Council & Public Events · Brisbane Region

Working With Brisbane City Council

The Brisbane Multicultural Festival is where the city celebrates its cultural diversity. Multiple stages, dozens of performing groups, food from every continent, and an energy that's intentionally celebratory. When the council brought us in to design lighting for the 2025 festival, they had one brief: make every culture's performances feel honoured and elevated. That's a delicate brief. You can't light every stage identically—that erases cultural specificity. But you also can't light each group with stereotypical colour choices (no rainbow pride palettes for every non-Western act, no tokenism). The lighting had to be respectful, professional, and genuinely tailored to each performance. We started by meeting with the festival's cultural programming director and the representatives from each performing group. We learned about the music, the dance, the cultural context. Then we designed a lighting palette for each stage based on what actually mattered to the performance, not on assumptions about culture. The main stage got a full touring rig: 24x intelligent colour-mixing fixtures, a professional lighting console, and an experienced operator who could reprogram between every act. The secondary stages got distributed LED rigs that could support multiple colour palettes within a single show. The ambient areas (food courts, marketplace zones) got warm atmospheric lighting that made the space feel intentional without competing with the performances. The Sudanese dance group needed contrast and clarity—we lit them with sharp front light and cool backlighting so the movement read at distance. The Indian classical musicians needed a softer, more diffuse light that emphasized the nuance rather than the spectacle. The Brazilian samba group got warm, dynamic lighting with colour shifts that matched the energy of the music. Each group got the lighting language they needed. The challenge was turnaround time. With seven stages and twenty-two performing groups, we had maybe 12 minutes between acts to reprogram lighting. Our console operator and secondary technicians got so efficient by day two that we were hitting changes in under eight minutes. By day three, the programming was flowing almost automatically—the operator was anticipating the next act's needs and pre-loading cues while the current act was still performing. By November, the festival had run for three days across four weekends. The council's feedback was consistent: every group felt supported, every stage felt professional, and attendees commented that the lighting made the performances feel equally important and equally celebrated. That was the entire brief. The real lesson: inclusive design isn't about adding more colours or being louder. It's about understanding what each performance needs and delivering exactly that. When you do that work, the impact is profound. People feel seen. The culture feels honoured. The festival lands the way it's supposed to.