Of the "Bangerz" tour, Ernest Baker wrote last month that Miley Cyrus will "save the young women of America." Despite what you make think of her music or her antics, Miley Ray is definitely a performer, and people can't seem to get enough of her. The Bangerz album has gone platinum, and the tour of the same name has just hit Europe for a 22-date run through June 15. PLSN (Projection, Lights, and Staging News) decided to speak with a few of the people behind-the-scenes who have made the tour what it is: creative director and video content director Diane Martel, production designer Es Devlin, and lighting designer Rob Sinclair.
Martel referred to Miley as "a patron of the arts" and said that the pop star trusted her to hire talented artists, designers, and content producers. The creative director also had great things to say about Devlin, Sinclair, and other designers on the tour. "Directing the tour was not difficult, because I hired the right people to work with...Es is so elegant, and she has such a facile vibrant creative mind. The funniest thing about the set and the show is that, early on, she made these cutouts of different iconic objects we wanted in the show. I became so obsessed with the cardboard cutouts that they ended up informing our design choices in a major way."
Image via SonyMusicUK on Twitter
Of the entire production she says " We were making work to show teenagers, to engage them more deeply than most pop shows do. What I am very happy about is that tastemakers love the show as well as 15-year-old girls who (to my dismay) watch the show while video taping it on their iPhones... The ideas and the energy in the show translate across the board to all members of the audience, and that is something to be proud of."
Es Devlin tells PLSN that she "pitched the idea of the entire show taking place on a giant stage version of Miley’s tongue" during a meeting with Diane Martel. "Everyone liked the idea except the accountants... so we refined this into the current idea for the entrance as a slide down Miley’s Tongue. The whole show taking place on the tongue might have been fun — but often logistical constraints lead to more refined ideas and economy of visual language."
Image via kristniks on Twitter
Lighting designer Rob Sinclair spoke about the long process of mapping things out and the constant changes during and after the rehearsals. "We sat and programmed for hours every night for a month. Things changed, changed back and changed again. It’s always great to have the time to really drill into the songs and find everything within them that’s important and needs to be visualized. I think that everything we did feels completely right and appropriate and that we got a lot out of the system."
Head over to PLSN to learn more about the hard work that went into the spectacle that is the "Bangerz" tour.
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[via PLSN]