In addition to moving its schedule up a month earlier, the 2025 edition of Hype’O Dream dance festival had live band performances on stage for the first time in its 11-year history. The festival featured dance bands like Regi, The Subs and Compact Disk Dummies.
The festival organisers’ goal was to be true to their event’s original dance DNA. They accomplished this in no uncertain terms. The 2025 edition of Hype’O Dream celebrated its dance festival roots in brilliant fashion from the floor-filling music, to the kinetic lighting and production design from John&Jane that featured 266 CHAUVET Professional fixtures.
The festival’s main stage, which rose in steps until it reached its towering centre apex, created an awe inspiring cathedral-like setting that lent itself to an electronic dance celebration. At the heart of the stage were 40 insanely bright Maverick Storm 1 Flex fixtures that sent intense waves of visual excitement through the air.
A collection of 95 STRIKE P38 blinders, 63 Rogue Outcast 1 BeamWashes, and four STRIKE Array 4 units also drew festival goers into the dance music with bright beams of light. On the stage itself, colourful light from 48 COLORado Panel Q40 RGBW rectangular washes reflected the mood of the music with a flow of changing palettes. Through their varying light angles and edge-to-edge colour mixing, the COLORado fixtures also contributed to some attractive backdrops on the stage.
Lending an added visual dimension to the stage were the rig’s 16 Color STRIKE M motorised strobe-washes. The versatile fixture filled a wide range of roles during the two- day festival, providing intense background light and brilliant stage washes, as well as being used for pixel mapped effects.
Although Hype’O Dream created seamless experience for fans, making the festival’s lighting work to perfection required close coordination on the part of the John&Jane team. As is typical in productions of this magnitude there were also challenges.
Since many of the fixtures were mounted on the scaffolding, the build was different from those where lighting is simply flown on a truss. But the John&Jane team met this challenge in flying colours thanks to their skill and a collection of fixtures that deliver a lot of punch for their size.
