This article was first published in the September 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
When Es Devlin speaks about stage design, she could be talking about an ancient science: the distance between audience expectations and reality are "calibrated"; her collaborator Kanye West applies a kind of "medicine" to the proceedings; and a successful show is like a chemical reaction.
Over the past 20 years, Devlin, 43, has been challenging how audiences experience opera, pop music, theatre and, most recently, fashion. Her workplaces range from Olympic stadiums -- she designed the London 2012 closing ceremony and is working on the opening ceremony for Rio 2016 -- to found spaces, and claims to live her life by the Hamlet quotation: "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space." Fitting, seeing as the Londoner will bring her own vision of the Shakespeare classic to the Barbican Centre this autumn, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. From the opening night of U2's new iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE tour in Vancouver, coming to the UK in September, Devlin talks to WIRED about new technology and its role in the future of live music.
WIRED: You've been working on the new U2 show for two years. Where do your ideas come from?Es Devlin: On the last show of the 360° stadium tour [in 2011] Bono stood, looked at the giant space, and said: "Well next time, we'll just go out with a single light bulb." So that's how our new show starts, as a reaction against the architectural hugeness and light of the last adventure.
Has technology changed stage design during your career?When the system's working the right way round, the ideas drive the technology. With U2's tour, we wanted a screen that would divide the audience in two, and the band could perform inside and be seen through video projections. We wanted it to be more lateral and transparent than others we had seen. For it to happen, we had to develop new technology. But the idea came very simply -- from the lyrics. It's not that we had a desire to innovate technologically, it's more that there was something we wanted to say. For The Nether at the Royal Court Theatre [in London], we gave an ancient piece of technology a new dimension: a handheld counterweight system with a d3 video-playback system. It's the nitty-gritty of how you deliver your idea -- that's when the innovation happens.
Does it still all start with a sketch?It does. I try to think with a pencil in my hand so I can capture the train of thought. I have reams of sketches for every project I've been working on -- 20 years of them. There are thousands -- too many to put in a book. I might start Instagramming the sketches as I go. We documented the U2 process carefully and it's quite interesting to look back at the iterations because, actually, what you see on stage tonight is going to be remarkably similar to a drawing we sketched in September 2013, which we actually departed from for 18 months and ended up coming back to.
You jump from designing for stadiums to tiny theatres above a pub. Do you treat each space differently?You can go to the theatre and dutifully watch something where lots of money and time have been spent but nothing happens. Or there are other nights when you go and all there is on the stage is two actors and one strip light and it can go off. You get that feeling of the hairs going up on the back of your neck. The essence of what I try to do is to understand the alchemy of those moments when audiences communally feel something, whether it's 80,000 people or 200. So scale can be misleading because, fundamentally, the response of being moved by watching something together is potent, regardless of big or small. That's the ticket.
How do you manage to design across the different fields of fashion, pop, theatre and opera?The more fields that I work in, the more I enjoy blending them: extra-ordinary chemical fusions happen between people who look at things differently. I try to have the eyes of an outsider in each genre I've entered into, even theatre, where I started. It allows you to look at each challenge in an unexpected way.
What's your vision of the future for live music?There's still plenty of room for new ideas with artists on touring shows. It would be interesting to do some more residencies. Kanye gained a lot when we did a residency in Atlantic City. I'd be intrigued to see if the whole paradigm of live music had to follow that of a touring arena show: if there were a way of installing artists in found spaces, you could engage with architecture that's already there and be free from the brutality of touring. You could achieve far more visually and atmospherically.
What do you hope to achieve with Cumberbatch's Hamlet?Hamlet is really hard to design because Shakespeare wrote for a theatre that was conjuring space with words, and that has to move quickly like a film. What a Shakespeare production cannot bear is any kind of slowing down. You cannot wait for a scene change, it's got to keep coming at you. And there are hundreds of scenes in it. So what youhave to make is an environment that can be fluid, and avoid it just looking like the Globe Theatre. That's the challenge.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
