Live Design recently caught up with Zarkana’s scenic designer – Stephane Roy – and talked shop:
In taming the huge stage at Radio City Music Hall, French-Canadian scenic designer Stéphane Roy (whose previous designs for Cirque du Soleil include Dralion, Varekai, and Zumanity) reduced the size of the stage to something more manageable yet still majestic. “It’s like a temple when you first go into Radio City,” Roy says. “The best approach in dealing with this large space was to blend and continue the perspective in the theatre to make it smaller.” To do so, Roy used a series of three portals, noting: “Within the third portal, the stage is almost the same size as a Broadway theatre.”
With Radio City as the framework for the production, everything was large-scale: “Like an opera,” says Roy, who used various curtains, from Austrian, French, Kabuki, and Venetian, to punctuate the performance and set the various scenes. “The idea was that the theatre had been abandoned for 75 years,” he explains. “We wanted to express the idea of timelessness, we have been there before, we are there now, and will be there again. Everything is mystical, full of memories.” With that idea in mind, there are not a lot of set changes, but rather one set that evolves throughout the entire show. “That language allows us to have slow changes,” adds Roy.
Read the original article here.
{ SOURCE: LiveDesignOnline }
