“It is only necessary that everything works” – Newspaper Kommersant No. 160 (7361) of 09/01/2022

Canadian singer The Weeknd (Abel Tesfaye) has reached the finish line of his “The After Hours till Dawn Tour” – in September it will end with a concert in his native Toronto. The video support of The Weeknd’s show was handled by the Moscow design and multimedia studio Power of Light, which has been cooperating with the stars of the world show business for a long time. Boris Barabanov talks about how these and other domestic masters of concert lighting and video manage to remain in demand in the West.

In 2018, the Power of Light company, which already had a lighting design project for the Moscow Manege, a multimedia exhibition at the Poklonnaya Gora Museum of Victory, Eurovision with Polina Gagarina and the lighting design for the Ostankino Tower, implemented the first project with a Western star. It was the tour of the Canadian rapper Drake in support of the album “Scorpion”. The project was a breakthrough not only for a particular company, but also for Russian scenography in general.

In 2020, Power of Light created a virtual set for Billie Eilish’s online concert. By this time, the designers were already discussing a collaboration project with The Weeknd, the performer of the most popular song on the planet at that time – “Blinding Lights”. The designer Es Devlin, who works with the artist on a permanent basis, has repeatedly turned to them on trifles, but now she has decided to give the entire show to the masters from Russia.

Its final version was formed precisely in 2022. The concept was that The Weeknd was moving from hell to heaven, and the albums “After Hours” (2020) and “Dawn FM” (2022) became the musical basis for the spectacle. The scenery was a ruined city, they could identify the world-famous buildings from different metropolitan areas, including the famous TV tower in Toronto. The backdrop for the scenery was a huge IMAX screen. The main achievement of a large international team was an optical illusion, which consisted in the fact that the viewer could not determine where the physical objects end and the projection plane begins, where the smoke is real, and where is the on-screen smoke, where is the pyrotechnics, and where is the drawn lightning.

One of the founders of the Power of Light, Alexander Us, said in an interview with Kommersant that the artist’s management did not focus on who was in the team from which country, so the political upheavals of February 2022 did not affect the work on the show: “The story of whether Russian participation in the project is a problem is of most interest to the public in Russia. But in America, a real vinaigrette of people. No one emphasized that “we are working with the Russians.” “We work with Polina, Sasha, Anton, they are great guys” – the question is put like this. In addition, a Frenchman and a Vietnamese worked in our team, and for some details we turned to American productions.

The creative producer of the Setup studio, Dmitry Znamensky, described his work with the American group Red Hot Chili Peppers (RHCP) in approximately the same way in a conversation with Kommersant. The chief artist of the group found the works of the Russian studio on Instagram, and as a result, our compatriots received an order for both video support and stage design. This was the first album tour since guitarist John Frusciante’s return to RHCP, which is still ongoing.

It was at the very moment when the press was actively exaggerating the topic of “the abolition of Russian culture” that the RHCP production manager told his Russian colleagues: “I am not interested in politics. I just need everything to work, even if you have problems with visas.” In the same vein, the producer of The Weeknd, Lamar Si Taylor, spoke with “Power of Light”: “I’m out of politics” and so on.

For several years, the Russian-Georgian team, consisting of artists Dmitry Vorobyov, Pavel Pavlyukov and Georgy Molodtsov, has been working with Jean-Michel Jarre. They are also involved in the new show, which is being created on the basis of his new album “Oxymore”, which is scheduled for release in October. Pavel Pavlyukov became the author of its cover, and Georgy Molodtsov filmed the video in VR. It seems that the father of electronic music has long forgotten where his companions come from.

Alexander Us claims that the prospect of his company’s development in the global market is not only “providing services” to pop stars, but also the creation of immersive exhibitions. For example, now the “Power of Light” is making an exhibition in Atlanta to mark the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb, which the scientific world will celebrate on November 4th. And in their homeland, their main concern now is the IN TO art installation, which was created as part of the Polelab digital art gallery. According to the creators of “IN TO”, each visitor becomes a bearer of a graphic image: he is assigned a separate digital organism that grows and develops. “There are a lot of great media artists in Russia,” says Alexander Us, “and at the same time there is no space where they can easily show their art. In GES-2, for example, you need to provide a lot of documents explaining and describing your work. Everything is easier for us. If we like it, we give a place.”