The Art of Design: Stage Design by Es Devlin

Have you ever wondered what makes a great experience?

One of them is stage design, the set-environment which magically transports us into another world. There we find ourselves fully immersed in the experience. Introducing you Es Devlin, an amazing artist in the truest sense who has worked with world renown brands like Chanel and musicians like Adele, Kanye West & Beyonce in creatively translating their ideas into breathtaking design sets, engaging all of our senses, and turning them into unforgettable moments.

She poignantly shares how she views her artworks: "I don’t sell work which I am grateful about, because I don’t have to produce multiples of things. There is no market. I’ve been mercifully spared that, I guess because I started in theatre where there was no client. There was a director who knew what they wanted and then there was me, but we were both working to make the same piece."

I watched her documentary on Netflix, and here are some words of wisdom who might inspire you too, enjoy!

"My practice has been following my path of inquiry. And in order to practice, I have found willing collaborators who I've been able to align my personal inquiry with. From pop stars like Beyonce through to Wagner operettas. The interesting thing about the process I've learnt that I don't actually make anything or know what to make until I know the spaces it's going to inhabit. Because as soon as you have a frame, of course the first you want to do is to start breaking the edge of it." (from 6:00~)

"What I tend to be most interested in is the psychology of a space. A lot of my work now is about finding environment for music. And there is a lot of freedom I would say because many lyrics are already poetry. So I guess I am designing poetry to happen more often than prose. I really quite methodically go, okay, let's listen to the lyrics, let's write down the lyrics that we respond to, let's try to find the poetry, let's try to find the story, and each time an actor or singer sings or says a word, then there is another question 'What should be around them when they're singing it? What support or counterpoint what they are doing. It's really complex, there's really a lot of parts in it." (from 17:20~)

"So this (Chagall's window artwork) feels like paint turn into light. The intensity of that cobalt, ultramarine and caine, all those different blues that are going on together in that, is something that I would've seen in paint and then I would've come here and realized what happens when you pour light through it. And look at the refractions that are coming off it on the wall there.

What strikes me about these windows is, from the inside, they are these glorious jewel-like emanating source of coloured light. But look at them here (from the outside), they are black. It's waiting to be brought to life. It's how I feel at the beginning of a show before the lights come up on a piece of scenery." (from 22:55~)

"The turning of the lights out at the start of a performance, is a really special thing, isn't it? When you sit with a group of people in the dark, cause it's not something we habitually do. And I think it goes back to earliest childhood, the lights being turned out. If you think about sleepovers... A group of children awake in the dark, being an entry point into something. And I think that sort of does get rehearsed. There's 80,000 people and the sun goes down. That's the same as what happened at Stonehenge.

Something happens at that point in the show, because there's a change. They have all come to focus their gaze on one person. We don't need to say worship, but all the energy of the room is focused on that one little individual, and that in itself is an extraordinary physiological event. Eighty thousands human are all looking at one other little human." (from 23:50~) 

"Es is, without a doubt in my mind, the most driven human being I've ever met in my life. You know, in fact, she's so driven, that I think her own imagination needs its own chauffeur. But it's not ambition in a normal sense; it's about exploring the imagination. And there is a quality of Beethoven and Wagner and Shakespeare and Pinter, which perhaps there isn't in other fields. And I've got a feeling that deeply inside Es, the quality has got to win through." (from 3:15~)

"But the things that I create are not the things. They are the time that the people at the show spend in the company of the things. So it's time (magical moments) that you are making, really. Time perceived by an audience. The obejcts themselves are not what you think they are. What I am trying to say is if you were to keep the things that I make and put them in an art gallery, they wouldn't be behaving as they were designed to behave.

They can only do that in time. Reflecting the lights and projections in different ways, with different people inside them, saying different words, with different sound effects. With Hamlet, we made a very specific timeline. We read the pages of the script, and we litteraly make a chart, second by second, page by page. What's happenning? Who is saying what? As I start to shade things in, what I am always thinking is how the audience will feel. How long will they experience this for and then what will happen next? Everything else is sort of serving that." (from 36:00~)

"Theatre makers know the ephemerality of what they are making. Nothing's gonna last. You know when you set out to make it, that it's going to be gone. Sometimes in a week, sometimes in four days, sometimes in four years. In the end everything is only going to exist in the memories of people." (from 29:28~)

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