Creative Direction, Production, Staging and Lighting
TEM
Executive Producer
Valtteri Laihanen
Show Designer
The climax of Dystopia987, the character 'Dambrin', christened after Didier 'GOL' Dambrin, coalesces and is released. Skepta performs, taking the role as the conjurer of the interaction and energy that Dambrin trains on.
The crowd filters into the damp street, having had one of the nights of their lives.
All the complex tech had only heightened their experiences together, rather than hijacked it. The whole thing would have been perfect for Instagram.
What he and his collaborators built was a vision of the future, and what it might look and feel and sound like, if we want it, if we create it.
The challenge of the space was to create a stage that felt authentic to the dystopian world we were building, whilst feeling technically capable of evolving and telling a story, physically, and through the performance.
The challenge of the space was to create a stage that felt authentic to the dystopian world we were building, whilst feeling technically capable of evolving and telling a story, physically, and through the performance.
The stage was constructed in a non-typical way with materials that don't break the rules of the world, with a design that allowed a physical closeness to Skepta in a strong gesture that evoked a feeling of a central, processing core.
The visual system was built around an infinitely rotating cylinder of light that appeared to float in the centre of the stage, a digital zoetrope that span virtual geometries extremely fast, and on which we mapped and sliced flat textures.
This gave us a strong, functional anchor for the visual direction. As the zoetrope span around in the virtual plane, it actuated the lights that occupied the same physical space. At other times the central lights would be the driver, appearing to illuminate objects from inside.
The unique, long thin room meant we knew that the audience would have a controlled frontal perspective to the stage. That fixed perspective combined by with the visibility of the light core allowed us to create illusions of virtual objects being lit and interacting with the real light and real colour in the space.
The lightweight form allowed Skepta movement around the stage in 360 degrees, emerging and disappearing into the central core, and the transparency of all elements emphasised the central core by creating radiating shadows and patterns, as video and light rotated, and interacted with the hard structural forms.