For Foster the People’s performance at the Firefly Festival, June 21-23 in Dover, DE, production designer Trevor Stirlin Burk collaborated with the Los Angeles Contemporary Dance company, and their dancers — not mechanized automation — turned the seven three-sided towers (periactoids) supporting lighting and video elements. Although the largest of the towers weighed more than three tons, they were attached to milled aluminum bases on ball bearings and equipped with outrigger handles so that the dancers could rotate the units. “To have the dancers control the towers was important to me. The organic imperfection of having seven performers controlling those huge towers in unison was something special,” Stirlin Burk said.
—From “Designer Watch” by Debi Moen, PLSN, Aug. 2013
