A multidisciplinary team of engineers,
technologists and lighting designers was
required to realize a stage design capable
of engaging every member of the audience.To bring together the lone artist and the
thousands – sometimes tens of thousands- of fans surrounding him on every side
required a production team with expertise
across a number of fields. Architectural
engineering firm Tait, in collaboration with
creative designer Willo Perron and lighting
designer Jesse Blevins, fashioned a 300-m^2
LED stage complete with 288 video decks,
the low height of which allowed audience
members to see directly through to the
other side. Two hundred tiny drones flit-
ted over their heads at one point, as did a
helium-filled yellow Ferrari made of foam.
At another point in the show, the video
stage flickered into a crowded summer
pool, then a blindingly white iceberg, then
a reel of fan-made videos scrolling out from
underneath Drake’s feet. ‘The idea here was
to give people all the way around the arena
the same show and the same view,’ says
Aaron Siebert, a senior project manager at
Tait who oversaw the tour from production
to execution. ‘We talked about how the feel
of it should be like being courtside at a bas-
ketball game. And there’s even a basketball
court in the show, with a hoop installed
at one end and Drake summoning up an
audience member to make a free-throw at
one point.’
In traditional arena shows, Siebert
estimates that only around 60 per cent of
an audience – those sitting in the rows
from the middle of the arena and back –
receives a ‘good, holistic view’ of the stage,
while the rest of the crowd is shunted to
awkward angles. Some shows have opted
to ameliorate that viewing problem by
extending a runway into the crowd; other
shows acknowledge the inevitable and sell
a number of restricted-view seats at lower
prices. For Drake’s tour, the designers
decided to lower the stage itself, so that it
appeared almost indistinguishable from »AS LIVE SHOWS EXPLODE in popularity,
so does the demand for performances to be
arresting, unforgettable, and – most criti-
cally – available to an audience of immense
size. Historically, that level of ‘availability’
has been dictated by the class of ticket you
bought and, consequently, where you sat;
but new advances in stage design, powered
by technology, are reducing that hierarchy
of experience and delivering shows that can
resonate with audience members in the cheap
seats as strongly as those in the front row.
Take the Aubrey and the Three
Migos tour, a globe-spanning arena tour
headlined by hip-hop superstar Drake that
took over 43 North American stages last
year and is making its way across Europe
under a different name this spring. Instead
of focusing on the fans near the stage, the
show used state-of-the art visual design
to broker an intimate connection between
Drake and every person in attendance.
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160 SHOWS