Tenth Avenue North, the multiple Dove Award-winning band, recently wrapped its fan-favorite “Decade The Halls” tour this Christmas season, with special guests Plumb and Land of Color. Bandit Lites provided the lighting system for the joyful show, which explores the last 100 years of popular music with the costumes, set and lighting reflecting the styles of music ranging from Christmas pageants to candlelight services.
System simplicity & portability
“The big directive for the tour design is it needed to contain looks that reminded [the] audience of every decade of the music they’re hearing,” explains lighting designer Mike Marcario. “Combined with logistical directives to keep the system simple enough to be set, tech'd, ran and struck by a one-man lighting crew, while also living within a lower-than-usual weight restriction due to transportation, I believe we landed on a production design that accomplishes all of it.”
Bandit Lites supplied GLP X4S, Elation CuePix WW2 Blinders, Chauvet Rogue RH1 Hybrids, Chauvet Nexus 4x1 fixtures and Mega-Lite Circa Scoop LEDs, a fixture that Marcario shared doubles as the workhorse and time machine of the lighting.
“Starting the night only using the warm LED in the center, similar to a large old incandescent bulb, then adding the RGB color mixing and pixel mapping element as we get to the decades where that technology emerged allows me to easily paint looks from each of those decades,” he said.
“As the tour takes place mostly in churches and theatres, the lighting system has to stand on its own without any support overhead from the venue." Mike Marcario, Lighting Designer
As the show progresses, the lighting helps in the transformation of the space, with the static, warm tungsten tones of the 1940s and 1950s. As the decades progress, Marcario drew upon the groovy psychedelic rainbow looks of the 1970s and the fast, strobe effects for the late aughts’.
Considerations for church and theatre
“As the tour takes place mostly in churches and theatres, the lighting system has to stand on its own without any support overhead from the venue,” explained Marcario. “This is why I chose to use hybrid and wash fixtures - both the Elation Smarty Hybrid and GLP X4S can and do cover a lot of ground.”
“I always welcome the opportunity to work with Mike Marcario and the Tenth Avenue North production team of Davi Lema (board operator) and Jed Faessler (production manager),” says Bandit Lites Business Development Officer Brent Barrett. “This Christmas tour demonstrated Mike’s ability to use the different aspects of a lighting system to reflect the technological development of Christmas over the decades, which makes for an extremely enjoyable Christmas variety show that can be enjoyed by the entire family.”
Marcario reports that the Bandit teams comes up with more ways each year to make the systems easier to set up, as well as smaller and lighter to pack into the truck as the year before.
While the tour wrapped December 15, 2019, fans can watch the band’s first ever, cyber Christmas concert. Airing Dec. 20th at 6 p.m. CT/PT & 7 p.m. ET/MT.
For more information and tickets, visit https://yg309.infusionsoft.com/app/orderForms/Tenth-Avenue-North?fbclid=IwAR3B2_IYs2nWp1_B7de4pUx4943H-Nf4GbV7TxJBAG1KcTCtsfHh6gYL53g.
