Gil Perron Celebrates Color With CHAUVET Professional at Montreal Pride

	"Using the Pride flag colors exclusively in both lighting and video content, our results are a little loud....but loud was the whole point!", says Perron.

Internationally acclaimed French architect Roger Taillibert wasn't thinking about colorful entertainment lighting when he was commissioned to design the main stadium for the 1976 Summer Olympics. But the towering edifice that he created provides an ideal backdrop for a lighting designer looking to unleash powerful imagery in color. Gil Perron demonstrated that this year at the Montreal Pride Festival.

Color always plays a key role in this iconic festival, but Perron wanted to take things a step further in 2026. "This year, I really wanted to play the color theory at its most obvious," he says. "Using the Pride flag colors exclusively in both lighting and video content, our results are a little loud....but loud was the whole point!"

Perron created colorful panoramas throughout the festival site. At the Olympic Park Stadium, which backed the main stage, Taillibert's architectural design allowed him to create long, clean streaks of reds, greens, and blues to complement the hues onstage.

"The building provided a perfect canvas for color, all thanks to its great architecture," Perron says. "Because the skin of the building has these enormous blades sticking out from the surface, it's quasi-impossible to get spillover or color washing. So, lighting the building has become a major part of the vibe at the festival. Obviously, with a building of this size, it takes a lot of instruments! In this case, I used 48 COLORado Panel Q40 fixtures per slot."

The COLORado Panel Q40s were only some of the color-rendering CHAUVET Professional fixtures in Perron's LSM-supplied rig. Also featured were 42 Maverick Force3 Profile units on 16 truss cords with automated chain hoists, 24 Rogue BeamWash 1 fixtures in racks of four, ten Maverick Storm 2 Profiles at the front of house on the stage, and seven additional Q40 Panels for blinders, as well as 12 Maverick Force 1 Spots on the floor.

Perron also used 231 COLORado 1 Quade fixtures and 32 Ovation Reve E-3 IP units for site and environmental lighting. "Given the statement we wanted to make, we needed a good amount of fixtures," he says.

Pulling off this study in color didn't only require a large number of fixtures; it also called for a concerted team effort. Perron was joined by a group of colleagues that included Ryan Germundson, master electrician; Fahed Hammami, "systems and network guru"; and Kevin Laflamme, the TD who also handled the site lighting project.

All of the performers who visited this year's Montreal Pride relied on Perron and his festival team to handle lighting for their shows. Francis Guitard, who Perron describes as a "EDM Lighting Legend," came out of early retirement to handle the main event. "The guy made me cry; he was so good," says Peron, describing Guitard's show as "epic."