The creative team at The Playground recently summoned the power of mysterious visual language for Megan Thee Stallion’s 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 colour 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 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 focussed 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 Technical Group. 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 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.
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 coloured light around the room like a big, multi-coloured 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.
