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Behind the Scenes: Es Devlin

Es Devlin

BBC Radio 4 - Behind the Scenes, Es Devlin

World class stage designer and artist Es Devlin reveals the astonishing range of her work.

If you've been thrilled in a stadium by a pop spectacular or in a theatre by an intriguing set, chances are you've encountered Es Devlin's work. We hear about her art projects.

Es Devlin has been described as a design polymath. She's best known perhaps as the go-to maker of spectacular rock concerts - eye-popping stage sets for Beyonce , Adele, Kanye West and U2 with their audiences of many thousands. Yet she's as happy and inventive setting the stage for opera or plays at the Almeida Theatre that seats 320.  

We hear about how, as a designer,  she goes about offering thrills with intimacy in the huge spaces and lifting the significance of a performance in the smaller venues. 

We also find out how Es, during lockdown, has been working on projects that are less about live performance - the audience, she says 'is a temporarily extinct species' - and more about expression though art works and films.  We sample, for example, the film commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to mark 75 years since the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The film played out over the entire advertising screens of Piccadilly Circus for an open air , socially distanced crowd- a work that brought together British and Japanese accounts of those events. 

We also see Es involved in a wonderful collision of ideas, film, music and archive staged on the roof of a multi-storey car park in London as the sun went down over the city.

Es invites us to her studio to meet her vital team of collaborators. Next stop, Miami for an installation of a huge mirrored maze.

Produced by Susan Marling
A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 4

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