Articles discussing Muse's WOTP tour production
Claypaky Xtylos Deliver Post-Apocalyptic Look For Muse’s “Will Of The People”
British rock band Muse has hit the road with its North American tour, “Will of the People,” on which more than 150 Claypaky Xtylos enhance the band’s post-apocalyptic staging non-stop.
The tour is named for the band’s most recent ninth studio album, which gave Muse its seventh consecutive No. 1 on the UK albums chart and topped Billboard’s Alternative and Rock Albums tallies. The “Will of the People” tour began in Chicago’s United Center on February 25 and concluded the U.S. portion of the tour on April 20 in Salt Lake City, after which it will move on to Europe.
“The band and I really wanted to go in a very different direction from their previous tour to give this one its own identity,” notes Jesse Lee Stout, Creative Director and Co-Production Designer. “We developed a post-apocalyptic, near-future world as a metaphor for our ‘New Normal.’ In the past couple of years a pandemic wreaked havoc, an insurrection stormed the Capitol, anonymous activist hackers attacked governments and corporations, and people began tearing down monuments across the globe. We all quickly grew accustomed to wearing masks and proposed a story of an extreme leftist group of vigilantes resetting the world to ground zero: The Great Reset.”
Lighting Designer Sooner Routhier of Sooner Rae Creative, who also served as Co-production Designer with Stout, created a rig that echoes “the skeletal nature of a post-apocalyptic, near-future world. It consists of grids of the same lights that put the band inside a deconstructed building: simplistic, industrial and homogeneous. This became the visual identity of the [limited] underplay [theater] tour that Muse did last October and has carried through into their arena tour in 2023,” she explains.
Routhier chose Claypaky Xtylos to deliver the vast majority of the show’s looks because she “wanted beams of light to extend beyond the stage to help further the idea of the skeletal building structure. They needed to be strong with minimal degradation in the beam shape and brightness.
“We also have tons of mirror products on the show,” she notes. Mirrors are “a theme of the current album cycle, and the Xtylos fixtures are able to bounce off the mirrors and create a near perfect beam reflection. With the mirrors moving overhead in the rig, we’re able to create different bounces and geometric shapes.”
The production developed a set consisting of two inflatables, each more than 30-feet high; a clear stage that exposes gear, lighting and other industrial materials; a 15-foot animated flaming monogram logo of “Will of the People;” and six giant kinetic mirrors suspended from the ceiling.
“One inflatable, dubbed ‘WILL,’ wears a Perspex mirror mask,” says Stout. “I immediately knew I wanted to bounce light off of these mirrors as an identity for the show. We later added the ceiling mirrors to continue the theme. The content helps explain a narrative of vigilantes unifying after witnessing a non-violent protester brutalized by a pack of authoritarian figures adorned in golden armor and bull skull-shaped masks. This figure appears as a 40-foot inflatable for the encore.”
Routhier set a series of vertical ladders in a horseshoe configuration around the stage, which track around the band to different positions upstage. Each ladder contains the same number of Xtylos fixtures for a total of 128. “When everything is on together it forms a massive grid that creates three walls of our skeletal building,” she explains.
“We also created a stage that’s 75 percent Plexiglass. The entire floor lighting package, including 24 Xtylos, sits below the decking, which has a grid of structure for support. It makes for a very clean stage surface, and when lit from below adds to the skeletal feel of the stage.”
The Xtylos offer Routhier and her team a number of unique advantages they can’t find in other fixtures. “I love the mirror bounce we get with the Xtylos,” says Routhier. “The beam bounces with very minimal beam degradation and great saturation in all colors. I’ve never been able to achieve that with any other fixture.”
Associate Lighting Designer and Lighting Programmer Aaron Luke finds that “the Xtylos’s laser engine, combined with great optics, produces a beam that just seems to keep going. It feels just as bright at the back of the arena as coming out of the front of the fixture. The laser engine also allows for great saturated colors without compromising on intensity,” he observes.
At the tour’s halfway mark, Luke says the Xtylos have been a “great success. With 152 fixtures, we’ve had very limited issues. Since this is my first time working with a lighting fixture with a laser engine, I’ve had to learn their ‘personality,’ so to speak.”
He notes that Claypaky’s Strategic Marketing Manager for Entertainment Lighting Solutions, George Masek, “has been a very valuable resource. From sending literature about the specialized handling of ‘safe zones’ and answering my questions to making himself available around the clock, I’ve felt like he and Claypaky are doing everything they can to ensure the success of the show.”
Routhier concurs, saying, “George Masek is incredible. He’s always such a great resource for information and guidance about the regulations surrounding the fixtures.”
Claypaky’s George Masek concludes, “It’s such a pleasure to work with Sooner and her teams - they always embrace the latest technology and are willing to take the time to learn about it. Aaron picked up the specifics of running the Xtylos immediately and this ensured that no time was taken away from the creation process. Sooner’s shows always have a powerful, unique element to them - this time, the most dramatic one is the kinetic mirrors which give the Xtylos beams a very particular look and feel unlike anything I’ve seen before.”
Joe Lott is the tour’s Lighting Programmer and John Bahnick and Josh Wagner at Upstaging are the lighting vendors.
Source: https://www.etnow.com/news/2023/5/claypaky-xtylos-deliver-post-apocalyptic-look-for-muses-will-of-the-people
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Jesse Lee Stout and Sooner Routhier Reflect Mood of Muse Tour with Chauvet Professional
USA - At its best, art holds a mirror up to its times. Not one of the fun-house variety that distorts to flatter myths or scare up false demons, but a relentlessly realistic one that reflects things as they are, and through the artist’s perspective offers hope for how things might somehow become better.
Such was the artistic mission that powered Muse’s 2022 “Will of the People” LP, which took an unsparing look at a looming post-apocalyptic world though its words and music. The same compelling force can be felt throughout arenas today on the multi-Grammy winners' current tour in support of the LP, not just in the British rocker’s shredding riffs and mind-bending electronics, but also in a powerful production design that is generating so much attention in the press.
A collaboration between creative director and co-production designer Jesse Lee Stout and lighting designer and co-production designer Sooner Routhier, the thought provoking visual panorama does more than merely support the music on stage. It also creates an all-embracive environment that works with the band’s performance to burnish itself into the audience’s collective consciousness.
Discussing the design, Stout noted: “The band and I wanted to strip down some of the theatrics from the prior tour, although we didn’t abandon them completely. We worked with the band to develop a post-apocalyptic near-future world as a metaphor for our ‘New Normal’ in today’s society. In the past couple years, a pandemic wreaked havoc, an insurrection stormed the capital, anonymous activist hackers attacked governments, and corporations, and people began tearing down monuments across the globe. We all quickly grew accustomed to wearing masks, so we proposed a story of an extreme group of vigilantes resetting the world to ground zero. With this in mind, we really wanted a lot of exposed tech in our design to evoke a bit of that futuristic dystopian vibe, but we also wanted to balance it with some sleek elements (the perspex stage, mirrors everywhere) to also lean a little sci-fi, as the band’s brand always does.”
Routhier described how this concept was translated into a production design. “After pouring through the creative direction for the new album cycle, we worked together to create a rig that feels like the skeletal nature of a post apocalyptic, near-future world,” she said. “The rig consists of grids of lights that put the band inside a deconstructed building; simplistic, industrial, and homogeneous. This became the visual identity of the underplay tour we did in the fall of 2022, and it has been carried through into the arena tour in 2023.”
Key to helping the team achieve this vision were 122 Chauvet Professional Color Strike M fixtures, which, like the rest of the rig was supplied by Upstaging. The vast majority of these motorised strobes are positioned in a horseshoe configuration around the stage, while 32 units are located under the Plexiglass stage, with a few others placed on a truss in the house for audience lighting.
“The Strike Ms in the horseshoe configuration around the stage help us create the wall of light around the band,” said Routhier. “They are one the main workhorses of the show. The units in the upstage row under the stage are usually used to uplight the inflatable characters throughout the show. Otherwise, all the under stage lighting makes the Plexiglass stage feel like its own lighting instrument.
“We’re getting some excellent colours out of our Strike Ms,” she continued. “There’s one particular crazy colour effect we do with them for the song ‘Won’t Stand Down,’ that I’ve never been able to get out of any other light before. We mimic it in the rest of the rig. It almost feels like a digital colour glitch.”
Run by associate lighting designer and programmer Aaron Luke, and programmer Joe Lott, the light show flows smoothly with the band throughout their 24-song set (including two encore numbers), accenting key moments with some intense strobing.
“This set list contains heavier music than the previous tour and that lends itself to lots of strobing,” said Routhier. “The challenge we always face when the music requires lots of strobing, is that it can become too much, leaving the audience blinded by lighting. It’s not always about the lights! HAHA! So, we try our hardest to vary the types of cues in the strobes. We use all of the strobes in the brightest strobe possible, in white only a couple times in the show. This keeps those super bright moments more impactful.”
“I think the team really tried to let the music guide the approach by following the dynamics,” added Luke. “Musically, some hits are very loud and in-your-face, so we try to let those be the biggest moments. Then there are those times when something is happening in the music that needs to be accentuated, but maybe it’s something relatively subdued or minor to the overall feel. These moments we find it more appropriate to use fewer fixtures or even a smaller number of pixels within the fixtures.”
Movement, shape and colour also flowed through a continuous spectrum of change throughout the show adding essential variety to the design, while also ensuring that it kept pace with ever nuanced change in the music. “I wanted beams of light to extend beyond the stage to help further the idea of the skeletal building structure,” said Routhier. “Also, we need diversity in cuing with the vast set list. The different directional movements help us paint each song differently.”
Varying geometric configurations also creates myriad looks that reflect different dimensions of the music. For example, for “Plug in Baby,” the design team created a floating diamond shape with the mirrors above the stage. The lighting running in a waterfall pattern along the inner sides of the diamond results in a trippy movement that is a bit disorientating, creating a worm hole or warp zone effect above the band.
In terms of colour, Stout said he was looking to create a stark difference from the band’s last tour (Simulation Theory), which leaned heavily on the aesthetics from the SynthWave subculture, including neons, cyans and magentas. Instead, he wanted to go with a palette that was more post apocalyptic.
“With this campaign we created a polluted, dirty, dusty world and our colour choices pulled from that,” he explained. “The main colour combo throughout the show is orange and teal, very ‘Mad Max Fury Road.’ Even though songs like Starlight and a few others might have pink or purple, they are very desaturated and set alongside sandy golds.”
Colour also coordinates beautifully with video content in the show, creating what is one of Stout’s favourite looks. “I love the way the video content turned out and really drives the narrative of the show and introduces characters before you see them as 30-foot plus high sculptures,” ‘he said. “There are also some great guitar chase looks Sooner does with the Strike Ms in Madness.’”
For her part Routhier said “There are so many great moments in this show direction that Jesse and the band created. It’s hard to pick just a few! Every time a new scenic element is introduced, the excitement of the show increases.”
Quite a few critics would agree with her. As one New York scribe wrote, “I don't think I will ever forget Muse's show at Madison Square Garden on Friday night, as it has been seared into my retinas; I can still see it when I close my eyes!”
Such is the power of art that reflects its times.
Source: https://www.etnow.com/news/2023/4/jesse-lee-stout-and-sooner-routhier-reflect-mood-of-muse-tour-with-chauvet-professional
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Ayrton Perseo and Domino LT Fixtures Shine on Muse’s “Will of the People” North American Tour
USA - British rock band Muse recently finished the North American leg of its “Will of the People” tour named for the band’s ninth studio album that’s packed with UK and Billboard chart toppers. Lighting designer Sooner Routhier of Sooner Rae Creative, who served as co-production designer with tour creative director Jesse Lee Stout, chose Ayrton Perseo and Domino LT fixtures as stage lights and spots. ACT Entertainment is the exclusive distributor of Ayrton lighting in North America.
“I love the reliability of the fixtures and that they are rated IP65,” says Routhier. “With Muse heading to Europe for a summer stadium tour at the end of May, it was important to have fixtures that could deal with inclement weather. We also love the fixtures’ brightness and smooth field of colours.” John Bahnick and Josh Wagner from Upstaging provided the Ayrton fixtures.
The post-apocalyptic staging of the new tour takes the band in “a very different direction from their previous tour” in our pre-pandemic, pre-insurrection world, notes Jesse Lee Stout. He partnered with Muse to transport the band to a near-future realm where an extreme group of vigilantes are resetting the world to ground zero.
Stout and Routhier created a massive grid that formed three walls of a skeletal building with the band inside. This simplistic industrial look became the visual identity of the underplay tour by Muse last fall and carried through to the “Will of the People” tour in 2023.
The production features a clear stage comprised of 75 percent Plexiglass that exposes gear, lighting and other industrial materials; when the Plexiglass decking is lit from below it adds to the skeletal feel of the stage. A 15-foot animated flaming logo is an acronym for “Will of the People.” Two inflatables more than 30 feet tall tower over the stage; one of them, dubbed “WILL,” wears a Plexiglass mirror mask, which bounces light as do kinetic ceiling mirrors.
“The content helps explain a narrative of these vigilantes unifying after witnessing a non-violent protester brutalised by a pack of authoritarian figures adorned in golden armour and bull skull-shaped masks,” says Stout. “This figure appears as a 40-foot inflatable for the encore.”
For Muse’s arena shows, 16 Perseos were located on the bottom of the torms surrounding the stage. Eleven Domino LTs were deployed as spotlights with eight on a FOH truss for front light and three on an upstage truss for backlight. When the tour plays stadiums this summer 12 Domino LTs will be mounted on FOH delay towers and three upstage for backlight.
The North American tour marked the first time that Aaron Luke, the associate lighting designer and lighting programmer, worked with Perseos and Dominos although he’s used other Ayrton fixtures in the past. “I’ve been very happy with Ayrton products for their brightness, efficiency and reliability,” he says. “Using IP-rated fixtures now made them the right choice for this tour as we head outdoors.”
The Domino LT, in particular, was selected for its compatibility with the Follow-Me system used on the tour. “We needed a bright light with long-throw optics and a flat field as well as the speed to keep up with artists who quite literally sprint from the main stage to the B stage at times,” says Luke.
“We’ve been very happy with the performance of all the Ayrton fixtures and have had absolutely zero issues with them,” he reports.
“The support we received from ACT was amazing, as always,” adds Routhier. “We love ACT!”
Source: https://www.etnow.com/news/2023/5/ayrton-perseo-and-domino-lt-fixtures-shine-on-muses-will-of-the-people-north-american-tour
British rock band Muse has hit the road with its North American tour, “Will of the People,” on which more than 150 Claypaky Xtylos enhance the band’s post-apocalyptic staging non-stop.
The tour is named for the band’s most recent ninth studio album, which gave Muse its seventh consecutive No. 1 on the UK albums chart and topped Billboard’s Alternative and Rock Albums tallies. The “Will of the People” tour began in Chicago’s United Center on February 25 and concluded the U.S. portion of the tour on April 20 in Salt Lake City, after which it will move on to Europe.
“The band and I really wanted to go in a very different direction from their previous tour to give this one its own identity,” notes Jesse Lee Stout, Creative Director and Co-Production Designer. “We developed a post-apocalyptic, near-future world as a metaphor for our ‘New Normal.’ In the past couple of years a pandemic wreaked havoc, an insurrection stormed the Capitol, anonymous activist hackers attacked governments and corporations, and people began tearing down monuments across the globe. We all quickly grew accustomed to wearing masks and proposed a story of an extreme leftist group of vigilantes resetting the world to ground zero: The Great Reset.”
Lighting Designer Sooner Routhier of Sooner Rae Creative, who also served as Co-production Designer with Stout, created a rig that echoes “the skeletal nature of a post-apocalyptic, near-future world. It consists of grids of the same lights that put the band inside a deconstructed building: simplistic, industrial and homogeneous. This became the visual identity of the [limited] underplay [theater] tour that Muse did last October and has carried through into their arena tour in 2023,” she explains.
Routhier chose Claypaky Xtylos to deliver the vast majority of the show’s looks because she “wanted beams of light to extend beyond the stage to help further the idea of the skeletal building structure. They needed to be strong with minimal degradation in the beam shape and brightness.
“We also have tons of mirror products on the show,” she notes. Mirrors are “a theme of the current album cycle, and the Xtylos fixtures are able to bounce off the mirrors and create a near perfect beam reflection. With the mirrors moving overhead in the rig, we’re able to create different bounces and geometric shapes.”
The production developed a set consisting of two inflatables, each more than 30-feet high; a clear stage that exposes gear, lighting and other industrial materials; a 15-foot animated flaming monogram logo of “Will of the People;” and six giant kinetic mirrors suspended from the ceiling.
“One inflatable, dubbed ‘WILL,’ wears a Perspex mirror mask,” says Stout. “I immediately knew I wanted to bounce light off of these mirrors as an identity for the show. We later added the ceiling mirrors to continue the theme. The content helps explain a narrative of vigilantes unifying after witnessing a non-violent protester brutalized by a pack of authoritarian figures adorned in golden armor and bull skull-shaped masks. This figure appears as a 40-foot inflatable for the encore.”
Routhier set a series of vertical ladders in a horseshoe configuration around the stage, which track around the band to different positions upstage. Each ladder contains the same number of Xtylos fixtures for a total of 128. “When everything is on together it forms a massive grid that creates three walls of our skeletal building,” she explains.
“We also created a stage that’s 75 percent Plexiglass. The entire floor lighting package, including 24 Xtylos, sits below the decking, which has a grid of structure for support. It makes for a very clean stage surface, and when lit from below adds to the skeletal feel of the stage.”
The Xtylos offer Routhier and her team a number of unique advantages they can’t find in other fixtures. “I love the mirror bounce we get with the Xtylos,” says Routhier. “The beam bounces with very minimal beam degradation and great saturation in all colors. I’ve never been able to achieve that with any other fixture.”
Associate Lighting Designer and Lighting Programmer Aaron Luke finds that “the Xtylos’s laser engine, combined with great optics, produces a beam that just seems to keep going. It feels just as bright at the back of the arena as coming out of the front of the fixture. The laser engine also allows for great saturated colors without compromising on intensity,” he observes.
At the tour’s halfway mark, Luke says the Xtylos have been a “great success. With 152 fixtures, we’ve had very limited issues. Since this is my first time working with a lighting fixture with a laser engine, I’ve had to learn their ‘personality,’ so to speak.”
He notes that Claypaky’s Strategic Marketing Manager for Entertainment Lighting Solutions, George Masek, “has been a very valuable resource. From sending literature about the specialized handling of ‘safe zones’ and answering my questions to making himself available around the clock, I’ve felt like he and Claypaky are doing everything they can to ensure the success of the show.”
Routhier concurs, saying, “George Masek is incredible. He’s always such a great resource for information and guidance about the regulations surrounding the fixtures.”
Claypaky’s George Masek concludes, “It’s such a pleasure to work with Sooner and her teams - they always embrace the latest technology and are willing to take the time to learn about it. Aaron picked up the specifics of running the Xtylos immediately and this ensured that no time was taken away from the creation process. Sooner’s shows always have a powerful, unique element to them - this time, the most dramatic one is the kinetic mirrors which give the Xtylos beams a very particular look and feel unlike anything I’ve seen before.”
Joe Lott is the tour’s Lighting Programmer and John Bahnick and Josh Wagner at Upstaging are the lighting vendors.
Source: https://www.etnow.com/news/2023/5/claypaky-xtylos-deliver-post-apocalyptic-look-for-muses-will-of-the-people
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Jesse Lee Stout and Sooner Routhier Reflect Mood of Muse Tour with Chauvet Professional
USA - At its best, art holds a mirror up to its times. Not one of the fun-house variety that distorts to flatter myths or scare up false demons, but a relentlessly realistic one that reflects things as they are, and through the artist’s perspective offers hope for how things might somehow become better.
Such was the artistic mission that powered Muse’s 2022 “Will of the People” LP, which took an unsparing look at a looming post-apocalyptic world though its words and music. The same compelling force can be felt throughout arenas today on the multi-Grammy winners' current tour in support of the LP, not just in the British rocker’s shredding riffs and mind-bending electronics, but also in a powerful production design that is generating so much attention in the press.
A collaboration between creative director and co-production designer Jesse Lee Stout and lighting designer and co-production designer Sooner Routhier, the thought provoking visual panorama does more than merely support the music on stage. It also creates an all-embracive environment that works with the band’s performance to burnish itself into the audience’s collective consciousness.
Discussing the design, Stout noted: “The band and I wanted to strip down some of the theatrics from the prior tour, although we didn’t abandon them completely. We worked with the band to develop a post-apocalyptic near-future world as a metaphor for our ‘New Normal’ in today’s society. In the past couple years, a pandemic wreaked havoc, an insurrection stormed the capital, anonymous activist hackers attacked governments, and corporations, and people began tearing down monuments across the globe. We all quickly grew accustomed to wearing masks, so we proposed a story of an extreme group of vigilantes resetting the world to ground zero. With this in mind, we really wanted a lot of exposed tech in our design to evoke a bit of that futuristic dystopian vibe, but we also wanted to balance it with some sleek elements (the perspex stage, mirrors everywhere) to also lean a little sci-fi, as the band’s brand always does.”
Routhier described how this concept was translated into a production design. “After pouring through the creative direction for the new album cycle, we worked together to create a rig that feels like the skeletal nature of a post apocalyptic, near-future world,” she said. “The rig consists of grids of lights that put the band inside a deconstructed building; simplistic, industrial, and homogeneous. This became the visual identity of the underplay tour we did in the fall of 2022, and it has been carried through into the arena tour in 2023.”
Key to helping the team achieve this vision were 122 Chauvet Professional Color Strike M fixtures, which, like the rest of the rig was supplied by Upstaging. The vast majority of these motorised strobes are positioned in a horseshoe configuration around the stage, while 32 units are located under the Plexiglass stage, with a few others placed on a truss in the house for audience lighting.
“The Strike Ms in the horseshoe configuration around the stage help us create the wall of light around the band,” said Routhier. “They are one the main workhorses of the show. The units in the upstage row under the stage are usually used to uplight the inflatable characters throughout the show. Otherwise, all the under stage lighting makes the Plexiglass stage feel like its own lighting instrument.
“We’re getting some excellent colours out of our Strike Ms,” she continued. “There’s one particular crazy colour effect we do with them for the song ‘Won’t Stand Down,’ that I’ve never been able to get out of any other light before. We mimic it in the rest of the rig. It almost feels like a digital colour glitch.”
Run by associate lighting designer and programmer Aaron Luke, and programmer Joe Lott, the light show flows smoothly with the band throughout their 24-song set (including two encore numbers), accenting key moments with some intense strobing.
“This set list contains heavier music than the previous tour and that lends itself to lots of strobing,” said Routhier. “The challenge we always face when the music requires lots of strobing, is that it can become too much, leaving the audience blinded by lighting. It’s not always about the lights! HAHA! So, we try our hardest to vary the types of cues in the strobes. We use all of the strobes in the brightest strobe possible, in white only a couple times in the show. This keeps those super bright moments more impactful.”
“I think the team really tried to let the music guide the approach by following the dynamics,” added Luke. “Musically, some hits are very loud and in-your-face, so we try to let those be the biggest moments. Then there are those times when something is happening in the music that needs to be accentuated, but maybe it’s something relatively subdued or minor to the overall feel. These moments we find it more appropriate to use fewer fixtures or even a smaller number of pixels within the fixtures.”
Movement, shape and colour also flowed through a continuous spectrum of change throughout the show adding essential variety to the design, while also ensuring that it kept pace with ever nuanced change in the music. “I wanted beams of light to extend beyond the stage to help further the idea of the skeletal building structure,” said Routhier. “Also, we need diversity in cuing with the vast set list. The different directional movements help us paint each song differently.”
Varying geometric configurations also creates myriad looks that reflect different dimensions of the music. For example, for “Plug in Baby,” the design team created a floating diamond shape with the mirrors above the stage. The lighting running in a waterfall pattern along the inner sides of the diamond results in a trippy movement that is a bit disorientating, creating a worm hole or warp zone effect above the band.
In terms of colour, Stout said he was looking to create a stark difference from the band’s last tour (Simulation Theory), which leaned heavily on the aesthetics from the SynthWave subculture, including neons, cyans and magentas. Instead, he wanted to go with a palette that was more post apocalyptic.
“With this campaign we created a polluted, dirty, dusty world and our colour choices pulled from that,” he explained. “The main colour combo throughout the show is orange and teal, very ‘Mad Max Fury Road.’ Even though songs like Starlight and a few others might have pink or purple, they are very desaturated and set alongside sandy golds.”
Colour also coordinates beautifully with video content in the show, creating what is one of Stout’s favourite looks. “I love the way the video content turned out and really drives the narrative of the show and introduces characters before you see them as 30-foot plus high sculptures,” ‘he said. “There are also some great guitar chase looks Sooner does with the Strike Ms in Madness.’”
For her part Routhier said “There are so many great moments in this show direction that Jesse and the band created. It’s hard to pick just a few! Every time a new scenic element is introduced, the excitement of the show increases.”
Quite a few critics would agree with her. As one New York scribe wrote, “I don't think I will ever forget Muse's show at Madison Square Garden on Friday night, as it has been seared into my retinas; I can still see it when I close my eyes!”
Such is the power of art that reflects its times.
Source: https://www.etnow.com/news/2023/4/jesse-lee-stout-and-sooner-routhier-reflect-mood-of-muse-tour-with-chauvet-professional
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Ayrton Perseo and Domino LT Fixtures Shine on Muse’s “Will of the People” North American Tour
USA - British rock band Muse recently finished the North American leg of its “Will of the People” tour named for the band’s ninth studio album that’s packed with UK and Billboard chart toppers. Lighting designer Sooner Routhier of Sooner Rae Creative, who served as co-production designer with tour creative director Jesse Lee Stout, chose Ayrton Perseo and Domino LT fixtures as stage lights and spots. ACT Entertainment is the exclusive distributor of Ayrton lighting in North America.
“I love the reliability of the fixtures and that they are rated IP65,” says Routhier. “With Muse heading to Europe for a summer stadium tour at the end of May, it was important to have fixtures that could deal with inclement weather. We also love the fixtures’ brightness and smooth field of colours.” John Bahnick and Josh Wagner from Upstaging provided the Ayrton fixtures.
The post-apocalyptic staging of the new tour takes the band in “a very different direction from their previous tour” in our pre-pandemic, pre-insurrection world, notes Jesse Lee Stout. He partnered with Muse to transport the band to a near-future realm where an extreme group of vigilantes are resetting the world to ground zero.
Stout and Routhier created a massive grid that formed three walls of a skeletal building with the band inside. This simplistic industrial look became the visual identity of the underplay tour by Muse last fall and carried through to the “Will of the People” tour in 2023.
The production features a clear stage comprised of 75 percent Plexiglass that exposes gear, lighting and other industrial materials; when the Plexiglass decking is lit from below it adds to the skeletal feel of the stage. A 15-foot animated flaming logo is an acronym for “Will of the People.” Two inflatables more than 30 feet tall tower over the stage; one of them, dubbed “WILL,” wears a Plexiglass mirror mask, which bounces light as do kinetic ceiling mirrors.
“The content helps explain a narrative of these vigilantes unifying after witnessing a non-violent protester brutalised by a pack of authoritarian figures adorned in golden armour and bull skull-shaped masks,” says Stout. “This figure appears as a 40-foot inflatable for the encore.”
For Muse’s arena shows, 16 Perseos were located on the bottom of the torms surrounding the stage. Eleven Domino LTs were deployed as spotlights with eight on a FOH truss for front light and three on an upstage truss for backlight. When the tour plays stadiums this summer 12 Domino LTs will be mounted on FOH delay towers and three upstage for backlight.
The North American tour marked the first time that Aaron Luke, the associate lighting designer and lighting programmer, worked with Perseos and Dominos although he’s used other Ayrton fixtures in the past. “I’ve been very happy with Ayrton products for their brightness, efficiency and reliability,” he says. “Using IP-rated fixtures now made them the right choice for this tour as we head outdoors.”
The Domino LT, in particular, was selected for its compatibility with the Follow-Me system used on the tour. “We needed a bright light with long-throw optics and a flat field as well as the speed to keep up with artists who quite literally sprint from the main stage to the B stage at times,” says Luke.
“We’ve been very happy with the performance of all the Ayrton fixtures and have had absolutely zero issues with them,” he reports.
“The support we received from ACT was amazing, as always,” adds Routhier. “We love ACT!”
Source: https://www.etnow.com/news/2023/5/ayrton-perseo-and-domino-lt-fixtures-shine-on-muses-will-of-the-people-north-american-tour