HAIR the Musical

Assignment

Painting with Light has supplied lighting and video design for the current Stage Entertainment tour of cult 1970s musical ‘Hair’ which is currently touring the Netherlands.

Set in New York during the Vietnam War era in the midst of hippie counterculture, the sexual revolution and mind-expanding drug experimentalism ... the storyline touches multiple race and class issues and asks leading and rhetorical questions about the futility of war and violence. These historically significant markers all provided multiple layers of rich visual material for Luc Peumans and his team which included associate and video content producer Michael Al Far to work with.

It is a two truck tour so the basic design elements factored in this logistic, and Carla Janssen-Höfelt created the scaffolding-based set design to bring a temporary pop-up feel in a rapidly changing world with little stability and often no palpable rhyme or reason!

The big challenge was to preserve a period feel to the work respecting the historical significance especially for those seeing it who were original Hair fans, but also helping to make it relevant and in a contemporary for younger audiences seeing it for the first time ... which meant some very specific styling.

Solution

As the initial storyline was evolved, Carla produced a set of guidelines for video content and how that should relate to the overall narrative. The street art style of the footage underlined these, also emplacing the shifting, itinerant nature of the piece and subtly reinforcing the many scenic and locational references – both real and hallucinogenic!

Painting with Light recruited a team of three video artists to assist this intensive process and they created all the basic drawings like the skyline, parks, etc., which were used as a template to create more detailed content essential to the digital scenery. Once the raw content and ideas had the green light, additional treatment and fine-tuning completed the process.

All the content is run through one of Painting with Light’s Pandora's Box media servers, programmed by their video control specialist, Katleen Selleslagh.

Luc wanted the lighting aesthetic to be harsh with plenty of contrasts, dark and light areas, different directions and strategically deployed side light which always creates atmosphere.

He chose a ‘direction’ for the lighting in every scene, and the moods ranged from intimate, minimal and stark to larger and more colourful for the big production numbers with the full cast onstage.

Read the whole case here!