CHAUVET Professional Helps The Playground Build Narrative for Megan Thee Stallion Tour

	"The show took the audience on a journey through color, light, sound, and movement," says Adams.

Wanting to share the story of her creative and personal journeys with fans, Megan Thee Stallion 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 color changes and various set and video configurations to endow each chapter of the Megan Thee Stallion narrative with its own aura.

"The Hot Girl Summer Tour consists of three main acts that really drive the creative intent, explains Curtis Adams, who, along with Sooner Routhier and Trevor Ahlstrand was the coproduction designer of the tour. "Act one featured Megan's hard-hitting 'Snake' beginnings with sharp lines, powerful silhouettes, and stark colors. Act two centered around Megan's 'Butterfly' era and had a dichroic color palette. "The softer pastel-like colors were a vast departure from the hard-hitting show open, which culled a difference in mood and helped emphasize her metamorphosis.

"Act three focused on Megan's 'Human Embodiment'," continues Adams. "This led to an all-out dance party. The final act's color selections were sexy, elevating the look and feel of skin and the show's tone. The show took the audience on a journey through color, 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 palette were 110 CHAUVET Professional COLORado PXL Bar 16 motorized RGBW battens supplied by Fuse. 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," notes Adams.

Breaking down the role of the colors rendered by all the fixtures in the rig, Routhier notes: "The first act was titled 'Snake,' and focused on fiery colors -- 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 color and video content."

"One of the major themes of the show was transformation and rebirth," says 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 says. "Most of the production was stripped back to embellish this intimacy of the moment."

"I love all the incredible programming that [lighting programmer] Dane Kirk did in the COLORado PXL Bars," says 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."

Routhier recalls another moment at the top of Act two when the star appeared in a cocoon constructed of plexiglass and dichroic film. "Two dancers spun it around for Megan's reveal," notes Routhier. "As it spun, the moving lights hit the exterior of the cocoon, throwing colored light around the room like a big, multi-colored mirror ball!"

"There was a good bit of automation and video that converged with our lighting," Kirk elaborates 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."