GRiZ goes cross country with Ayrton Kyalami and Rivale fixtures
Denver’s Voyage Productions chose Ayrton Kyalami and Rivale fixtures for a wide range of recent shows featuring longtime client GRiZ, the DJ, songwriter and electronic music producer from Southfield, Michigan. Thornton, Colorado’s Brown Note Productions, Inc. provided the Ayrton fixtures from its extensive inventory of the brand. ACT Entertainment is the exclusive distributor of Ayrton lighting in North America.
Voyage has worked with GRiZ for 13 years, and the turnkey production design and consulting firm has a long history with Ayrton fixtures as well. “We’re always looking for innovative fixtures, and Ayrton has been in the picture for us many times over the years,” says Kyle Kegan, who served as Production Designer for the GRiZ projects and co-Show Director with Ian Davis, who was also Creative Director and Operator. “The Kyalami and Rivale made big impacts on GRiZ’s shows.”
Ryan Knutson, President of Brown Note Productions commented, “When we bring new technology into our inventory, it has to make sense for our team, our workflow, and the kind of shows we’re supporting. We chose the Kyalami because it’s a fixture that delivers real output and control in a compact footprint. It allows our crew to deploy efficiently, gives designers flexibility, and performs consistently under pressure.
“For a production like GRiZ where the visuals are high-energy but also detailed and intentional, the Kyalami and Rivale combination was a natural fit,” Knutson continues. “The Kyalami gave us density and precision without adding unnecessary weight or complexity, and the Rivale brought the punch for key moments. Just as important, they integrate cleanly into our process from prep to show day.”
For the outdoor Valley of the Seven Stars camping music festival, Cassady Miller-Halloran, who teamed with Kegan and Davis on the design of the shows and handled programming, says they needed “something small and light that was a great beam. Kyalami was a perfect fit. It’s also super fast, which is very important for this genre of music.” Eighty-eight were deployed in the rig.
The team also found “a great modern spot fixture with clean optics” in 76 Rivale, he notes. “They were compact but had all the features we needed: gobos, animation wheel, framing shutters.”
A few weeks later, Voyage reprised Kyalami and Rivale for their design of GRiZ’s Re:Connect arena shows in Chicago and the San Francisco Bay area. “The geometry of the rig with the Rivale’s strong spots and Kyalami’s strong gobo looks, vivid colours and colour mixing was very important,” Davis says.
In the Chicago Wintrust Arena ten Kyalami were mounted in linear arrays while 48 Rivale fixtures were distributed throughout the rig as workhorse fixtures. “The Kyalami fixtures are so small that we could pack them tightly together on the truss to deliver a unique look like a curtain of beams,” recalls Miller-Halloran. “That would have been impossible with another fixture.”
The larger size of the Cow Palace required Voyage to increase that venue’s fixture count to 140 Kyalami and 64 Rivale, adding eight pods, each mounted with five Kyalami and two Rivale fixtures, in the audience to “bring the show out to the crowd with texture and gobo moments,” Davis explains.
A Detroit holiday tradition since 2014, The 12 Days of GRiZmas is an annual charity fundraiser during which GRiZ participates in citywide events and plays two shows at the city’s Masonic Theater. “These are smaller-scale shows, but we made the same fixture choices: 60 Kyalami and 40 Rivale fixtures, which were easy to scale to this smaller stage,” Davis reports.
The Voyage team also used two other brands exclusively distributed by ACT Entertainment in North America: grandMA3 consoles and MDG theONE™ atmospheric generators.
“We have used grandMA3 running MA3 software for several years now, and it’s definitely the framework around which we build shows,” says Miller-Halloran. For GRiZ’s tour Brown Note provided three full size consoles, a grandMA3 light as a tech desk on stage, plus six processing units to handle some 80,000 parameters.
Brown Note also supplied a pair of MDG theONE™ atmospheric generators. “They are always our top choice for atmosphere,” says Miller-Halloran. “We switch between their hazer and fogger modes for the shows, filling the room with haze and cueing the fog for cloud effects.”
The Voyage team has been so pleased with the Ayrton fixtures that they plan to keep them busy with GRiZ’s upcoming Re:Connect tour dates, spring and summer festivals and one-off shows at the end of 2026. “We will want to implement these fixtures on our designs for other artists, too,” Davis notes.
He adds that, “Brown Note has been a great partner for us over the years in making our shows come together, and we’re excited to continue working with them.”
“At the end of the day, our decisions come down to people, process, and packaging. We want gear that supports our technicians, streamlines deployment, and shows up every night. The Ayrton lineup checks those boxes, and that’s why it earned its place in our inventory,” adds Knutson.
“We’re also eager to see what Ayrton continues to add to its arsenal and the new ways we can use their fixtures,” concludes Kegan.
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Text: Courtesy of ACT Entertainment
Photos: © Jason Siegel Photography
