ABSTRACT
Theater, opera and music tour designer Es Devlin has worked with a number of major musical acts: Kanye West, U2, Adele, Beyoncé. This essay concentrates on her collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys on their Pandemonium tour (2009–10) and proposes it as an indicative example of a particular type of live music experience: the mobile and malleable tour whose design components can be reshaped for a variety of venues (theaters, arenas, festivals). The essay considers the challenges faced by creative tour designers in relation to particular types of venue; it questions the lack of theoretical attention given to tour designers and their work; and, through close reading of aspects of Pandemonium, it identifies ways in which formal and emotional design components can be articulated in complex ways. The essay concludes by drawing attention to the ways in which tour design and mobile technologies intersect.
