Lighting designer Marc Janowitz recently added GLP’s KNV Dot to his toolbox, which was deployed to project Black Pumas’ logo for their tour.
“I had always leant heavily towards small fixtures I could dangle or arrange with minimal structure, but to be honest [KNV Dot] then fell out of my mind,” Janowitz admitted.
This was until the Black Pumas tour came along.
“When this project came up, I started thinking about modular small sources, and this put the Dot back in front of me. We were running out of fabrication time and this was already engineered.”
The journey that led him to specifying 60 of these compact fixtures began with a Grammy appearance, and developed through a short residency at Stubb’s in the band’s native city of Austin, Texas.
Once they started rebooking shows post-pandemic, the band wanted their intertwined puma logo to be the centrepiece.
“They had made a Grammy appearance earlier that year and [the Grammys’ production] had built a logo piece for the occasion,” he explained. “From that, the band inherited the two puma cut-outs, intertwined – which they wanted to be converted into the centrepiece of their stage set.”
Janowitz was then tasked with creating a design with the puma logo as its focal point, although it first had to go through several geometric iterations before the original layout metamorphosed into a 10ft (3m)-diameter circle.
“I was originally hired to design a five-night limited engagement at Stubb’s at the end of May,” he said. “For the Black Pumas this was a monumental set of shows: five nights in their hometown celebrating the return of live music in Austin. For anyone who’s played Stubb’s, the idea of designing a production there immediately comes with challenges – perhaps the biggest one being that nothing can rig from their roof.
“For that engagement we came up with a compromise for the puma logo design piece. Working with local hometown hero vendor Ilios Lighting, we were able to make a 10ft-wide octagon of linear fixtures with the pumas mounted in the centre. Every piece was mounted by ladder on a ground supported network of truss and pipe. The full stage design took two days to install and was never going to be tour-worthy.”