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Christina Rupp lights Army-Navy Gala with Elation Paragon

Christina Rupp used Elation Paragon fixtures to illuminate the Army-Navy Gala in December 2025 at the Baltimore Convention Center. The fixtures were supplied by Elkridge, Maryland-based stage lighting company Afterglow Lighting, an early adopter of Elation’s Paragon LED profile moving head.

The event, held ahead of the 126th Army-Navy football game, one of the oldest rivalries in U.S. college football, featured a transformed ballroom complete with a main stage, dance floor, and a variety of performance elements honoring those who serve. Rupp, a lighting designer and master electrician with a decade of industry experience, has worked on Army-Navy collaborations before, but this marked her first time working on the Army-Navy Gala. She frequently collaborates with Afterglow and was brought onto the project by Afterglow and the client, VPC.

“This was not your standard corporate design with a stage wash and audience wash”, she explains. “We needed lighting to transition from a formal dinner to onstage presentations, to performances by bands, cheerleaders, and dance groups, to a late-night dance party. We needed those clean stage washes and audience lighting, but also pickups, accent lighting, and vibrant effects while supporting other elements like walkthroughs and videos.”

Rupp led the design and operation of 32 Paragon S, along with twelve Seven Batten 72, and other fixtures. On stage, the designer created tailored looks with distinct colors for each service branch as the MC highlighted their accomplishments, then shifted to entirely different looks for other presentations, keeping the visuals fluid and dynamic. A full band also performed on stage, playing throughout dinner and into the late-night dance party. A central walkway ran through the room, used by the MC, performers like the color guard, and arriving guests. “Anyone walking down it, or when the MC moved into the audience or onto the dance floor, was lit by the Paragons”, says Rupp. 

The designer created a dynamic walk-in look with slow-moving effects, carrying a red, white, and blue theme from the national anthem into the dinner look. “It provided a calm look for dinner in colors that represented both the Army and Navy”, Rupp explains. “Being able to carefully frame and focus the Paragons to place the blue precisely in the center of the onstage scenic piece added a three-dimensional effect.”

The Seven Batten 72 fixtures, 6-foot full-color batten wash luminaires, were used to enhance the scenic from above and below, adding depth and dimension to the look. Rupp employed the Paragon’s TruTone variable CRI engine, switching between high and low CRI looks to create a more dynamic feel, and accessed the fixture’s animation wheel to create diverse looks throughout the night. At dinner, for example, she applied slow-moving animations to the walls intertwined with custom gobos. Then later, during the dance party, she switched to more animated gobo transitions.

The setup included an upstage truss, downstage truss, and four perpendicular trusses extending into the audience that housed the Paragons used extensively for pickups and accent lighting. “For any audience or band pickup, or any situation that needed some punch, I went straight to the Paragon”, says Rupp.

Afterglow’s lighting crew comprised Production Manager/Show Master Electrician Josh Watson, who drafted the plot with Rupp’s advice and preferences in mind, plus lighting techs Jake Myers, Galen Newell, and Ethan Cooper who pre-rigged, patched, and managed the load-in. The 2025 Army-Navy Gala was managed and designed by Chicken Scratch and executed in collaboration with VPC.

(Photos: Elation)

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