Renowned American singer and songwriter, Katy Perry recently performed three shows in Johannesburg as a part of her current international tour, titled: Witness: The Tour. The show featured lighting and stage design by some of the leading designers in the world and provided South African audiences with the opportunity to be a part of one of the most ambitiously staged tours of the year.
Katherine Elisabeth Hudson, known professionally as Katy Perry, rose to fame in 2008, following the release of her second album titled: One Of The Boys. The album’s single, I Kissed a Girl topped the US Billboard Hot 100 charts for seven consecutive weeks and her third album, Teenage Dream, released in 2010, became the first album by a female artist to produce five number-one songs in America. Katy Perry released her fifth album, Witness, in June 2017 and announced that she would be promoting the album with her fourth world tour.
Witness: The Tour presents audiences with a multi-media showcase that captures the energy and cutting-edge attitude of the artist on a grand scale. The show features stunning high definition video content and breath-taking props and staging effects, which aims to take the audience on a retrospective journey through Perry’s career, in a two-hour long show comprising six distinct acts.
Perry launched Witness: The Tour on 19 September 2017 in Columbus, Ohio and took the show on an extensive North American tour which ended in February 2018. The tour visited Asia between March and April, with the Singapore show being hailed as “one of the grandest shows that the Singapore Indoor Stadium has ever witnessed” by online music magazine Bandwagon. Between May and June, the European leg of the tour took Perry and her team on a gruelling trip that included shows in Cologne, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Paris, Zurich, Copenhagen and Stockholm, before embarking upon an extensive tour of the UK. In July, Perry and her team arrived in South Africa to perform three shows at the Ticketpro Dome in Johannesburg. The away leg of Witness: the Tour concluded in August, with 14 shows across Oceania that included additional dates in Australia.
Witness the Team
Perry has collaborated with award-winning Irish-born lighting designer, Baz Halpin for a number of years and once again turned to Halpin to deliver the lighting design for Witness: The Tour. Halpin not only developed a truly spectacular lighting show for the tour but also took on the role of producer.
Halpin teamed up with Australian creative show directors and choreographers, Antony Ginandjar and Ashley Evans of The Squared Division, who have worked with Britney Spears, Ariana Grande and Nick Jonas to name a few. The Squared Division team worked closely with Perry to provide creative direction for the tour’s staging and choreography. Halpin also worked in close collaboration with London-based stage designer Es Devlin – a multiple award-winning artist whose practice ranges from solo gallery works to kinetic sculptures and dynamic stage design for opera, dance, concerts and theatre. Devlin has worked with Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, U2 and Adele, and has received numerous awards for her work, including an OBE in 2015.
The technical team for Witness: The Tour also included Jay Schmit, who has served as Perry’s production manager for the past seven years, together with the associate lighting designer and video programmer Eric Marchwinski, and lighting director and video programmer Drew Gnagey.
Witness the stage
Innovative stage design dominates the production of Witness: The Tour, with audiences greeted by a massive main stage, backed by an extra-large eye-shaped video wall, and a 27-meter long runway stage. Perry and her montage of dancers, Parkour performers and stilt walkers perform amid a montage of moving platforms, kinetic stage sculptures and meticulously mapped video content displayed on LED screens that are positioned throughout the set.
Tait, a global leader in the design and construction of live event equipment for the international market, delivered a full stage production for Witness: The Tour, including a custom-built stage, automated rigging, and a performer flying system.
The 20-meter wide main stage is equipped with eight performer lifts, surrounded with LED video panels that transform into staircase-like configurations that display video content throughout the show. The show ends with a powerful performance of Firework, with Perry sitting in the palm of a giant inflatable hand, supported and lifted by a TAIT performer zip lift, which raises the hand 3.5m into the air towards the audience.
The entire stage, including the enormous props and custom designed LED wall have accompanied Perry and her crew all over the world over the past year, where her specialised crew oversee the installation of the set in each venue. Speaking to ETECH in a recent interview, Jakobus de Wit of Gearhouse – who served as project manager on the Katy Perry shows at the TicketPro Dome in Johannesburg, expressed his pleasure at working with the touring crew. “Katy Perry’s crew are as professional as you get, and proved incredibly skilled at getting the rig set up in record time,” de Wit observes.
