USA - The Playground creative team called upon an artful blend of dramatic colour changes and various set and video configurations to endow each chapter of the Megan Thee Stallion narrative for The Hot Girl Summer tour.
“The tour consists of three main acts that really drive the creative intent,” explained Curtis Adams, who, along with Sooner Routhier and Trevor Ahlstrand was the co-production designer of the tour. “Act 1 featured Megan's hard-hitting Snake beginnings with sharp lines, powerful silhouettes, and stark colours. Act 2 centred around Megan's Butterfly era and had a dichroic colour palette. The softer pastel-like colours were a vast departure from the hard-hitting show open, which culled a difference in mood and helped emphasise her metamorphosis.
“Act 3 focused on Megan's human embodiment,” continued Adams. “This led to an all-out dance party. The final act's colour selections were sexy, elevating the look and feel of skin and the show's tone. The show took the audience on a journey through colour, light, sound, and movement. For our team, working with Megan’s production manager Joseph Lloyd on this was true pleasure.”
Helping The Playground team create their evocative palette were 110 Chauvet Professional Colorado PXL Bar 16 motorised RGBW battens supplied by Fuse. Positioned on the vertical towers between the video walls, which they worked hand-in-glove with, and along the upstage deck, where they served as backlights, the fixtures filled multiple roles in the design, “working to drive direction and energy during the performance,” said Adams.
Breaking down the role of the colours rendered by all the fixtures in the rig, Routhier noted: “The first act was titled Snake, and focused on fiery colours – red, orange, fuchsia, magenta, amber with a tiny bit of teal dropped in. The second act was titled Butterfly, and was lit with cyan, magenta, baby pink, and yellow. The final act was titled Human and focused on skin tones as much as possible. The best way for us to achieve the distinction between each act was through colour and video content.”
Artfully placed dark spaces helped amplify the narrative power of the colours and videos. “One of the major themes of the show was transformation and rebirth,” said Adams. “We knew we wanted to design an experience that felt like it evolved as you were watching it. The dark negative space was our vehicle to transform the stage, and the lighting allowed us to carve out that negative space and develop new and innovative performance spaces throughout the show.”
Much of the narrative was also told by shape, which involved video content and automation, such as an elevator lift, a powerful lighting and video vortex, and a swirling lighting sculpture.
Dane Kirk, the show’s lighting programmer and director did a masterful job syncing lights with video. “I love all the incredible programming that Dane did in the Colorado PXL Bars,” said Routhier.
“There was a good bit of automation and video that converged with our lighting,” Kirk elaborated when describing the show. “We used video the most to highlight some moments, but lighting came in and did the job for key lighting at these points. The video walls alone made an amazing looking set. There were plenty of moments where lighting just wasn't needed, or lighting was pulled back to let the video walls stand out more.”
But in the end, all that mattered to Adams, Routhier, Ahlstrand, Kirk and fellow lighting programmer Jason Giaffo, was that all the various visual elements came together as one to tell the compelling story of a rising star in a way that would be otherwise impossible to do.
