Known worldwide as the Crown Jewel of Rodeo and the Super Bowl of Western Sports, 'The American' is a legendary event held annually at the iconic AT&T Stadium, home of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys.
Known worldwide as the Crown Jewel of Rodeo and the Super Bowl of Western Sports, 'The American' is a legendary event held annually at the iconic AT&T Stadium, home of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys.
‘The American’ brings together top professional athletes to compete in the richest single-day payout in all of rodeo. Held in a true open-competition format, ‘The American’ is the only major sporting event that gives amateur athletes a chance to compete against the sport’s greatest names.
Having recently acquired the event as the centerpiece of their western sports portfolio, Teton Ridge sought out the experiential and producing expertise of Executive Visions to help launch their “all-new" brand and bring the 2022 American Rodeo experience to an unprecedented level. Within a highly compressed timeframe, an elite team of creative and technical professionals brought the project to realization under the visionary direction of Teton Ridge President Emily Castel.
Beyond the adrenaline-pumping, edge-of-your-seat rodeo action, the event also featured a rousing rendition of the national anthem, performed by Pia Toscano, and a concert by country music mega-stars Tim McGraw and Faith Hill.
The show was enjoyed by 50,000 fans inside the stadium, as well as by a nationwide audience via live broadcast on The Cowboy Channel and INSP network.
As he has for nearly three decades, EVI Executive Producer Michael Marto asked Lightswitch to join the project, providing lighting design. Our task was to combine lighting for death-defying sports with exciting concert and celebration design — made all the more challenging by the fact that the event was held in a “semi-daylight” stadium.
The Lightswitch team designed a high-impact, high-energy, stadium-scale, “Texas big” lighting solution, which provided broadcast lighting for talent and winners, as well as dynamic visuals to support the concert performances. To maximize efficiency on site, we used extensive pre-visualization to program the complex show offline, and used our time — the most precious of resources — as wisely as possible.
Events like this require skill sets across multiple disciplines, including sports, broadcast, and entertainment lighting. These diverse specialties are often seen as contradictory to each other, but Lightswitch’s comprehensive track record and nimble approach ensured all facets of the project were kept in balance and given the attention they deserved. The results? The client was thrilled, the audience was wowed, and a new paradigm for Western sports production was created.
Photography by Suzanne Teresa | Lucas Noonan
