Designing with Intention: How LD Tal Kochav Lit Alessia Cara’s Love and Hyperbole Tour

LimeLightWired
Jun 4
4 min read

For Alessia Cara’s long-awaited return to the road, subtlety wasn’t a limitation—it was the point. Lighting Designer Tal Kochav crafted a design for the Love and Hyperbole World Tour that leaned all the way into emotional precision over visual noise. With CuePoints and grandMA3 Recipes making it tour-ready, Kochav packed the design "into road cases and is ready to take it global."

Back on the Road

With Love and Hyperbole, Alessia Cara returns to touring with a show that prioritizes emotional clarity over spectacle, anchored by a design built for adaptability. With Cara deeply involved in creative decision-making, the result was a canvas that gave the music space to breathe. Framed by a mature, theater-inspired aesthetic, it’s a deeply personal production that reflects how thoughtful design can mirror an artist’s evolution.

Setting the Stage for Love and Hyperbole

This marks Alessia’s first tour since 2020, a comeback sparked by the release of her new album Love and Hyperbole. “Alessia and I, luckily, got along very fast. We both shared a lot of the same artistic visions right off the bat,” says lighting designer Tal Kochav, recalling the collaborative process. “We landed on this concept of ‘spotlight’—bringing her back into the light.”

The visual concept began with a single, evocative color: cranberry red wine, pulled directly from the album artwork. That choice laid the groundwork for a theatrical world where light could guide emotion, not overwhelm it. “I wanted the stage to feel like a theater,” Tal explains. “She’s not a flash-and-trash type of artist. We didn’t need massive towers or strobes—we needed something elegant and transportable.” With fresnels placed around the band and subtle “eye candy” wrapping the stage, the result was a show that felt intentional, not industrial.

The 1.5-hour setlist spans 26 songs, most of it timecoded to preserve precision. Yet despite the structure, each venue brought its own curveball. “Not only do the overhead packages change every day,” Tal says, “the stage size changed every day too.” Some nights meant massive festival stages; others meant squeezing into 25-foot casino prosceniums. To handle this, Tal leaned on two key tools: MA3 Recipes and CuePoints.

Designing for Flexibility with MA3 Recipes

For this tour, Tal built the entire show file using MA3 Recipes—a decision he calls pivotal to its success. “This is my first time using Recipes in a cue stack with timecode,” he says. “It felt natural to program, and it gave us a level of repeatability and speed we couldn’t have hit otherwise.”

Recipes allowed Tal to create flexible cue structures that remained visually consistent—even when fixtures changed nightly. “On show day, I can load in, patch, update groups, and palettes, and be ready for a full sound check in under 2.5 hours,” he says, describing the efficiency it enabled. “It’s future-proofing the design.”

There were tradeoffs, of course. “Recipes take longer to program upfront,” Tal admits. “You have to be intentional about where your data lives and how it’s stored.” But with every venue presenting different gear and limitations, the upfront time investment paid off quickly. “The show looked the same from Taipei to Melbourne,” he adds. “That wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.”

How CuePoints Shaped the Show

While MA3 kept things consistent on the road, CuePoints was essential during preproduction. “CuePoints was the lifeline of programming this show,” Tal says. “It completely revolutionized my workflow.”

CuePoints is a timeline-based cue tagging system that allows users to pre-map musical structure, complete with BPMs, fade times, cue names, and timecode positions — before even opening the console. It’s a system we’ve previously broken down in an article here, and for Tal, it quickly became essential to his preprogramming workflow. “It cut my data entry time nearly in half,” he explains. “Instead of retyping BPMs, colors, and structure, I could start designing as soon as I opened the console.”

That structure extended beyond solo workflows. Tal described using CuePoints with multiprogrammer teams, where having a centralized cuefile helped everyone stay in sync. “We’d enter a flow state because all the data was already in front of us,” he says. Designers could see each other's intentions without stopping for constant back-and-forths.

The most dramatic proof of CuePoints’ value came during a one-off performance in Shanghai. “Because of visa delays, we couldn’t source an MA3 in time,” Tal recalls. “They had an MA2 on site, and I had to reprogram the entire timecoded show from scratch the night I landed.” Thanks to the data he had stored in CuePoints, he was able to rebuild the show, top to bottom, in under 24 hours. “That wouldn’t have been possible if I’d only done the data entry directly in MA3.”

Gear List

10 x Martin Professional MAC Aura XIP

7 x Chauvet Professional COLORado PXL Bar 16

6 x Elation Professional KL Fresnel 8

4 x Elation Professional KL Cyc L

1x TMB FOH Friend

2x Swisson 8 port node

2x Obsidian EN12

1x Cisco SG300 switches

2x Chauvet CP racks

2x ½packcaddies

2x 3’ pipe and base

Control

1x grandMA3 Light

1x TMB FOH Friend

2x Swisson 8 port node

2x Obsidian EN12

1x Cisco SG300 switches

2x Chauvet CP racks

Who Made It Happen

Behind Love and Hyperbole is a small, tight-knit team that shaped the tour with creative freedom and mutual trust. “It was my first time with Alessia and her camp,” Tal says. “I couldn’t have asked for a better camp to work with for my first world tour. We’re already having a blast together.”

That collaboration started long before rehearsals. “Listening and hearing what was done before me—what they liked, what they didn’t like, and what they saw for the future of Alessia—helped all of us align our visions into one,” Tal explains.

Artist: Alessia Cara
Lighting Designer/Programmer: Tal Kochav
Production Manager/Monitors: David Donin
Tour Manager: Andres Recio
FOH Audio: Peter Kadelbach
Backline: Zack Robinson
Social Media/Photography: Dario Caracciolo
Lighting Vendor: Kinetic Lighting (James Schipper)

Love and Hyperbole is a compact tour with an expansive vision—one that balances artistry, technical constraint, and emotional storytelling. By embracing tools like MA3 Recipes and CuePoints, Tal Kochav brought a cinematic, flexible lighting design to life night after night. “We’re making art because we can and love to,” he says. And that spirit of collaboration and intention is written in light across every beat of the show.