Wincent Weiss Sommer Tour 2026
Task
Creative & Show Direction
More than eighteen months ago, Wincent arrived with the idea of an entire architecture: a single modular set capable of producing two distinct worlds. He called it HELL and DUNKEL, bright and dark. It became the visual DNA of the entire show.
In its bright state, the set reads as a field of individual LED-clad towers, wrapped in a beige curtain. In its dark state, those same towers reassemble into one continuous ten-metre LED wall behind black. One kit, two atmospheres, built for the open air and the long light of a summer evening.
I started from a simple conviction: an image on stage should never be arbitrary. It should belong: to the artist, and to the journey his songs describe across the night. Much of the international live tradition has long treated the stage as a storytelling instrument: set and content grounded in the artist’s own world, drawing on shared cultural and musical cues, building an arc the audience can follow. That embodied verve, we translated into strong imagery, world-building, a narrative you can feel.
So HELL and DUNKEL became much more than the labels for each act. They are a dramaturgical curve drawn from Wincent himself: a journey from breath and openness tightening into density and intensity, with every song placed where its energy belongs on that line. A show built to slap before the sun even sets.
Before any content even existed, we wrote the rules. Across our creative development phase, I set the aesthetic and kinetic principles that place Wincent at the centre of every transition, every energy bump, every piece of interactive content. Five North Stars became the show’s shared language: one framework every department could build from, so lighting, video, pyro, and stage moved as a single instrument: Nothing stands alone. Wincent is the trigger. Continuous visuality. Seamless transitions. Made for the open sky.
On top of the North Stars sat the dramaturgical curve itself: a journey from Luminous Maximalism (open, luminous, character-driven, Wincent as anchor and host), into Radiant Momentum, where spectacle condenses to the few elements that hit hardest in the body, Wincent as the impulse that drives it forward.
With the rules in place, the real work began: threading a story through the set, using Wincent’s own performance logic as the line. The ambition was as simple as it was impactful: to create moments that hold their own beside him, never competing with the performance, always feeding his energy and relentless power on stage.
The hardest constraint: the visual world had to live on a daylight-lit stage. I drew on the hyper-real, big-room language of contemporary event techno … saturation, exposure, pure energy … a vocabulary that has rarely found its way into narrative pop, and asked how it might serve a song-driven show.
Wincent is power and raw pop, a force of nature, so the first act leans into full-colour blocking, gradients, exposure bumps, and texture paths drawn across natural elements: stone, waves, water.
Together with video artists Balkan Karışman and Antonia Melzer, we built the opening as a play of energies: gradient paths, scanner strobes, and alternating colour states rooted in daylight pastels. Rather than literal imagery, these visuals served uplifting realness.
A physical lenticular glass plate sat across the front-facing panels, adding a layer of real, optical depth no screen alone could fake (lighting design by Tom Groß).
The second act changes register. Narrative, anamorphic content gives way to generative, unedited bursts of energy. We built these visuals in TouchDesigner as a parameterized generative system: a living engine with real-time control over saturation, displacement, reactive bumps, C-parts, and EDM breakdowns, then rendered the looks to final video and finished them in Resolume.
Nature-led motifs, liquid glass, anamorphic forms, and 3D simulation carry the back half of the set. After dark, the transparent screen finally comes into full power, and bespoke Notch looks bring the finale its shine.
The most current visual language (hyperreal digital content, generative systems, the saturated energy of the big room) hits hardest when it meets something physically real in the same breath. So the show is built as a constant exchange between the two: a digital world on screen, answered by physical effects you can feel in the room.
That exchange is the heart of the piece, and it is what keeps a fast, modern show emotional. The digital keeps it current. The physical keeps it human. And neither is ever allowed to pull focus from the one thing that matters most: the artist at the centre of it all.
The show’s spine is an arc written in cloud and water. In the first act, we infuse the infield with horizontal eCO₂ bursts, conjuring a standing cloud that gathers on stage around Wincent: weather as staging.
The cloud returns for the newest song of the set, FLIEG, this time ignited by real fire (developed and powerfully executed by H4Stage), with Wincent commanding the top of the LED wall.
Finally, the arc completes in “Spring”: a new, high-energy EDM breakdown detonates across the audience and the B-stage, green comets climbing to sixty metres to close the story in the sky.
The night ends the way it should: an aerial firework finale built on a Super Bowl-inspired, rapid-fire sequence: a dense, tightly choreographed barrage with screen and stage colour locked in sync.
For all the spectacle, one principle held above the rest: the fans should see Wincent’s face, clearly and often. The live image is a clean feed, framed from the American perspective, so it could move freely between the IMAG screens and Notch-treated content.
I steered away from grungy or glitchy looks by design. The lighting and the video worlds we built became the visual context for his face: letting him appear in the IMAGs in the very same aesthetic as the stage around him.
Where Notch entered, it served clarity or underlined a lyric. In the new single “Uhhh / Alle so,” a Resolume-and-Notch combination multiplies Wincent across the on-stage IMAGs through the chorus, crystal-sharp, yet just tainted enough to feel like a world of its own. Coachella-ready visuals for Germany’s summer stages.
The final craft is show flow, the tight choreography of cues that protects Wincent’s energy and keeps the stage working with him, never against him. This is where direction earns its keep: on site, in the rehearsal room, translating a season of ideas into a living show. Cue by cue, we pressure-tested every transition against the reality of the stage, timing pyro to breath, syncing colour across screen and light, tightening the gaps until the spreadsheets disappeared and only the performance energy remained. The aim was never precision for its own sake. It was to build a show so fluent that Wincent could step into it and simply play.
German live production is world-class at what it does: precision, craft, and the ability to deliver flawlessly under real pressure. This show set out to add a concept-first, story-led layer to that strength, abstract visuals that carry meaning, bound to the artist and to the shape of the night. The two together produced a show that was impeccably built: proof that concept-first authorship can live inside a production culture built for precision, and that the leap from idea to execution holds all the way to the stage.
- Creative Direction — Held the creative vision end to end, translating Wincent’s creative lead idea into a fully directed show. Owned the throughline from first principle to final cue, keeping the artist at the centre of every decision.
- Authored the Show’s Creative Framework — Wrote the rule book that unified every department: the Five North Stars and the dramaturgical curve from Luminous Maximalism into Radiant Momentum, giving lighting, video, pyro, and stage one shared language to build from.
- Daylight-First Visual Strategy — Brought the hyper-real, big-room language of contemporary event techno into narrative pop, and engineered every content and lighting moment to hold up under open summer sky; clarity and impact in residual daylight, not just after dark.
- Directed Content Creation & Pipeline — Led the visual development with video artists Balkan Karışman (video content) & Antonia Melzer (on-site support), shaping a parameterized generative system in TouchDesigner, finished through Resolume and bespoke Notchlooks.
- Integrated Pyro, Fire & Atmospherics as Dramaturgy — Wove eCO₂, real fire (H4Stage), and an aerial firework finale into the emotional arc: from the standing cloud that gathers around Wincent to a Super Bowl–inspired, cue-dense finale with screen and stage colour locked in sync.
- Camera & IMAG Direction — Set a face-first principle for the live image: a clean feed, framed from the American perspective, letting Wincent read on the IMAGs in the very same aesthetic as the stage around him: steering deliberately clear of grungy or glitchy treatments.
- Action-Mapped Show Flow — Storyboarded the entire show, mapped Wincent’s performance paths and energy first; where he stands, runs, plays, and meets the crowd; then built content, effects, and cues around that logic, so every moment lands with maximum force and nothing pulls focus from the artist.
- Led On-Site Show Direction — Directed the show into being from dry-tech through rehearsals to premiere, building a self-sufficient cue flow that protects the artist’s energy and keeps the stage working with him; precision in service of spontaneity, never at its expense.
Creative, Visual, and Show Direction
Wincent Weiss / Wincent Weiss Management
Concept & Creative Lead
Bäumler Productions
Production Design & Tour Production
Andy Machals
Creative- & Show Direction
Creative Departments
Tom Groß / Standtom
Lighting Designer
Balkan Karışman, Antonia Melzer
Video Artists
Hauke Husemann / H4Stage
Pyro & Fire
Touring Services
Production & Tech
BTA, Coach Service Germany, Rock’n Roll Trucking, Rote Gourmet Fraktion, satis&fi, 4media.biz
Photos by Christoph Koestlin & Richard Hofmann-Apostolou.