In its best moments—and Abstract has many—the show is as satisfying as a great unboxing video or a teardown on YouTube: It cuts through the opacity of a finished product and helps you understand, if not entirely explain, why some things are attractive, why they work. But even better, the show does that by dealing as much with the maker as the made.
ES DEVLIN
“When artists and I talk about how they should first be seen,” she says, “I often think about it in the context of the conversation that’s being had around them in the public domain while we are planning the show.” The conversation during the planning of Miley Cyrus’s Bangerz tour in 2014 was all about twerking and tongues (Cyrus had a habit of sticking hers out at the general public). In response to the furore around Cyrus’s behaviour, Devlin suggested the singer “enter by sliding down a giant bright-pink slide version of the contentious tongue – a bright, bubblegum gesture as an antidote to toxic talk”.
When Es Devlin speaks about stage design, she could be talking about an ancient science: the distance between audience expectations and reality are "calibrated"; her collaborator Kanye West applies a kind of "medicine" to the proceedings; and a successful show is like a chemical reaction.
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