Thursday, February 27, 2020
How to design a tour good enough for Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, or J.Lo
The Verge: J.Lo’sJ.Lo’s It’s My Party tour starts with a bang. The curtain drops, revealing the artist dangled above the stage covered in Swarovski crystals. She’s perched inside a sparkling hoop that sits underneath a wine glass chandelier. There are hundreds of balloons, dozens of dancers, and a multistory video screen, all awash in various shades of violet and rose. It’s a bombastic spectacle — and every detail was designed by a small team of creatives called Silent House.
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This article’s interview goes deep into the stage design process. I really liked the designer Reardon’s description of what they do - “architecture on speed”. I think this applies to theater too, but more like scaled-down architecture and we have a little more time. An Important thing that Reardon talked about was how it is his job to “tap into the nucleus of the artist and represent them”. The times I’ve been to concerts, I’ve always been impressed with the scale of the designs and how they looked really cool. But I never thought about how the designers should capture the essence of the artist. It also makes a lot of sense that stage designs for live music shows should accentuate the artist and their performance. As Reardon puts it “The point is to design something where the only thing you’re staring at is him, and the rest augments it.” I’m a little disappointed to see only 15-20% of artists want to get involved in the designs. I think they’re such a visual element it could set the tone of your performance. You should care about everything that you are represented with / that goes on stage.
I absolutely love this article. Concerts and touring productions always seem to be on the cutting edge of live entertainment, because that’s where the bulk of the money goes. On the design side of the process, I loved what the article said about the firm creating a “playground” for a musical artist with their set. I think that’s exactly the right mindset to go into a scenic design with: you want to create a space for performers to explore, discover, and use however they see fit. And with social media and phone photography, you have to think about the photographic implications of every choice you make: will this show well on social media? Interesting point about concerts being more about the “punctuation than the paragraph.” It’s like as long as you have some really cool crowd pleasing moments you’re good, and it seems to ignore the rest of the concert.
The idea of designing for concert tours is very exciting to me! Because concerts are often incredibly flashy and bold it seems like there are no limits to what the design can be, especially for big name artists such as J Lo, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift. I think Reardon’s idea of tapping into the nucleus of an artist in order to come up with a theme for their shows is really interesting. It’s crazy how little time they have to design these shows. “What we do is architecture on speed,” Reardon laughs. When he talked about the floors and how even the texture of the floor is considered in the design process it reminded me of Carnegie Mellon Drama productions. I’ve never seen a show floor accept in broadway shows before coming here to CMU. Also, I think it’s really cool that they have a picture of the first sketch of the set for IGOR’s tour and then a picture of the fully realized set.
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