New Dimensions – Cameo at the Tante Mia Tanzt Festival 2023

On May 18 2023, 20,000 electro and EDM fans were drawn to the tranquil town of Vechta in Lower Saxony, Germany. In just seven years, the Tante Mia Tanzt Festival has become a permanent fixture in the festival calendar and once again offered a strong line-up featuring top international DJs like Netsky, Steve Aoki and W&W. The open-air festival is like an annual family reunion for all involved and benefits from continuity and creative ideas. This year, Eventures GmbH was once again responsible for the technical event equipment. Milan Spira was once again behind the lighting desk. Spira had already used plenty of Cameo moving lights for the 2022 edition, and this year left the stage(s) to the OTOS, OPUS and ZENIT series!

Larger stage – fewer spotlights

In 2023, the festival offered the spectators a different sight: with a width of 68 metres and a height of 14 metres, the stage was significantly larger than in the previous year. At the same time, Milan Spira and his video partner Paris Yilmaz – both members of the creative collective Clubkind Design – had to deal with the organiser’s reduced budget: “We used fewer lights this year than in 2022 and also reduced the LED walls on the stage. So the challenge was to make the lighting setup as efficient as possible so that it doesn’t look like ‘less’ to the audience on the huge stage,” Spira explains.

The solution: the stage was divided into several levels, on which Spira distributed a total of 56 Cameo OTOS H5 IP65 Beam-Spot-Wash Hybrid Moving Heads in groups of five, and used them primarily for beams and fan looks: “This way, the overall image looks bigger and has more depth.” As the budget and stage setup did not allow for hundreds of lighting fixtures, Spira needed a multifunctional fixture that could produce both the cutting beams typical of EDM festivals and gobo projections.

“The OTOS H5 forms the centre of my lighting design and offers everything I need: bright beams, cool gobo looks and IP65 outdoor capability.”
Milan Spira, Lighting Designer (Clubkind Design)

The diamond in the hallway

In addition to the open-air main stage, Tante Mia Tanzt also offers a tent stage in the “Diele”, where house, future house and live acts find their home. Here, the OPUS H5 Beam-Spot-Wash Hybrid Moving Heads and ZENIT W600 SMD LED Wash Lights dominate the lighting setup. “We took our cue from a diamond in terms of stage and truss shape, framing the artists in the ceiling with the OPUS H5s as if they were in a cage,” Spira explains. In addition to the vertical “cage beams”, the OPUS H5s – like their IP65 brothers on the outdoor stage – were also used for gobo projections. The ZENIT W600 SMDs sat both in the truss, to illuminate the marquee in colour, and on the stage floor for massive strobe and blinder effects.