Moorea Festival Goes Giga with Robe

	During the day, the need was for subtle lighting to highlight the depth and overall scenic texture created by the careful blending of stage and lighting designs, allowing the stage geography to stand out. Photo: Robe Lighting France

The Maatea (main) Stage at the 2026 Moorea Festival in France featured an array of international electronic and EDM artists and a lighting design by Loic Esparraga -- of Paris-based design studio MIND -- with 48 Robe GigaPointe moving lights at the core of the aesthetic.

The festival, which started in 2024, was staged in the gardens of the 11th-century Chateau de Grillemont at La Chapelle-Blanche, south of Tours in France's Indre-et-Loire region.

Esparraga worked closely with Corentin Poirier, the festival's creative and executive director and founder, who designed the Maatea Stage's scenography, based on a tall LED screen setup, which, together with the lighting, was based on the thematic concept of fire and rock, to create a striking contrast between day and night atmospherics.

During the day, the need was for subtle lighting to highlight the depth and overall scenic texture created by the careful blending of stage and lighting designs, allowing the stage geography to stand out.

At night, the stage was transformed into a completely different space by the GigaPointe beams and their powerful and spectacular effects. The fixtures were installed in six vertical columns of eight fixtures, equidistantly spanning the stage, with video content featuring erupting volcanoes "reinforcing the visual universe," Esparraga says.

Esparraga stated that the organisers sought something unique and different in this design: "The main challenge was to create this new and different world, one that broke from a typical EDM festival stage design, looked distinctive and individual while still following a defined theme."

This is the second time Esparraga has lit this event, and the second time he used Robe's new, GigaPointe fixture, officially launched in February at ISE.

Tours-based rental company Multi Sceni -- the lighting, audio and video equipment supplier to this event -- has recently made this investment in GigaPointes, delivered by Robe France.

Esparraga comments on the GigaPointe's "extremely powerful" laser source output, which "ensured that we could make a strong visual impact even over long distances." He also appreciates its speed of movement and the array of new gobo and prism effects, which can be used to imagine a myriad of cool looks and scenes onstage.

The layout of the six columns of GigaPointes was instrumental in utilizing the entirety of the stage dimensions -- both horizontally and vertically -- a geometric harmony that provided a balanced visual presence of all elements, with the fixtures a natural integrator/interpreter between the scenic fabrics and video surfaces.

The festival's logo, installed at the top of the structure, was also highlighted with two Robe iFORTES rigged on the Layher structure, and another two iFORTES were used to front light the artists. iFORTES were chosen for their framing shutters, allowing them to pick out the detail of the 12m-wide logo, which was positioned 14 metres up on the structure.

Two Maatea Stage artists -- Timmy Trumpet and Trym -- brought their own lighting operators this year, who also appreciated the GigaPointes, and the rest were all lit by Esparraga and his team, including colleague lighting operator Lucas Bussy. They worked closely with video operator Bastien Sierakowski and special effects operator Paul Dubertrand under the project management of Charlene Rodrigues.