When design studio Auratecture was asked to rethink Reggae Land at the Milton Keynes National Bowl, the answer involved 500 GLP X-PAR 12Z on a single main stage. The quantity was not just there for spectacle. It was the solution to the problem that shapes every daylight festival – how to give an artist a light show when the sun is out. “It wasn’t about the beams, it was about the colours,” says Jevons. “And it just worked. It was so bright.”
Auratecture is the lighting and production design studio run by Ross Chapple and Nick Jevons, specialising in stylistically driven, design-focused stage concepts for concerts, touring and live events. The studio approaches lighting design from an architectural perspective, with shape, form and narrative as the backbone of the work. Jevons has been a lighting designer for more than three decades, beginning as a touring LD before moving into festival and corporate design. Chapple came up through Jevons’s own production company before spending eight years designing for Eric Prydz. The pair have worked together again at Auratecture for the past few years.
Reggae Land’s promoters approached Auratecture with a clear instruction. After six to eight years, the festival had settled at a level. For 2026, they wanted it taken somewhere else. Jevon and Chapple’s response increased the video surface by around 80 per cent and doubled the lighting fixture count.
“It’s one of these festivals that, prior to this, I’d never heard of, but it turns out it’s now the biggest reggae festival in the world,” says Nick Jevons, lighting designer and co-founder, Auratecture. “We had two days, each sold out. The promoters came to us and told us to take this to the next level, so we did.”
What Auratecture proposed was a single integrated object rather than a stage with equipment on it.
“We wanted something that was big and bold and that just really stands out,” says Jevons. “Before it’s even switched on, it’s important to be able to look at it and go, ‘Wow, that looks good, and I can’t wait to see it in the dark!’ With the design, it was supposed to be like the video was peeling away to reveal huge sections of lighting. That was the concept. You're peeling away layers and there’s something behind each.”
The GLP X-PAR 12Z sat behind those peeled-back layers. IMAG was handled not as conventional 16:9 screens flanking the stage, but as full-width video running from the top of the stage to the bottom and wrapping around it, continuing upstage. Where the video peeled away at the corners, the fixtures were revealed behind, densely packed across the exposed surface. The same treatment extended to the four delay towers out in the bowl, where video, fixtures and the PA hangs were designed as one enveloped structure.
“That’s when you can actually say the term production design, because it had all the elements of a production wrapped up together as one coherent thing of beauty,” says Jevons. “You could see it, hear it, and watch it. So many times, production elements fight against each other for your attention. But this was one unified thing.”
The reason that arrangement needed 500 fixtures rather than a fraction of that comes down to daylight. At a festival of this length, only the headliner performs in full darkness, and the act before them might get twenty minutes of it. Everyone else plays in the sun.
“The ultimate challenge is, how do you get a light show at a festival during the daytime? The majority of the artists perform during the day,” says Jevons. “Because video is so bright and powerful, the fixtures had to be equally as bright to keep up with that video, as they’re right next to the video screen. We wanted a densely packed, populated surface area of fixtures, and it needed to register in the daytime.”
The summer of 2026 tested that directly, with cloudless skies across the festival.
“There was not a cloud in the sky, it was baking hot, and yet we had a light show,” says Jevons. “But every artist had a light show during the day, because we built it so you could see it.”
The fixtures were run at full zoom throughout, with colour gradient fades across the surface.
"As it came out with a haze, all the colours blended together. It was just about this colour mass, this colour saturation that we wanted,” says Jevons.
Two practical factors made the quantity workable. The X-PAR 12Z is IP-rated, without which Jevons says the design would not have been viable in a British festival field at all, and its rental cost allowed the numbers to scale in a way a more expensive fixture would not have.
“It wouldn’t have worked if they weren’t IP-rated,” says Jevons. “Budget always plays a huge part in these things too, and that’s why we were able to work with such vast numbers of the fixture, because they were so well priced. We could go, how much do they cost to rent? Great, well, let’s keep them coming.”
Two other GLP fixtures completed the picture. The impression X5 provided the main wash over the stage from trims of 13 to 14 metres, with enough output to punch through the video screen behind. GLP JDC Burst 1 fixtures edged the entire thrust and were used as wash lights rather than purely as strobes, flipped out into the audience during the day with the plate effects tied into the wider design. Then, they were turned back onto the stage after dark to light artists walking down the thrust.
Colour consistency across the three fixture types mattered as much as output. “You’ve got the same colour temperature throughout the GLP stuff – the same reds, the same blues, the same greens. We just knew we were going to get that,” says Jevons.
The festival, supplied by PRG, went the distance almost untouched. Of the 500 X-PAR 12Z, two were swapped out. On camera, the fixtures held up equally well, appearing in shot on the IMAG feeds through the evening without flicker.
Auratecture then took the Reggae Land concept to Diaspora Calling! at the same venue, with Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu on the bill and Dave Chappelle hosting. The budget was different, and the design was cut accordingly. The video on the delay towers came out, the main stage was retained and the sides filled in, and the fixture count came down. The studio also wanted the second festival to read as its own event rather than a repeat.
“Reggae Land was the statement. That was the design. That’s what we needed to deliver,” says Jevons. “Diaspora didn’t have that budget, so we just cut our cloth accordingly. But we kept the main stage and filled in the sides, as that was Reggae Land’s unique look and we didn’t want that to be what we did with Diaspora. We wanted to give it a unique look, a different look as well, and we still achieved that.”
The commercial verdict arrived quickly. The promoters had taken a considerable risk on production spend. Within two weeks of the festival closing, they released 55,000 early bird tickets for 2027 and sold out without announcing a single headliner. Simultaneously, artist management began calling after seeing images circulate on social channels to request those artists come back again for 2027. Auratecture has been rebooked since, and they’ve been asked to design the entire festival next year rather than the main stage alone.
Among the visiting lighting designers working the stage across Reggae Land 2026, the daytime capability drew the most comment, with guest LDs noting they could finally see what they were doing before dark.
“They were the standout heroes, the GLP X-PARs,” says Jevons. “Unsung, because they can’t move, so they get forgotten about. But goodness, they pack a punch.”
