Roosevelt D'Souza Designs Javid Ali Tour at Sydney Opera House with CHAUVET Professional

	"We changed looks throughout the concert to keep pace with the versatility of Javid Ali's music while also reflecting its very moving soulful quality," D'Souza says.

Indian playback star Javid Ali recently played the Sydney Opera House on his Rafi Aur Main Tour. The show combined romantic tunes, lively hits, and classical-style Bollywood numbers. Accompanying him was a lighting design by Roosevelt D'Souza featuring CHAUVET Professional STRIKE, Maverick, and Rogue fixtures.

"We changed looks throughout the concert to keep pace with the versatility of Javid Ali's music while also reflecting its very moving soulful quality," D'Souza says. "So, we might have a song start very low-key, and then, all of a sudden there are beats of suspense music. At that point, we have lights blinking throughout the entire concert hall. The CHAUVET Professional fixtures gave me this kind of flexibility."

The movement that D'Souza created was not always of the pan-and-tilt variety. He often evoked a sense of motion on stage through his adroit color changes, moving fluidly from deep blues to whites. "Congo is my favorite color," he says. "I use this in my intros to the audience/stage for the show. It creates a space effect that can go with the song to give us a nice vibe. Then we add other colors for variety and movement."

Also helping D'Souza create a variety during the three-hour show was the staggered trim, which reached 60' at its highest points, while some of the truss structures with lighting fixtures 16' above the stage and at different intervals. "Having different spacing made it easier to create new looks," he said. "The set was long, so we created 65 different looks to have the variety we were after."

Anchoring this wide array of looks were the rig's 12 Color STRIKE M motorized strobes. "It was important for me to cover the entire stage, so we had a broad canvas to work with," D'Souza says. "In my view, there was no better way to do this than with the Color STRIKE M. We used it to light the roof to expand our design, to create strobing action, and to set different tones with color effects."

"The music of my client and the aura of the venue itself called for powerful imagery on stage," D'Souza says. A variety of richly textured video content, many dreamy images of the artist himself, also enhanced the mood on stage. A flowing tapestry of Indian-inspired imagery was accentuated with color washes from Maverick and Rogue fixtures.