Designing Sarah Connor’s Freigeistin tour

Image: Paul Gärtner

Sarah Connor is one of the most successful German-language artists of her generation. Her current number one album Freigeistin has brought her through a spring arena run across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, with the production continuing into the summer with the Wilde Nächte open-air series.

The lighting and production design is once again in the hands of Bertil Mark, who has collaborated with Connor for many years. His specification for the current tour is built around 12 GLP TWYN and 57 GLP WildBar 16.

The show’s visual concept is centred on a controlled reveal. It opens with a large semi-circular LED wall flanked by two side IMAG screens, with the lighting rig remaining largely out of sight. Sarah Connor is alone on stage and the energy of the opening songs comes from her presence and voice rather than the scale of the production.

“It was important to us that Sarah carries the show alone at first,” says Mark. “The large lighting setup is deliberately hidden at the beginning. The energy comes only from her performance, not from the technology.”

The dramaturgy reflects the broader narrative of the production, as the show traces Sarah Connor’s journey from her first steps as an artist through to the full arena spectacle. The turning point comes when the central LED wall rises to reveal the band, dancers, and backing singers on a two-tier riser. From that moment, the role of light shifts from intimate and image-led to spatially layered, with depth, structure, and movement brought to the foreground.

The 12 TWYN units are positioned on the side ramps of the riser and on the riser itself, behind and between the musicians, where they define the show’s spatial depth. As a dual-face moving head, the TWYN carries a 3×3 RGBL wash array with nine 40W LEDs on one face and a hybrid strobe on the other, combining 36 white LEDs with 480 RGBW LEDs in the surrounding segments.

Running both faces simultaneously is where the fixture earns its role in the rig. One side illuminates surfaces, backdrops, or performers, while the other delivers strobe or FX accents in parallel.

In a show that moves constantly between intimate moments and large-scale pop sequences, this dual capability is consistently put to use. The TWYN units create not only different looks across the set, but through simultaneous operation of both faces, they also add visual layers that would otherwise require additional fixture types.

Colour consistency across the rig is maintained by GLP’s iQ.Gamut technology, which both the TWYN and the WildBar 16 share. Working alongside large-format LED content, reliable reproduction of pastels, saturated colours, and white light across different fixture types is essential to the coherence of the visual world.

While the TWYN units handle depth and energy at the back of the stage, the 57 WildBar 16 units define its architecture at the front. They line the edge of the main stage, run the full length of the walkway, and trace the perimeter of the circular B-stage, drawing the entire playing area as a continuous line of light.

With 16 40W RGBL LEDs, a motorised 190-degree tilt, and a zoom range of 4° to 44°, the WildBar 16 handles tight light curtains and broad washes alike. The identical pixel pitch within and between units produces homogeneous lines and clean pixel structures across the full length of the stage edge, walkway, and B-stage.

Both fixtures carry IP65 ratings, making the transition to the outdoor Wilde Nächte dates straightforward. The series began in May and is currently running through to the end of August 2026.