Robe celebrates at Sziget 2025
- Dec 12, 2025
- 4 min read
One of the liveliest, friendliest, and most musically and performance diverse festivals of the European summer season, Sziget, in Budapest, Hungary, is also staged at one of the most picturesque locations, Óbudai- sziget (Old Buda Island), a beautiful 108-hectare island on the Danube River, a short distance from Budapest city centre. This is transformed into a tolerant, inclusive, humanity-loving ‘Island of Freedom’ community for the 6-day duration of the event.
Robe moving lights were prominent on several major stages this year, including the Bolt Night Stage supplied by Light Positive with some fixtures that were a brand-new investment; The Revolut Stage supplied by VEG Europe, and the Main Stage, supplied by Colossal.
Robe’s distributor AVL Trade organised an exclusive word-of-mouth backstage area and tech hub for all crew, creatives and others working BTS across the site, which included the Avostream mobile demo vehicle, a comprehensive merch cabin, naturally a bar and chilling zone under the trees, complete with nice loos adjacent to the Night Stage backstage village, which brought the buzz of artists coming and going.
AVL Trade’s Csaba Csanádi commented, “It was another great event for us in terms of networking, reconnecting with our industry friends and acquaintances and making new contacts, including visiting lighting directors and operators. It was excellent to see so many Robe products in use festival-wide, proving once again that iFORTE and other Robe favourites are a reliable go-to for festivals and outdoor events.”
Bolt Night Stage — Previously known as the Party Arena, this large – 10,000- capacity – tent is Sziget’s core for electronic music fans and revellers keen to rip up the 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. hours, with a lineup featuring some of the genre’s greats, including Armin van Buuren, Steve Angello, Amelie Lens, Boris Brejcha and many more. The Night Stage lighting design was created by Netherlands-based visual design specialist The Art of Light, led by Andre Beekmans. The company is well known for its innovative work especially in the electronic music genre and they also provided the production lighting design for the Colosseum Stage. Robe is one of their go-to brands for this scenario.
Overseeing The Art of Light’s work on site was Kasper Dijksterhuis, who created the plot, drawings and renders with Andre. A major feature of TWOFIFTYK’s environmental design for this space was 14 x automated ‘visual’ pods rigged with lighting and video elements, hung in the roof above the audience, which enabled the architecture of the space to be changed each day – and during each artist as required, offering a super dynamic performance experience.
Additional trusses ran the length and width of the ceiling area available for lighting, audio and video positions, and the onstage widescreen LED behind the DJ booth accentuated the epic yet fun feel of the space. Each of the moving pods contained 10 x Robe LEDBeam 350s, with additional LEDBeam 350s also used as side key light for the DJ. 20 x Robe FORTES were positioned along the top of the upstage screen and on the trusses left and right of this, ideally placed for high-impact back lighting. In the roof trusses, 60 x MegaPointes were positioned to beam down, along and around the audience area. The FORTES and 24 of the total 142 x LEDBeam 350s helping to ramp up the excitement were new purchases by Hungarian rental company Light Positive, which has been supplying this stage at Sziget for the last 6 years. They also purchased more MegaPointes at the same time, as these are still on riders, and are always in demand either for their own projects or for cross rentals. They have around 250 Robe products now in the current rental fleet.
Revolut Stage – the second biggest of the event – featured a heady mix of global stars, local gems, and rising talent. Including Justice, Empire of the Sun, Blossoms, Caribou, Papa Roach and loads more. Looking after lighting here were Bence Doma and Almos Bus, both regular freelancers for VEG (Visual Europe Group). The overhead house lighting rig comprised 24 x FORTES, 22 x Tarrantulas, 34 x MegaPointes and 12 x Tetra2s, as well as a variety of different floor packages, some with additional Robe fixtures, which they also supplied to certain acts.
Main Stage production lighting for Sziget’s Main Stage was designed by Mark Kontra, part of the team from rental specialist Colossal, which supplied all the lighting kit for this area. The Robe count this year was over 300! This included 56 x FORTES, 30 x iFORTE LTX, six FS (follow spot) versions and 24 standard, 40 x iFORTES, 56 x Pointes, 38 x ColorStrobes, 34 iBar 15s and 48 x LEDBeam 350s, with four RoboSpot systems available for those wanting to make use of the iFORTE LTX FSs which were installed on the four FOH towers.
Photos © Louise Stickland
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