A forest that fits on a truck, a stage that changes with the music and a stadium show designed to feel intimate. Ric Lipson of STUFISH takes us into the creative thinking behind Dermot Kennedy’s tour
Words Verity Butler
here are certain genres of music and kinds of musicians that feel purpose-made for performance
in large-scale venues. Recent examples, like Harry Styles’ Together, Together tour, with its elevated walkways reaching up to 100 metres across the stadium floor – or the immense 149-date Eras Tour by Taylor Swift, whose show time amounted to approximately 3.5 hours – demonstrate that some musicians and their fans are destined for a stadium-sized stage. When it comes to styles of music that are more rooted in vulnerability, taking that and placing it in front of tens of thousands of people can sometimes present a greater challenge than some of the ‘busier’ production designs we commonly see. For Irish singer-songwriter Dermot Kennedy, whose work moves between quiet introspection and soaring, full-bodied anthems, that careful balancing act between projecting his music in vast arenas while preserving its intimate style was central to his recent The Weight of the Woods tour. Accompanying his latest album of the same name, the production creates an atmospheric landscape in which the stage becomes a world of its own: layered, tactile and constantly shifting, with a visual language that reflects the emotional weight of the music. Conceived by entertainment architects STUFISH, the design takes its cues from the natural world without attempting to reproduce it literally. Fabric-built trees, sculptural rock formations and transparent video surfaces combine to create a forest that can feel simultaneously expansive and enclosed. For Ric Lipson, a partner and stage architect at STUFISH, the starting point was understanding how Kennedy wanted this new chapter to feel. “The initial brief was quite wide. We had a meeting with Dermot’s management first, and then with Dermot to hear his thoughts on the new album, and also his previous tours: what he liked and wanted to keep, and what he wanted to change for this tour.” A LIVING LANDSCAPE “The previous big arena tour had taken on a cleaner and more traditional live aesthetic with lots of video, automation and band risers,” describes Lipson. “Whereas Dermot’s more recent underplays had been more stripped back with a painted backdrop and simple domestic light fixtures on stage, which felt in some ways more authentic to the new music.” With The Weight of the Woods , Kennedy’s music and accompanying imagery
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