SummerSonic 2010

Last year we were invited to provide designs for each of the indoor stages at the Summersonic festival in Tokyo.  We started to come up with some fairly cool ideas for the various stages, but two things quickly became apparent, the client clearly didn’t want stage designs as such, though that had been our first impression, what was really needed was an room ambiance, the stage area would kind of take care of itself, whether it was just a lighting look or something that a band might bring themselves, and the other thing… well as always the budget number was really pretty low.  So we decided to use as much of our rental inventory as possible.

This worked out fairly well, but the halls at Makuhari Messe, an extensive exhibition complex near Tokyo where the festival is held, are so vast and cavernous that they simply seemed to swallow up scenery and render things miniscule.  Plus lighting was limited, so trying to light large arrays of rental modules was a challenge.  Turning up with so many individual rental pieces also required a lot of rigging.  What would work a lot better, I thought, rather than try to fill the room, would be if we could build a fewer number of bigger elements, that would be more iconic in the spaces,  and would be much easier to light individually.

So we started to develop fabric structures that would be easy to ship, simple to rig requiring as few points as possible and would go up and come down quickly.  We came up with quite a range of ideas, and whittled those down to some favorites. 

The theory is that eventually these first pieces will form the basis of a scenic repertoire so that each year each hall will have a “new” look.  We had four halls to consider:  “Mountain Stage” -  the biggest space where we decided to hang four floating columns way out in the room, and have an array of Diamond Box Columns on each side of the stage.  Only six elements in total but we felt that at the right scale that might be enough to provide an adequate ambiance.  For “Sonic Stage” we built six giant fabric tubes that could be internally lit and added some silver panels to the side walls.  “Dance Stage” was a different kind of room - whereas for the other sages there was a definite strategy that perhaps for the performances themselves the scenic ambiance might remain unlit - so as not to detract from what the band were doing onstage, and ambiance would be a kind of “house lights” state, that would give the audience something to look at during the changeover periods between acts, Dance was definitely intended to be up the whole time and add a club ambiance to the room throughout the shows.  So there we came up with op art boxes hung at different levels over the audience, and laser cut fabric light columns, this was a huge success the various elements pulsing with saturated colors making the space exciting and intimate.

The final space was a Chill Zone, a rest area for tired festival-goers to stretch out on carpet and relax.  Here we provided a cubic array that we could project onto with moving video. 

We prototyped all the units, fabricated them in the US and shipped to Japan shortly before the festival.  Everything worked out really well, and I felt like in comparison to what we did last year we really succeeded in taming the cavernous Halls and enhancing the look of the festival.  We are already starting to think about the way we might use the current units in different configurations, and based on our experiences this year what we might add next year. 

I think what surprised me most was that on the Mountain Stage, the units were mostly lit throughout the performances, I think it was because the units were far enough away from the stage and were so simple and elegant that the bands didn’t feel that they “interfered” with their own look but just became part of the general environment.  My biggest thrill was the Chill-Out Cubic Wall, which was a simple structure that looked complex in three dimensions and formed a perfect sculpture over the rest area.  It’s the kind of piece that would be excellent in an atrium context since it looks so different as one moves around it.