for 2017 Festival Season

It was designed with dance festivals in mind, which will frequently feature this size of self-contained venue within a larger event.

Its actual debut was at Lollapalooza Berlin 2016 where it provided Perry’s Stage in Treptower Park, right in the centre of this vibrant and buzzing event.

The stage and roof system can support weight loadings of up to 10 tonnes and comes complete with Litec’s popular EXE-Rise motors. It can either be supplied as a ‘dry’ stage or with full video and lighting production for which Colour Sound can offer an array of different standard packages or custom designs.

The stage is robust and festival friendly, quick and easy to set up and offers a 12 metre wide by x 10 metre deep performance space that is ideal for DJs and bands. The masts are 11 metres high giving a clear headroom of 8.5 metres, and the roof’s 10 tonne weight loading is impressive for the size of the structure.

“We felt there was a real gap in the market for a stage of this size on which a decent amount of production can be rigged,” says Colour Sound’s Haydn Cruickshank who, together with his colleagues, pooled a wealth of festival production experience and knowledge to come up with this well-engineered, highly practical and quality solution.

They wanted to partner with Litec as it is their ‘house’ trussing brand, and the stage components dovetail with Colour Sound’s existing ground support systems making it extremely versatile, particularly for outdoor applications.

All elements are TUV certified / compliant, meeting the most exacting safety specifications in the world.

Straight out of the box and erected for the first time in Berlin by Colour Sound’s crew working with local crew, it passed all the inspections.

For Lollapalooza Berlin, eight trusses were rigged in the roof which were sub-hung with four more, all used for lighting and LED screen positions. Two step-shaped pieces of LED were hung from the sides of the stage, paired with two more different shaped step-pieces either side on the deck below. The two floor pieces were secured in place by neat trussing constructions and angled backwards to add more depth to the space.   

The effect of having screens  in the air and on the floor was a great success and ensured there were no visual black holes - sometimes annoyingly present - in the downstage corners of EDM performance spaces!

Extending the stage area out to the sides and embracing more of the audience were three different width columns of LED screen each side.

The whole stage design looked equally good in daylight, dusk and dark, an important consideration for most festivals, where 75% of the action will take place when it’s light!

Colour Sound has invested substantially in rigging over the last 12 months, including in another 50 x EXE-Rise motors which rapidly seem to be becoming a current industry standard.

Also new are substantial quantities of Litec’s new pre-rigged truss plus a complete new Kinesys automation system and control, purchased in the last quarter of 2016, which is currently out on the Placebo tour.