PRAGUE — No one enters The Dakar, a 10,000 kilometer (6,200 mile) off road rally from Paris to the Senegal capital, without a high-spirited sense of adventure. No one completes, no less wins it, without ironclad determination. Olga Lounová possesses both in abundance!

The multi-talented Czechoslovakian native, who was the navigator on a winning Dakar team, is known throughout her country as an actress and singer. She was set to take her singing career to the next level, moving from smaller theatres to larger arena-level venues when COVID shut down everything. After the pandemic subsided, she was set to reboot her career in music, when Dakar came calling.

 

As she was about to try yet again, she became pregnant. Some singers might have put their plans on hold at that point, but not Olga! Pregnant or not, she began her move to larger venues in December. Luckily, she had a partner in Martin Hruska, one of the world’s leading stage designers, who not only possessed immense talent, but matched her in pure grit and determination.

“This has been a true journey,” said Hruska. “The tour was postponed several times, first because of Covid, later due to the Dakar Rally– and now almost again as a result of Olga’s pregnancy. However, we went ahead with this tour, and in the end, everything has gone very well. Olga is the first Czech female artist to reach the US Billboard charts. There has been a great deal of fan interest. Our first concert was realized with great success at the O2 Universum Prague hall, which has a capacity of 6000 people. The next step is to move her shows to venues two and three times that size.”

 

Modifying his design to account for his client’s pregnancy, Hruska relied on 98 CHAUVET Professional fixtures, supplied by Czechoslovakia-based Mastro to create seamless flowing lighting looks for his client. Run by LD Dominik Šiška on a ChamSys MagicQ MQ500M Stadium Console, the lighting highlighted the many distinctive elements of Hruska’s set design.

“Due to the artist’s pregnancy, I had to simplify many things in the concert, especially her flying and her movement on floating objects,” explained Hruska. “I only kept a tilting cross with stairs and a railing that she could climb onto without fear. The choreographer had to simplify the choreography, basically Olga did not have any major choreographic movements and we transferred all the movement to the dance company.”

 

Discussing the automated cross set piece, Hruska said “The cross seemed to me to be the optimal simple solution to scaling the set to accommodate Olga’s pregnancy. It is an interesting shape. We had a LED screen is mounted on it, and it moves with four motors. I created stairs with equally high and deep steps, which were attached to the upper part of the cross and allowed a 45-degree tilt in both directions of tilt.

“This allowed me to achieve two different scenes: the cross could be tilted with the screen forward and the artist standing on it, or the cross could be tilted in reverse so that the stairs could be seen from the audience’s perspective as the artist climbed up,” continued Hruska. “There was also a third option with a reduction that would allow the artist to stand on the horizontal position of the cross and float above the stage. I eliminated this during the preparations due to the advanced stage of the artist’s pregnancy. To sum it up, the cross combined with the LED in the background allowed me to create more interesting effects.”

Adding a captivating sense of depth to Hruska’s effects was his artful fusion of video and lighting. Relying on color matching and carefully coordinated movements and brightness levels, he ensured that video imagery and lighting worked together to provide an immersive backdrop to his client’s performance.

This combination was beautifully evident during the song “Dark Water” when Hruska and his LD Šiška created an “underwater world” on stage by coordinating colorful light with video images of fish swimming and jellyfish rising. “I also used jellyfish as real props in the foreground of the image, and thus a 3D realistic scene of the underwater world materialized,” noted Hruska. “In the middle of this scene was Olga and a tilted cross.”

Providing colors for this vivid panorama were 28 Color STRIKE M motorized strobe-washes, 22 COLORado PXL Curve battens, 12 Rogue R2X Beams, 12 Maverick Storm 3 BeamWashes. Adding extra punch to the design at key moments and delivering audience lighting were 24 STRIKE Array 2 fixtures, flown on the downstage truss.

Šiška used many of these fixtures to outline the contours of Hruska’s compelling design. For example, 16 of the Color STRIKE M fixtures were positioned on the floor in a semi-circular layout, following and accentuating the outline of the stage decal, while eight of the COLORado PXL Curve 12 motorized battens were mounted on the cross-set piece to accent its shape.

The remaining fixtures were distributed along the sides of the stage and the upstage edge. Šiška positioned the Rogue R2X Beams evenly at the rear of the stage, behind the band. “The beams were primarily used to enhance the show’s dynamics, adding energy and visual impact throughout the performance,” said Šiška. “The Maverick Storm 3 BeamWash fixtures were used to illuminate the band and dancers, with eight units mounted on the front truss and four units positioned on the floor at the sides of the stage.”

In Hruska’s view, the sold-out concert, succeeded in giving fans a taste of what to expected in future Olga Lounová concerts. “We wanted to get people excited,” he said. “Given Olga’s popularity, the plan is to repeat the concert at bigger and bigger venues with bigger excitement.”