How Charli XCX and Troye Sivan’s Sweat tour turned sold-out arenas into nightclubs.
It’s no surprise to anyone who’s been online this year, one of the recurring names when the Grammy nominees were announced last week was Charli XCX, whose album, bro, he got seven heads. The Recording Academy also nominated Charli XCX’s creative director, Imogene Strauss for Best Recording Package (and Special Offering agency) for the ubiquitous, neon-green artwork. bro.
Apart from his performance of brat packaging, Strauss was also a part of translating it to the stages of Sweat, the headlining tour of Charli XCX and Australian pop singer Troye Sivan. Sweat, which includes 22 stops between Sept. 14 and Oct. 23, was the biggest tour ever for both Charli XCX and Sivan, who sold out arenas with more than 15,000 fans. Per Billboardthe tour grossed $28 million and sold 297,000 tickets for the 22 shows Charli XCX and Sivan played from September 14 to October 23.
But a tour of the stadiums, for all their beauty, can also take a while. Strauss, who was the tour’s artistic director, and production director Jonny Kingsbury were tasked with recreating the dirty, sexual, and drug-addled atmosphere. bro and Sivan Something to Give in areas that also have houses Disney on Ice. They used one-of-a-kind sets for each artist and a custom-built transparent catwalk over a tunnel-like cage, and used intricate steadicam work to make even the nosebleeds feel like they were part of the action.
“We really wanted to lean into this dark, club light as the main focus,” Strauss said, noting that he wanted it to sound like he was “in a club with Charli and Troye.”
Against Sweat, Strauss and Kingsbury had the opportunity to work together on Charli XCX’s previous tour in support of 2022. The crash. That tour spanned the world at many theaters and festivals, meaning the venues—which held anywhere from 1,000 to 6,000 people—could vary widely. This hindered their approach to the show: Strauss says they were lucky if the stage was 40 × 20 meters, and that their design needed to be sufficiently coherent, but also adaptable.
Sweat was an opportunity to show that discipline The crash he taught Strauss and Kingsbury while letting Charli XCX out. The artist explained The crash-the last of the five albums she released under contract with Warner’s Asylum Records-as her “big-label selling” record, and the era itself her “pop girlie” moment. The tour, with its colorful lights and large columns, reflected this commercial image, Kingsbury said.
“With The crashwe were trying to combine it with the idea of pop stars that he was following at the time,” he said. “Open up browe were released.”
The platform is also completely different but it is still a platform
For Sweat, Strauss and Kingsbury faced a new challenge: Bringing Charli XCX and Sivan together for one show. Neither Strauss nor Kingsbury had worked with Sivan before. But Gordon von Steiner, Sivan’s creative director, was an old friend of Strauss and an expert in photography and video. Combined with Strauss’s talent for live shows, the two combined their ideas with ease.
“[Von Steiner] he was very open to letting me take the lead on how to turn his ideas into a living world,” Strauss said. “I really expected there to be more tension, and there wasn’t.”
Sweat the stage showed the combination of two acts. Because both Charlie XCX and Sivan have been touring solo all summer, the producers were able to take a piece of each set into the show—Sivan lent industrial scaffolding that dominated the stage, while Charli XCX opened the show, bro-the green drape he appears in at the beginning of each show.
Just because of their size, arenas are a challenge to produce concerts. For Sweat, Strauss and Kingsbury needed to find a way to fill the space with sound and lights without it being raw. More mega-club, less basketball game. With that, the duo decided to scale back the design.
“Usually when you go to a stadium show, they’re very bright and there’s one big set in the middle,” Strauss said. As Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter frequented rainbow color schemes, Strauss chose to stick to a dark palette. “To do a really dark show on the field is rare, and it’s something we wanted to lean on.”
Kingsbury, working with COUR Design, also led the way in lighting. For Sweat, he used lighting tricks to evoke a light, clubby atmosphere. At the top of the show, a line of lights sat high above the stage. Every time Charli XCX appeared, the lights were dimmed the closer she got to the stage. By the time he came out to sing “Vroom Vroom,” they were just above his head, serving as his main source of light while looking a bit sinister.
“Instead of [the stage] it felt 40 feet long, it felt 10 feet long,” Kingsbury said. “It feels like the club is lighting up the pitch with every step back.”
In venues with 15,000 people, camera work is also important in making stadium visits feel smaller. For fans who go up to the balcony, the jumbo screens can only provide a clear view of the artist. The multi-platform tour will use 60 frames per second video, per Kingsbury. I Sweat the video feed was a crisper 24 frames per second, with video shot every night by a steadicam operator.
Because the screens were made to look like billboards, Charli XCX could perform on them, shouting her lyrics to fans on the far sides of the stage. “You tap people into the ‘worst seats’ in the area, but they end up being amazing seats at certain times of the show,” Strauss said.
Cages, platforms, and other technical mysteries
The main set for the tour was the “cage,” a long, transparent catwalk with a fenced-in layer below. This basement gave Charli XCX and Sivan access to the floor from the back of the stage, allowing them to get closer to the standing audience members. It also gave set designers a chance to put their spin on the pop-star arena tour.
“Charli didn’t want to have a catwalk, because she felt like it was pop,” Strauss said. “Being on his level with the audience, being able to connect with them more, that’s where the idea of the cage came from.”
Kingsbury embraced the cage for its cinematic possibilities. When Charli XCX and Sivan reunited near the end of the show to perform their 2018 hit “1999,” camera operators were able to film above and inside the cage—where Sivan crashed to the bottom of the catwalk beneath Charli XCX. Also, after Charli XCX spat on the catwalk during “Guess,” the camera operator could capture a photo of her licking it up, below close up.
Since the first end of the show in “1999” we also had the biggest technical work of the tour: A rising platform, which raises the stars up near the balcony. The Platform is the basis of the field shows, but without being decorated with the name of the tour, the lifting time still avoids the big one.
“I wanted things to feel industrial, minimal, but still functional,” Strauss said. “It doesn’t have this big poptastic, ‘Oh, flying saucer thing.’ It’s just a platform. There’s very little that can be, and we’re not trying to hide that.”
