Light for live music

Why a prototyping studio lights concerts

Light has been the thread through everything Hola has made — the lamps, the installations on the beach, the interactive sculptures. Lighting live music is the same craft under the hardest conditions: one evening, no second take, a room you get for a few hours, and performers who should never have to think about it.

It is also where Vaib, our AI stage-lighting designer, comes from. Every rig we have planned, programmed and run taught it what a real show needs.

Where it started: 2022

Our first full season was 2022, and it set the pattern: monumental rooms that were never built for a light rig.

At the 2TO2 festival in the Batavierhuis, a national monument in Rotterdam, commissioned by Droom en Dat, we lit more than twenty performances over a weekend — drawing out the character of the building while giving each act its own atmosphere.

For the band Bonsai Panda we lit their concert in the Armeniuskerk: vibrant colour against the wood and brick, drawing the eye to the stage and the organ above it.

For The Larsen Pipes, Simone Bottasso’s performance at De Doelen, light became one of the actors, programmed scene by scene with the music.

And for North Sea Round Town we lit the opening of George Dumitriu’s Hazard Ensemble at the Tropicana, Rotterdam’s former tropical swimming pool, with light, haze and projection under the glass dome.

From 2022 into 2023, with the Royal Surfclub collective, we designed light for DJ nights in unusual places — Weelde in Rotterdam, The Grey Space in the Middle and PIP in The Hague.

North Sea Round Town, in the Laurenskerk

North Sea Round Town is Rotterdam’s jazz festival across the city. Its Night Program concerts take place in the Laurenskerk, the city’s medieval church — stone columns, high vaults, and an audience lying on cushions on the floor.

We have worked with the festival every year since 2022 — the Tropicana in 2022, an installation at the Margarinefabriek in 2023 — and have lit the Night Program in the church every year since 2024: in 2024 for Joachim Badenhorst’s night, in 2025 for the opening concert RE:Collections, with Kit Downes on the church organ, and in 2026 for Runa Becomes Sun.

A church fights you. There is nowhere to hang anything, and the architecture is the show — so the light goes up the columns and into the vaults, and the musicians sit in a pool of warm light below.

The rig is planned on the church’s floor plan on a one-metre grid, and run from a laptop and controller on the floor among the audience.

Batafest

We have come back to the Batavierhuis every year since 2TO2. Since 2023 we have done the lighting and stage for Batafest — several stages and a nightlife floor in one building, each with its own programme, quote and plan.

Seeing it before it exists

Most of our lighting is designed in Twinmotion before anything is hired: the venue modelled, the fixtures placed, the looks rendered. A client signs off on pictures, not promises, and the rig that arrives is the rig that was agreed.

For the Hazard Ensemble at the Tropicana, the render placed light among the old rock garden under the glass dome — compare it with the photo from the night above.

Writing light with performers

For the Blink Quartet in Utrecht, the light was written as a script, scene by scene with the musicians. It starts in darkness, so the audience listens before they look. Light then comes from behind the audience while the players move around the hall. Flocking-bird footage is projected onto white sheets and onto the performers themselves, dressed in white. It ends where it began, so the piece has a frame.

For the Noordpool Orkest’s theatre tour Elvis Never Left the Building, Part II — 37 musicians on stage — we built the lighting set-up and ran the shows. For RITUS, a gathering in Historisch Delfshaven reflecting on the colonial past, we made light installations for a shrine and a corridor.

Where it stands

North Sea Round Town and Batafest come back every year, and each show feeds what Vaib knows about real rigs in real rooms.