Council & Public Events · Brisbane Region

Working With Brisbane City Council

Riverstage is Brisbane's heartbeat for live music. Every genre, every scale, every season. The challenge for the council isn't booking artists—it's making sure every performer, from solo acoustic acts to 4-piece bands to full touring ensembles, feels like they're on a proper stage. That starts with lighting. When we inherited the Riverstage lighting brief for 2025, the existing rig was tired. EDO fixtures from 2010, a lighting desk that required 45 minutes to reprogram, and a power distribution system that maxed out at 40 amps. For a venue pumping out three to four events a week, that's a disaster. Half the touring bands refused to use it. The council knew they needed to upgrade but wasn't sure what "right" looked like for an outdoor amphitheatre. We mapped the brief: 120-seat capacity, 30-metre sightlines, open-sky backdrop (so you couldn't use harsh backlighting without blinding the audience), and a tight budget. We designed a touring-grade rig that didn't pretend to be a 2000-capacity arena but did deliver genuine concert lighting for acts operating at that scale. The kit: 12x 1200W intelligent fixtures (ETC Source Fours with moving mirror modules), 16x colour-mixing LED pars for accent lighting, 8x intelligent wash lights for general illumination, and a proper lighting console (Chamsys MagicQ) that an operator could reprogram in under 15 minutes between acts. Every light tied into a single DMX network, every network isolated from the venue's power grid to avoid ground-loop hum on the audio system. The first test run was a four-piece indie band in late October. The lighting designer showed up, plugged in their show file (designed for a conventional venue two hours north), and we adapted it live using our console. Seventy-five minutes later, the band played a ninety-minute set under proper stage lighting. The promoter was surprised we could flex like that. We weren't—we were just giving them tools that worked at their actual scale. By November, Riverstage was hosting touring acts that had previously played larger venues. The word got out: Riverstage now has real lighting. The council's attendance numbers climbed, the promoter added a third night per week, and touring bands started requesting the venue specifically. We went from legacy kit holding the venue back to equipment accelerating it. The real lesson: outdoor amphitheatres don't need arena rigs. They need touring rigs—flexible, quick to reprogram, powerful enough to create atmosphere, and reliable enough that an operator can troubleshoot in the dark. Once you nail that, the artists show up, and the venue wins.