Let’s Dance
Designed by Nikolaus Langer, PyroDigit Firing with 5255 cues.
The debutante team from Austria were treated to perfect weather conditions, both during their five day setup and on night of the display. Despite it being a Wednesday, La Ronde had a large attendance of around 21,000 people, according to official sources. The designer, Nikolaus Langer, is the second youngest in the history of the competition at 24 years old, just one year older than Nikola Koletic who won silver for Croatia in 2013 and five years younger than three-times Gold Jupiter winner Yanick Roy, who took the top prize in 2003 at the age of 29.
The theme of the display was essentially the evolution of dance, and featured many styles distributed over sixteen musical pieces. Given the nature of dance, it’s rather challenging to design a soundtrack that features difference tempi, but steyrFire managed to do this fairly successfully. One criticism that could be made is that some of the pieces were a tad long and there were a few different types of transition between the pieces with some featuring mini-finales but others with more of a fade out. However, all the music was enjoyable and well chosen.
The display was definitely heavily biased towards low-level one-shot effects, with scarcely any shells at all during the opening piece of music. This must have been a bit disconcerting for the audience outside La Ronde. There were many interesting patterns used across ramp three, but, as is the case with one-shots, eventually the patterns end up being repeated (even though the actual pyrotechnic effect may differ). This was the case with this display. As there were fewer shells used than the typical displays in competition at La Ronde, this lead to the feeling that some of the segments were either unbalanced or lacked power, though, in other portions of the display, the shell sequences were powerful and sky-filling with excellent large calibre shells. Particularly memorable was a sequence of silver rain shells with mines below fired from ramp 5 that both filled the sky from above and gave the feeling of a moving curtain of sparks in front.
An anticipated segment was that to the music of Y.M.C.A. which was supposed to be augmented by mines firing the letters from ramp 5. Unfortunately, even though the letter sequence was fired four times, really only the “C” and “A” could be clearly seen as the shape they were supposed to be. As this was also a long song, it was unfortunate that all the letters were fired at the beginning.
In general, the products used reflected the type of music well (with tourbillons and farfalles during “The Twist”) and the choice of colours (which were always very vivid) worked well too. Two 30m high lifts were used to fire 360 degree patterns (or 180 degrees) and these worked well, though the sequences used in some cases were very similar to those from ramp 3, giving the impression that ramp 3 was somehow just higher in the air.
The audience was very enthusiastic throughout the display and gave the team a loud standing ovation after the exciting finale. Overall, it was a very good display, especially given their debutante status, but a few points were missed here and there in terms of repetition of firing patters and weak shell support sometimes as well as lack of nautical products (though there was a sequence of stars skipping across the water in front of ramp 3). Definitely a company to watch and hopefully we will see them in Montreal again!