#stage-design

#stage-design

Pop tours in 2025 are generally one of two categories: extravagant spectacle or stripped-down dance party. Lorde's "Ultrasound World Tour" is, refreshingly, something in the middle. While other stars have cornered the market on being the provocateur, the drama queen, the rock star, the posh performer, Lorde has always presented as the more left-of-center, elemental type. So, it's fitting that her show at New York's Madison Square Garden on Wednesday, October 1st was equally idiosyncratic.

At the recent AVEDA Congress show, designer and creative director Dany Vo introduced a stage environment shaped by motion graphics, typography, and visual storytelling. Acting as creative lead, Vo developed a motion-driven backdrop that interacted directly with the choreography, transforming the runway into a spatial narrative rather than a static presentation. The visuals, composed of shifting typography and organic graphic forms, were synchronized with the movement of models and garments.

Although Aussie director Simon Stone has staged only a handful of shows in the UK, it has to be said that you can see a pattern developing. Take a classic play - previously Lorca's - rewrite the whole thing into aggressively modern English that revolves around long, light hearted stretches of posh people swearing amusingly, season with a bit of Berlin-indebted stage trickery, and finally change tack and wallop us with the tragedy, right in the guts.

Handel's Semele is one of those works that refuses to sit neatly in a box. First staged at Covent Garden in 1744, it was billed as a new oratorio to slip past London's strict Lenten ban on opera. Yet what audiences encountered was no pious oratorio at all, but a glittering mythological drama brimming with erotic charge, satire, and Italianate arias.

"The best design does not have evident designs on its audience... Tomas Palmer's design scarcely seems arranged: it is simply a place in which things happen."