I met with Emeric Poirier, part of the team of three who worked on the design of this year’s opening show. Emeric is part of the Masson family (son of Bernard’s daughter Josée) and represents the third generation working at the company. Emeric said that Paul Masson had been largely responsible for designing the show together with himself and Gaston Poirier.
BEM had last competed in 2019, a year before their 50th anniversary, as well as presenting the opening show in 2015. BEM also competed in 2011 and in 2005, when they won the Bronze Jupiter.
Emeric said that this is a busy week for the company, with their display falling between the twin fireworks holidays of St Jean Baptiste Day (24th June) and Canada Day (July 1st). This lead to working late nights at their facility in order to prepare all of their shows. Emeric said that the company was presenting 16 large pyromusicals during this period and countless smaller shows fired by local artificiers.
For this opening show, the theme of the soundtrack – Viva Latino – had been selected by La Ronde and the competition’s technical director, Paul Csukassy, had spent around two months compiling the final montage of 19 pieces. The mandate was to only use “new latino” music, so nothing older than around seven years, thus obviating well-worn classics from the likes of Ricky Martin. Paul said a large challenge was that the rhythm and pace of such music doesn’t show much variety – a comment also echoed by Emeric who said it made it more difficult to design. He said the rhythmic nature of the music could cause the designer to spend all of the budget in the first ten minutes if care wasn’t taken!
On the technical side, the display will be fired with 56 FireOne UltraFire modules (of 32 cues each) and will feature five positions on ramps one, two and three. There will be no pontoons used (ramp 5) nor ramp 4 (the roof of the control structure). For the fireworks themselves, these will largely be taken from BEM’s arsenal of Chinese-manufactured products (many, especially cakes and slice-cakes, to their specifications). There will also be some Spanish and Italian products too together with some nauticals.
Emeric talked enthusiastically about his work in the pyrotechnics industry and how it combines his passion for landscape gardening (noting that many fireworks are named after flowers, such as peonies, chrysanthemums etc.) as well as his deep love of all of the sciences. Indeed, he has a background in Environmental Engineering and noted that Canada has very strict criteria on the materials that can be used to make fireworks. He also noted that fireworks evoke the same passions in all types of people, irrespective of their background and invited the public to come and enjoy the start of the summer season to the rhythms of Latino music!