“Things can be said in colors and shapes that cannot be said any other way”, the great Georgia O’Keeffe once observed. The creative team at The Playground summoned the power of this mysterious visual language for Megan Thee Stallion on her Hot Girl Summer tour. Wanting to share the story of her creative and personal journeys with fans, the iconic star envisioned a tour that would recount the different stages of her evolving career in three distinct sections. Acting on this vision, The Playground team called upon an artful blend of dramatic color changes and various set and video configurations to endow each chapter of the Megan Thee Stallion narrative with its own compelling aura.
“The Hot Girl Summer 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 coproduction designer of the tour. “Act 1 featured Megan’s hard-hitting Snake beginnings with sharp lines, powerful silhouettes, and stark colors. Act 2 centered around Megan’s Butterfly era and had a dichroic color palette. “The softer pastel-like colors were a vast departure from the hard-hitting show open, which culled a difference in mood and helped emphasize her metamorphosis.
“Act 3 focused on Megan’s Human Embodiment,” continued Adams. “This led to an all-out dance party. The final act’s color selections were sexy, elevating the look and feel of skin and the show’s tone. The show took the audience on a journey through color, 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 motorized 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,” noted Adams.
Breaking down the role of the colors rendered by all the fixtures in the rig, Routhier noted: “The first act was titled ‘Snake,’ and focused on fiery colors – 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 color and video content.”
Artfully placed dark spaces helped amplify the narrative power of the colors 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. The latter was among the show’s highlights for Adams. “There was a moment in the show when we had a snake-like lighting sculpture descend from the sky and encapsulate Megan,” he said. “Most of the production was stripped back to embellish this intimacy of the moment.”
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’s a particular moment in the show where the video team took over the bars and Dane tilted them to follow the eye movements of Megan on the large video wall. The PXL Bars become an extension of the video wall.”
This moment was one of many, where different creative elements of the show converged to add a powerful new dimension to its narrative. For example, there was the time when larger-than-life riffs of the electric guitar from a rock-like anthem were accompanied by orchestrated pyro and lighting that lit up the black void as Megan Thee Stallion performed in the middle of the lighting and video vortex
Routhier recalls another moment at the top of Act 2 when the star appeared in a cocoon constructed of plexiglass and dichroic film. “Two dancers spun it around for Megan’s reveal,” noted Routhier. “As it spun, the moving lights hit the exterior of the cocoon, throwing colored light around the room like a big, multi-colored mirror ball!”
“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 standout 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 impossible to do any other way.
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Read more about the Megan Thee Stallion tour design in the October 2024 issue of PLSN magazine
