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A movable fest could be coming
Yale architecture students are challenged to redesign Coachella's stage, no holds barred.
By Geoff Boucher, Times Staff Writer
April 29, 2006
Some things never change, so it's a good bet that a decade from now the
star of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival will be some
scruffy kid hailed as "the new Bob Dylan" (every decade has one) or a
London band the British press calls the single greatest thing in the
history of amplified music (those turn up at a rate of three per year).
What will be
different is the main stage they play on. That's because Paul Tollett,
the promoter for the massive festival that today kicks off its 2006
edition, believes that it's time to think outside the box when it comes
to your basic rectangle stage for outdoor festivals. And "outside the
box" may mean a giant robotic stage that moves like a metallic crab.
Really, no joke.
"That's one of the designs, yeah, believe it or not, but I don't know
really what it will look like exactly, but I do know it will be
different and it will move," Tollett said. "Right now, stages are what
they have always been, which isn't really anything special. We're going
to try to change that."
Today,
Tollett is in Indio, where Depeche Mode, Franz Ferdinand and Kanye West
are among the first-day performers at Coachella, which will draw a
crowd of 50,000 today and more than that on Sunday. But across the
country, in New Haven, Conn., a glimpse of the future of the premier
Southern California festival might be on display. There a graduate
class of architecture students is presenting final projects, and the
assignment is to completely re-imagine the stage of Coachella and to
make it move.
It's more than an academic exercise to Tollett,
who flew out to the Yale University campus a few weeks ago to review
the works in progress. He came back not only impressed, but resolved to
make his Coachella stage more than it is. "I know for a fact," he said,
"that we will move toward some of the things we saw in those plans."
One
reason is the young fans of today (and, even more, the young fans of
tomorrow) put a premium on high-tech visuals and grand theatrics that
move them viscerally. The rave scene has atrophied in recent years, but
its aesthetic imprint was certainly made. Likewise, the CGI world of
films and the hyper-reality of video game art have attuned generations
to a show that promises a bit more than a microphone, amps and a raised
platform.
Coachella is thriving as a business venture. Tickets
for the festival this year were sold in all 50 states and in 19
countries. Bands vie to perform, and more than a few famous acts are
quietly told, "Thanks, but no thanks." But Coachella now has plenty of
competition in similarly styled festivals nationwide (the Bonnaroo
Music & Arts Festival in Tennessee, for instance, this year for the
first time secured a lineup that rivals Indio's) and the concert
industry in general is finding it harder to lure fans through the
turnstiles. There's also the fact that the Internet allows
less-motivated fans to stay home and watch most festivals live and for
free.
"So you have to be special and it's not just the music
acts you get on stage, it's the whole experience and the way you set
yourself apart from everyone else," Tollett said. He dismissed the
notion that Coachella, which has enhanced its brand in the last year
with a concert movie and the creation of a successful online fan
community, can simply bank on its name. "No, you just can't stand
still."
One unexpected way to keep a festival spirit moving turns out to be future architecture.
Last
year, Tollett got a call from Los Angeles architect Greg Lynn, who is
also a Davenport University visiting professor at the Yale School of
Architecture. He asked if his class could use the festival for an
intense project under the class-studio title of Giant Robot, which made
clear the emphasis on movement for the structure. Tollett, a dedicated
fan of architecture, didn't need to think twice. "I said, 'Are you
kidding me? How much do I have to pay?' "
Tollett already had been chewing on ways to change the traditional stage.
"Some
bands have already changed the way stages are shaped, like the way U2
and Metallica have fans in the middle of [an area hemmed in by stage
ramps], and I think they are ahead of the curve. And in architecture,
the future is buildings that have walls and sections that move. It's
only a matter of time before the two come together."
For Lynn,
the project was inspired by the buzz in architecture circles about
incorporating robotics. He was also prodded by something a bit
glitzier: Las Vegas stage shows. "The stagecraft of productions in
Vegas, things like Cirque du Soleil, have changed the expectations of
what a stage can be, and I wanted to see that on a more monumental
scale with a free-standing building on an outdoor landscape."
Mark
Gage, a New York architect who assisted Lynn with the class, said the
success of the U2 stage and design trends point to a clear next step:
"The next big thing is that motion is going to show up in both bigger
and smaller shows than the arenas, and the technology and materials are
to a point where it's just about to happen. People are going to be
bored with things that don't move. You can have Björk up there in a
regular band shell or have Björk up there with all these giant robotic
fingers spreading out behind her as part of the production."
The
Yale students came west in November to join Tollett at the Empire Polo
Fields. They brought cameras and sketchpads and plenty of questions.
The first step for them was learning the landscape. "I gave them the
big tour," the promoter said, "I showed them everything."
The
students came with their heads already geared to robot culture. Lynn
and Gage had given their pupils plenty of design examples, including
industrial drones at work in automobile factories, robot vacuum
cleaners and even Transformers, the 1980s line of Japanese toys that
inspired comics and animation adventures (as well as a live-action
Michael Bay film, "Transformers: The Movie," slated for 2007). By the
time Tollett went to Yale last month, the examples had inspired
intricate buildings that open like flowers or clams or reveal the stage
inside by opening arms that recall the motion of crab claws.
The
class project's mission statement made it clear that the created
building should, like the Empire Polo Fields, transform itself for a
fleeting purpose: to handle music fans on a massive scale.
"Maybe three times a year hundreds of thousands of people will converge
on it. We will define an architectural problem that is neither monument
nor gizmo but something else that can incorporate both positions. They
may or may not move, but they will certainly be robots."
It's
just a class project, of course, and the economic factors and some
technological factors make the moving parts of the Coachella stage a
near-future fantasy, not a renovation ready to get underway. The
students will be presenting their projects today at Yale to a judging
panel of esteemed architects, among them Frank Gehry. Tollett is a bit
busy this weekend, obviously, so he can't make it.
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