It's easy to see why The Gorge is one of the favourite venues among festivalgoers. Located around 240 kilometres east of Seattle, it offers spectacular views of the Columbia River Canyon and exceptional natural acoustics thanks to its position between towering rock formations.
These qualities have earned it Pollstar's Best Outdoor Music Venue award on nine occasions.
James McKenna appreciates everything The Gorge has to offer, but as a lighting designer he also knows that this iconic venue presents significant challenges.
The Gorge is one of the most beautiful places to work, but it's also one of the toughest. You have to deal with the heat, the dust and all the complications that come with working there. It's also remote enough that if you forget something, your options are extremely limited. The venue has invested heavily over the past few years to significantly improve its infrastructure. But at the end of the day, when you see how spectacular the shows look there, all the effort is worth it, he says.
McKenna and his team at R90 Lighting delivered outstanding results for audiences attending the 2026 edition of Insomniac Beyond Wonderland at The Gorge, held on 25 June. Commissioned by Insomniac to build two stages, they developed a perfectly coordinated infrastructure that supported numerous artists throughout the festival's three-day run.
McKenna took on a dual role during the event. In addition to overseeing the construction of the two stages, Erik Mahowald of Bending Lite Productions asked him to handle lighting for the Bassrush-powered Mad Hatter's Castle stage. To keep pace with every high-energy dubstep, trap and bass performance during his busking sessions, he used a ChamSys MagicQ MQ500M Stadium console supplied by R90 Lighting.
"I like my jobs the way I like my chicken nuggets: with a double serving", he jokes.
Responsible for lighting every artist on the stage except three during the festival, McKenna relished the opportunity to deliver highly dynamic programming. "Mad Hatter's Castle is a bass music stage, and that style is pretty chaotic," he explains. "What I enjoy most about lighting this kind of music is that I can go all out with aggressive, eye-catching looks that evolve unpredictably. The lighting can be just as hard-hitting as the sound coming out of the PA system. There's a huge amount of freedom because you can take full advantage of everything the rig has to offer when you're busking a show like this".
The only limits are your imagination and the time you have available to programme. That allows you to combine all the tools available in the console to complement both the biggest drops and the softer moments in the music. And with bass music, there's a huge amount of strobe and shutter work. Want to relieve stress in a healthy way? Go busking, McKenna continues.
McKenna relies on his ChamSys MagicQ MQ500M to express himself during this type of performance. "The ease of programming in MagicQ software is made for someone like me", he says. "I'm one of those masochists who prefers to build every show from scratch rather than adapting an old one to a new rig. Every show is programmed specifically for the rig in front of me. Adapting a previous show's programming to a different setup can sometimes be difficult... or boring... when you want to busk".
The 12-key Executor also proved invaluable during Beyond Wonderland. "It's the perfect place to keep high-impact reusable looks within easy reach", he explains. "That's where I keep my 'emergency looks', so if something catches me off guard, I've always got those buttons ready to respond".
Lighting fixtures keep adding more and more parameters. I won't go into the details, but the MQ500M didn't require any additional network processing to control the fixtures in this rig using their full channel modes. That wasn't the experience of the consoles brought in by some of the guest lighting designers at the festival, adds McKenna.
A versatile console was not the only factor behind McKenna's success at Beyond Wonderland. He also highlighted the work of Maryalice Weed, R90 Lighting's lighting manager; Eugene Cognomen and Dwight Upton-Francis, the company's lighting technicians; as well as the entire team at R90's Seattle warehouse.
"Everything came together perfectly for us at this festival", McKenna concludes. And that made it possible to make the most of one of the most legendary outdoor music venues in the United States.
