CHAUVET Professional Helps LIGHTSWITCH Reflect Essence of Mt. Joy on Tour

	"That fixture sits in a lovely space -- it can be a classic audience blinder, but it's also capable of color and nuance," says Featherstone. Photo: Ignacio Rosenberg

LIGHTSWITCH's John Featherstone, along with his colleagues Ignacio Rosenberg and Haley Featherstone, worked diligently to reflect the essence of indie rock band Mt. Joy's character on the current Hope We Have Fun Tour.

"Mt. Joy live somewhere between intimacy and lift-off," Featherstone says. "They're not a 'look at me' band -- they're a 'come with us' band. The lighting has to honor that, and Cory Sperry, the band's long-time lighting director, makes sure everyone is along for the ride!"

In keeping with this vision, the design team created an asymmetrical rig. "We leaned into asymmetry because Mt. Joy aren't a symmetrical band," Featherstone says. "Their music has a looseness to it -- beautifully imperfect, slightly off-center, human. A perfectly balanced rig would feel too polite, too predictable. By breaking the grid, the rig breathes more like the music. It creates tension and release, pockets of focus, and a sense that the show is evolving rather than repeating. It also gives us more compositional flexibility -- every song can feel like it's found its own shape rather than being forced into one."

The lighting rig includes 31 CHAUVET Professional Color STRIKE M motorized strobe-blinders, most of them integrated into the overhead system; the remainder are strategically placed on the trusses behind the ROE Visual Vanish LED screen to provide added texture.

"What they give us is punch without harshness," Featherstone says of the Color STRIKE M units. "That fixture sits in a lovely space -- it can be a classic audience blinder, but it's also capable of color and nuance. We used them as emotional punctuation. When the band hits a chorus or a musical peak, they don't just light it -- they announce it. But because we can color them, they still feel part of the palette rather than a bolt-on effect."

Most of the tour's rig is in an overhead system with only a limited floor package, because the designers wanted to keep the band clearly visible and connected to the audience, not "boxed in by a forest of fixtures," according to Featherstone.

"Also, we felt that having a limited floor package gave us the desired tone for this band," he adds, "Floor packages can very quickly tip into something that feels more 'showbiz' than 'band.' There was also a pragmatic element -- fewer fixtures on the deck means faster changeovers, cleaner touring, and less visual clutter. Every unit that is there has a job to do."

The designers also went with soft gradients and hue choices for this show, often conveying the sense of nature that runs through Mt. Joy's music. "We deliberately avoided hard color cuts most of the time," Featherstone says. "The music feels more like a slow blend rather than a sharp turn, so the palette leans into gradients -- colors that drift into each other rather than snap. Austin Schneider, our amazing programmer, is a master of this."

Flexibility was also an essential element of the lighting design, allowing it to follow what Featherstone calls "the emotional arc" of the band's music. "There is a warmth and vulnerability in the verses," he says, "then these expansive, almost euphoric moments when everything opens up."