These are sequences from a play called "The Lehman Trilogy," which traces the origins of Western capitalism in three hours, with three actors and a piano. And my role was to create a stage design to write a visual language for this work. The play describes Atlantic crossings, Alabama cotton fields, New York skylines, and we framed the whole thing within this single revolving cube, a kind of kinetic cinema through the centuries. It's like a musical instrument played by three performers. And as they step their way around and through the lives of the Lehman brothers, we, the audience, begin to connect with the simple, human origins at the root of the complex global financial systems that we're all still in thrall to today.
这些片段取自“雷曼兄弟三部曲”, 它用三个小时追溯了西方资本主义 的起源, 只用了3位演员和1台钢琴。 而我的任务是设计舞台, 为这部作品创作视觉语言。 这部话剧展现了跨越大西洋, 阿拉巴马州棉花田, 纽约天际线的故事, 我们把整个叙事装在 了这个旋转的立方体里, 几个世纪来的一种动态电影形式。 这就像一个由三个人 演奏的乐器。 随着它们顺着雷曼兄弟的生活 一步步地走过去, 观众们 开始与那些简单的, 人类起源的东西连接, 它们是复杂的全球金融体系的根源, 我们至今仍受其束缚。
I used to play musical instruments myself when I was younger. My favorite was the violin. It was this intimate transfer of energy. You held this organic sculpture up to your heart, and you poured the energy of your whole body into this little piece of wood, and heard it translated into music. And I was never particularly good at the violin, but I used to sit at the back of the second violin section in the Hastings Youth Orchestra, scratching away. We were all scratching and marveling at this symphonic sound that we were making that was so much more beautiful and powerful than anything we would ever have managed on our own.
我小时候曾经玩过乐器。 我最钟爱的是小提琴。 这是一种能量的亲密传递。 你把这个充满生命的 小提琴放到你的心上, 就会你整个身体的能量 注入到这块儿小木头里面, 听着它被翻译成音乐。 我并不是特别擅长拉小提琴, 但是我曾经是哈斯丁青年管弦乐团 第二小提琴席位靠后的成员, 就那么拉着。 我们每个人都专心拉着琴, 对我们共同弹奏出 的交响乐感到惊叹, 这比我们自己任何时候的独奏 都更加美妙和充满活力。
And now, as I create large-scale performances, I am always working with teams that are at least the size of a symphony orchestra. And whether we are creating these revolving giant chess piece time tunnels for an opera by Richard Wagner or shark tanks and mountains for Kanye West, we're always seeking to create the most articulate sculpture, the most poetic instrument of communication to an audience.
当我创作大型演出时, 我总是和规模差不多 像交响乐团那么大的团队合作。 不管我们是在为 理查德·瓦格纳的歌剧 创造这些旋转 的巨大棋形时间隧道, 还是为坎耶·韦斯特的 《鲨鱼坦克》和《群山》创作时, 我们总是寻求创造最清晰的雕塑, 最诗意的工具与观众交流。
When I say poetic, I just mean language at its most condensed, like a song lyric, a poetic puzzle to be unlocked and unpacked. And when we were preparing to design Beyoncé's "Formation" tour, we looked at all the lyrics, and we came across this poem that Beyoncé wrote. "I saw a TV preacher when I was scared, at four or five about bad dreams who promised he'd say a prayer if I put my hand to the TV. That's the first time I remember prayer, an electric current running through me."
我说的诗意, 意思是语言是浓缩的, 就像一首抒情歌, 像一个有待被解开的诗意的谜题。 当我们准备为碧昂斯 设计“ Formation”之旅时, 我们看了所有的歌词, 我们还偶然看到了碧昂斯写的诗歌。 “当我四五岁,害怕做噩梦时, 看到一个电视传教士许诺说, 如果我把手放到电视上,他就会祈祷。 那是我记忆中第一次祈祷, 一股电流穿过我的身体。”
And this TV that transmitted prayer to Beyoncé as a child became this monolithic revolving sculpture that broadcast Beyoncé to the back of the stadium.
于是这台在碧昂斯小时候 给她传递祷告的电视, 变成了这个旋转雕塑 把碧昂斯的表演播送到体育馆后面。
And the stadium is a mass congregation. It's a temporary population of a hundred thousand people who have all come there to sing along with every word together, but they've also come there each seeking one-to-one intimacy with the performer. And we, as we conceive the show, we have to provide intimacy on a grand scale.
体育馆是一个大型的集会场所。 成千上万的人临时聚集于此 跟着一个字一个字地 一起唱起来, 但他们也来此寻求 与表演者一对一的 亲密感。 而我们,当我们在构思这个 演出时,我们必须提供 大规模的亲密感。
It usually starts with sketches. I was drawing this 60-foot-high, revolving, broadcast-quality portrait of the artist, and then I tore the piece of paper in half. I split the mask to try to access the human underneath it all. And it's one thing to do sketches, but of course translating from a sketch into a tourable revolving six-story building took some exceptional engineers working around the clock for three months, until finally we arrived in Miami and opened the show in April 2016.
它通常开始于草图。 我画出这60英尺高,旋转着 的广播质量的艺术家肖像, 然后我把一张纸撕成两半。 我撕开面具, 试图接近隐藏在面具下的人。 画草图是一回事,但把草图转化成 可观赏的六层旋转建筑 需要一些杰出的工程师 夜以继日地工作三个月, 直到我们最终于2016年4月 抵达迈阿密开始这个演出。
(Video: Cheers)
(视频:欢呼)
(Music: "Formation," Beyoncé)
(音乐: "Formation," 碧昂斯)
Beyoncé: Y'all haters corny with that Illuminati mess
碧昂斯:你特么的黑子们成天 唠叨光明会那些破事,
Paparazzi, catch my fly, and my cocky fresh
狗仔围追堵截老娘的航班, 偷拍老娘傲人光彩。
I'm so reckless when I rock my Givenchy dress
老娘一身潮牌,无所畏惧为所欲为, 这特么就是老娘的调调。
I'm so possessive so I rock his Roc necklaces
老娘我就是霸道, 将老娘男人的Roc收入囊中。
My daddy Alabama
老娘的爸来自阿拉巴马州,
Momma Louisiana
俺妈是地道的路易斯安人,
You mix that negro with that Creole
你们造就了我这个带着 克里奥尔血统的黑人 ,
make a Texas bama
让我好好生活在德克萨斯。
(Music ends)
(音乐结束)
I call my work --
我把我的工作叫做——
(Cheers, applause)
(欢呼,鼓掌)
Thank you.
谢谢。
(Cheers, applause)
(欢呼,鼓掌)
I call my work stage sculpture, but of course what's really being sculpted is the experience of the audience, and as directors and designers, we have to take responsibility for every minute that the audience spend with us. We're a bit like pilots navigating a flight path for a hundred thousand passengers.
我把我的工作叫做舞台雕塑, 但当然真正被雕塑 的是观众的体验, 并且作为一个导演和设计者, 我们要对观众跟我们 花的每一分钟负责。 我们有点像飞行员, 为10万名乘客导航。
And in the case of the Canadian artist The Weeknd, we translated this flight path literally into an origami paper folding airplane that took off over the heads of the audience, broke apart in mid-flight, complications, and then rose out of the ashes restored at the end of the show. And like any flight, the most delicate part is the liftoff, the beginning, because when you design a pop concert, the prime material that you're working with is something that doesn't take trucks or crew to transport it. It doesn't cost anything, and yet it fills every atom of air in the arena, before the show starts. It's the audience's anticipation. Everyone brings with them the story of how they came to get there, the distances they traveled, the months they had to work to pay for the tickets. Sometimes they sleep overnight outside the arena, and our first task is to deliver for an audience on their anticipation, to deliver their first sight of the performer.
在加拿大艺术家威肯的例子中, 我们把这条飞行路线 翻译成一架折纸飞机, 在观众头上起飞, 在飞行中途解体,幻化出不同的造型, 然后在演出结束后 在灰烬中重生。 跟任何飞行一样, 最微妙的部分是起飞,开始, 因为当你设计一场流行音乐会时, 你使用的主要材料不需要 卡车或工作人员来运输。 它几乎不需要任何成本, 然而在演出开始前, 它就充满了赛场中的空气。 这就是观众的期待。 每个人都带着他们 如何来到这里的故事, 他们旅行的距离, 为了支付票价所需 花费的工作时长。 有时候他们会在户外过夜, 我们的第一个任务是向 观众传递他们的期望, 让观众第一眼就看到他们。
When I work with men, they're quite happy to have their music transformed into metaphor -- spaceflights, mountains. But with women, we work a lot with masks and with three-dimensional portraiture, because the fans of the female artist crave her face.
当我跟男星合作时, 他们很高兴把他们 的音乐变成隐喻—— 太空飞行器,高山。 但跟女星合作时,我们经常 使用面具和三维肖像, 因为女艺术家的粉丝 渴望看到她的脸。
And when the audience arrived to see Adele's first live concert in five years, they were met with this image of her eyes asleep. If they listened carefully, they would hear her sleeping breath echoing around the arena, waiting to wake up. Here's how the show began.
当观众来到现场观看阿黛尔 五年来首场现场演唱会时, 他们看到的是这张沉睡的照片。 如果他们仔细倾听, 还会听到她睡眠的 呼吸在空气中回响, 等待被叫醒。 这是演出开始的样子。
(Video: Cheers, applause)
(视频:欢呼,鼓掌)
(Music)
(音乐)
Adele: Hello.
阿黛尔:哈罗。
(Cheers, applause)
(欢呼,鼓掌)
Es Devlin: With U2, we're navigating the audience over a terrain that spans three decades of politics, poetry and music. And over many months, meeting with the band and their creative teams, this is the sketch that kept recurring, this line, this street, the street that connects the band's past with their present, the tightrope that they walk as activists and artists, a walk through cinema that allows the band to become protagonists in their own poetry.
艾斯·代弗林: 而针对U2,我们引导观众 在空旷的场地上跨越30年的 政治、诗歌和音乐。 在接下来的几个月里, 我与乐队和他们的创意团队见了面, 这是一张反复出现的草图, 这些线条,这条街道, 街道把乐队的过去和现在连在一起, 做为活动分子和艺术家, 他们走在钢丝上, 走在电影中, 让乐队自己成为诗歌中 的主角。
(Music: U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name")
(U2的音乐:那里的街道没有名字)
Bono: I wanna run
保罗:我想要跑
I want to hide
我想要藏
I wanna tear down the walls
我想要撕倒这面
That hold me inside
围住我的墙
Es Devlin: The end of the show is like the end of a flight. It's an arrival. It's a transfer from the stage out to the audience.
艾斯·代弗林: 演出的结束就像航班的落地。 这是一次抵达。 这是一场从舞台向观众的传送。
For the British band Take That, we ended the show by sending an 80-foot high mechanical human figure out to the center of the crowd.
对英国乐队“Take That”, 演出结束时,我们把 一个80英尺高的机械人 送到了人群的中心。
(Music)
(音乐)
Like many translations from music to mechanics, this one was initially deemed entirely technically impossible. The first three engineers we took it to said no, and eventually, the way that it was achieved was by keeping the entire control system together while it toured around the country, so we had to fold it up onto a flatbed truck so it could tour around without coming apart. And of course, what this meant was that the dimension of its head was entirely determined by the lowest motorway bridge that it had to travel under on its tour. And I have to tell you that it turns out there is an unavoidable and annoyingly low bridge low bridge just outside Hamburg.
像很多从音乐到机械的转变, 这个设想起初被认为 在技术上是不可行的。 前三名工程师说不行, 最终实现这个的方式是 在全国巡演途中保持 整个控制系统的完整, 所以我们不得不把它 折叠放在平板货车上, 这样它就不需要拆开了再运走。 于是当然,这意味着它头部尺寸 完全取决于 它旅行运输途中最低的高速公路桥。 我要告诉你们的是, 就在汉堡城外有一座无法绕过的矮桥, 低到让人无法忍受。
(Laughter)
(笑声)
(Music)
(音乐)
Another of the most technically complex pieces that we've worked on is the opera "Carmen" at Bregenz Festival in Austria. We envisaged Carmen's hands rising out of Lake Constance, and throwing this deck of cards in the air and leaving them suspended between sky and sea. But this transient gesture, this flick of the wrists had to become a structure that would be strong enough to withstand two Austrian winters. So there's an awful lot that you don't see in this photograph that's working really hard. It's a lot of ballast and structure and support around the back, and I'm going to show you the photos that aren't on my website. They're photos of the back of a set, the part that's not designed for the audience to see, however much work it's doing.
我们另一个最具技术复杂性的作品 是在奥地利的布列根兹 音乐节上的歌剧《卡门》。 我们设想卡门的手 从康斯坦斯湖伸出来, 把这副纸牌抛向空中, 让它们悬在天空和大海之间。 但是这个短暂的动作, 这个手腕的轻弹 必须具备足够坚固的结构 来熬过奥地利的两个冬天。 这张照片背后隐藏了 很多表面看不出的艰辛。 后面有很多压舱物,结构和支撑, 我要给你们看网站上没有的照片。 也就是背面的照片, 这个不设计给观众看的部分, 然而却是花了很多工作的地方。
And you know, this is actually the dilemma for an artist who is working as a stage designer, because so much of what I make is fake, it's an illusion. And yet every artist works in pursuit of communicating something that's true. But we are always asking ourselves: "Can we communicate truth using things that are false?" And now when I attend the shows that I've worked on, I often find I'm the only one who is not looking at the stage. I'm looking at something that I find equally fascinating, and it's the audience.
这其实 对于舞台设计艺术家来说是个窘境, 因为我做的很多东西都是虚假的, 它是假象。 然而每个艺术家都追求 传达一些真实的东西。 但我们总是问自己: “我们能够使用虚假的 东西来传达真相吗?” 如今当我参加自己参与设计的演出时, 我通常发现我是唯一 一个不盯着舞台的人。 我在看一样同样吸引我的东西, 那就是观众。
(Cheers)
(欢呼)
I mean, where else do you witness this:
我指的是,你在哪里还能 见到这样的景象呢:
(Cheers)
(欢呼)
this many humans, connected, focused, undistracted and unfragmented? And lately, I've begun to make work that originates here, in the collective voice of the audience.
如此多的人,彼此连接,聚精会神, 且团结一致? 最近,我开始创作源自这里的作品, 源自观众的集体声音中的作品。
"Poem Portraits" is a collective poem. It began at the Serpentine Gallery in London, and everybody is invited to donate one word to a collective poem. And instead of that large single LED portrait that was broadcasting to the back of the stadium, in this case, every member of the audience gets to take their own portrait home with them, and it's woven in with the words that they've contributed to the collective poem. So they keep a fragment of an ever-evolving collective work. And next year, the collective poem will take architectural form.
“诗肖像”是一首集体主义诗歌。 它始于伦敦的蛇形画廊, 每个人都被邀请为一首 集体诗歌贡献一个词。 与体育馆后面播放的 一张大型肖像相比, 在这种情况下,每个观众 可以把自己的肖像带回家, 它与他们为集体诗歌 所做的贡献交织在一起。 因此,他们可以保留一个不断 演变的集体工作的片段。 明年这首集体诗歌将采用建筑形式。
This is the design for the UK Pavilion at the World Expo 2020. The UK ... In my lifetime, it's never felt this divided. It's never felt this noisy with divergent voices. And it's never felt this much in need of places where voices might connect and converge. And it's my hope that this wooden sculpture, this wooden instrument, a bit like that violin I used to play, might be a place where people can play and enter their word at one end of the cone, emerge at the other end of the building, and find that their word has joined a collective poem, a collective voice.
这是2020年世博会英国馆的设计。 英国… 在我一生中,从未有过 如此分裂的状态。 它从来没有感到如此的嘈杂, 发出过如此多不同的声音。 它从来没有感到如此需要一个地方, 在那里各种声音可以 相互联系,相互融合。 我的希望是这个木制雕塑, 这个木质乐器,有点像我 过去演奏过的小提琴, 人们可以在圆锥的一端玩耍 并输入他们的文字, 并在另一端出现, 从而发现他们的文字加入了 一首集体诗歌,发出了集体的声音。
(Music)
(音乐)
These are simple experiments in machine learning. The algorithm that generates the collective poem is pretty simple. It's like predictive text, only it's trained on millions of words written by poets in the 19th century. So it's a sort of convergence of intelligence, past and present, organic and inorganic.
这些是机器学习的简单实验。 产生集体诗歌的算法非常简单。 它就像预测文本一样, 只不过它是以19世纪诗人 写的几百万字为训练基础的。 所以它有点过去和现在, 有机和无机的智慧融合。
And we were inspired by the words of Stephen Hawking. Towards the end of his life, he asked quite a simple question: If we as a species were ever to come across another advanced life-form, an advanced civilization, how would we speak to them? What collective language would we speak as a planet?
我们被史蒂芬·霍金的话所鼓舞。 在他生命的终点,他问 了个非常简单的问题: 如果我们作为一个物种遇到 另一种高级形式的生命, 一个更先进的文明, 我们将如何跟他们沟通? 我们作为地球该说什么集体语言?
The language of light reaches every audience. All of us are touched by it. None of us can hold it. And in the theater, we begin each work in a dark place, devoid of light. We stay up all night focusing the lights, programming the lights, trying to find new ways to sculpt and carve light.
灯光的语言能够传递给每一个观众。 我们每个人都能被触碰到, 但每个人都无法抓住它。 在剧院中,我们在黑暗场景中 开始工作,远离光源。 我们彻夜不眠地聚焦灯光, 对灯光进行编程, 试图找到塑造灯光的新方法。
(Music)
(音乐)
This is a portrait of our practice, always seeking new ways to shape and reshape light, always finding words for things that we no longer need to say. And I want to say that this, and everything that I've just shown you, no longer exists in physical form.
这是我们实践的写照, 总是寻找塑造和重塑灯光的方式, 总是要为我们不再需要说出来 的东西寻找语言。 我想说的是,这个, 还有我刚给你们展示的所有东西, 都不再具有物理形态。
(Music)
(音乐)
In fact, most of what I've made over the last 25 years doesn't exist anymore. But our work endures in memories, in synaptic sculptures, in the minds of those who were once present in the audience.
事实上,我过去25年 所做的大部分东西 都不复存在了。 但是我们的作品存在于记忆中, 存在于突触雕塑中, 存在于那些曾经在观众中 出现过的人的脑海中。
(Music)
(音乐)
I once read that a poem learnt by heart is what you have left, what can't be lost, even if your house burns down and you've lost all your possessions. I want to end with some lines that I learnt by heart a long time ago.
我曾经读过用心记住的诗, 是你所留下的, 无法丢失的, 即便你的房子被烧毁 并失去所有的一切。 我想要用很久之前用心 记住的几行诗来结束。
(Music)
(音乐)
They're written by the English novelist E.M. Forster, in 1910, just a few years before Europe, my continent,
它们是英国小说家 E.M.福斯特所创作的, 写于1910年,就在欧洲, 我所在的大陆,
(Music)
(音乐)
began tearing itself apart.
开始撕裂自己的时候。
(Music)
(音乐)
And his call to convergence still resonates through most of what we're trying to make now.
他对融合的呼吁仍然在我们现在 尝试做的大部分事情中产生共鸣。
(Music)
(音乐)
"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, And human love will be seen at its height. Only connect! And live in fragments no longer."
“只有连接,是她所有的布道。 只有连接散文和激情, 两者才能升华, 人类的爱才能达到顶峰。 只有连接!并且不再活成散沙。”
Thank you.
谢谢。
(Applause)
(鼓掌)