Unsurprisingly to anyone who was online this year, one of the most repeated names when the Grammy nominations were announced last week was Charli XCX, whose album, brat, earned seven nods. The Recording Academy also nominated Charli XCX’s creative director, Imogene Strauss for Best Recording Package (alongside branding agency Special Offer) for the ubiquitous, neon-green artwork of brat.
Besides her work on brat’s packaging, Strauss was also integral to translating it to arenas for Sweat, Charli XCX’s co-headlining tour with Australian pop artist Troye Sivan. Sweat, which included 22 stops between Sept. 14 and Oct. 23, was the biggest tour yet for both Charli XCX and Sivan, who sold out arenas with as many as 15,000 fans. Per Billboard, the tour brought in $28 million and sold 297,000 tickets to the 22 shows Charli XCX and Sivan played from Sept. 14 to Oct. 23.
But arena tours, in all their grandness, can also be quite staid. Strauss, who was the tour’s creative director, and production director Jonny Kingsbury were tasked with recreating the messy, sexual, drug-addled nature of brat and Sivan’s Something to Give Each Other in venues that also house Disney on Ice. They used set pieces from each artist’s solo tours and custom-built a transparent catwalk over a tunnel-like cage, and used intricate steadicam work to make even the nosebleeds feel like they were part of the action.
“We really wanted to lean into this dark, clubby lighting as the main focus,” Strauss says, noting she wanted it to feel like “you’re in the club with Charli and Troye.”
When tackling Sweat, Strauss and Kingsbury had the advantage of having worked together on a previous Charli XCX tour in support of 2022’s Crash. That tour traveled the world to several theaters and festivals, meaning the venues—with occupancies ranging from 1,000 to 6,000—could be widely different. This constrained their show direction: Strauss says they were lucky if the stage was 40×20 feet, and that their design needed to be consistent enough, but also able to be modified.
Sweat was an opportunity to showcase the discipline that Crash taught Strauss and Kingsbury while letting Charli XCX off the leash. The artist has described Crash—the last of five albums she released under a contract with Warner’s Asylum Records—as her “major label sell-out” record, and the era itself her “main pop girlie” moment. The tour, with its colorful lights and massive columns, reflected this commercial image, Kingsbury says..
“With Crash, we were trying to fit it into the pop star concept that she was pursuing at that time,” he says. “On brat, we were unleashed.”
An arena and it’s completely different but also still an arena
For Sweat, Strauss and Kingsbury faced one new challenge: Meshing Charli XCX and Sivan together into one single show. Neither Strauss nor Kingsbury had worked with Sivan before. But Gordon von Steiner, Sivan’s creative director, was an old friend of Strauss’ and an expert in photo and video. Combined with Strauss’ knack for live shows, the two easily unified their visions.
“[Von Steiner] was super open to letting me lead on how to turn the things he was thinking visually into a live world,” Strauss says. “I definitely expected there to be way more friction, and there was none.”
Sweat’s stage showed off the synthesis of the two acts. Because both Charlie XCX and Sivan had been touring solo throughout the summer, producers were able to take piece of each set and incorporate it into the show—Sivan lent industrial scaffolding that dominated the stage, while Charli XCX brough a show-opening, brat-green drape that she emerged from at the beginning of each show.
Simply due to their size, arenas are a challenge for concert production. With Sweat, Strauss and Kingsbury needed to find a way to fill the space with sound and lights without it becoming gaudy. More mega-club, less basketball game. With that, the duo decided to tone the design down.
“Usually when you go to an arena show, they’re quite bright and there’s one huge set piece in the middle,” Strauss says. As Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter toured on rainbow-fied color schemes, Strauss chose to lean into the darker palette. “Doing a really dark show in an arena is pretty rare, and something that we really wanted to lean into.”
Kingsbury, who works with COUR Design, also led the charge on lighting. For Sweat, he used lighting tricks to invoke a smaller, clubby atmosphere. At the top of the show, a strip of lights sat high above the stage. Each time Charli XCX appeared, the lights were lowered closer and closer to the stage. By the time she came out to sing “Vroom Vroom,” they were just above her head, serving as her main source of light while flashing wildly.
“Instead of [the stage] feeling 40 feet tall, it suddenly feels 10 feet tall,” Kingsbury says. “It feels like club lighting in an arena by constantly shrinking the stage.”
In 15,000-person venues, camera work is also crucial to making an arena tour feel smaller. For fans way up in the balcony, jumbo screens may offer the only clear view of the artist. Many arena tours will use video that is 60 frames-per-second, per Kingsbury. The Sweat video feed was a clearer 24 frames-per-second, with video shot every night by a steadicam operator.
Because the screens were made to look like billboards, Charli XCX could perform on them, screaming out her lyrics to the fans on the far sides of the stage. “She’s touching the people in the ‘worst seats’ in the venue, but they end up being amazing seats for certain moments of the show,” Strauss says.
Cages, platforms, and other technical oddities
The tour’s biggest set piece was the “cage,” a long, transparent catwalk with a fenced-in layer below it. This underlayer gave Charli XCX and Sivan access to the floor from backstage, letting them get close to standing-room audience members. It also offered the set designers an opportunity to put their twist on a hallmark of the pop-star arena tour.
“Charli had been pretty adverse to having a catwalk, because she felt like it was too pop,” Strauss says. “Her being on level with the audience, being able to interact with them more eye-to-eye, that’s where the idea for the cage came from.”
Kingsbury embraced the cage for its cinematic possibilities. When Charli XCX and Sivan came together toward the end of the show to sing their 2018 collab “1999,” camera operators were able to film both above and inside the cage—where Sivan strutted to the end of the catwalk directly underneath Charli XCX.. And, after Charli XCX spat on the catwalk during “Guess,” a camera operator could capture the shot of her licking it up, from below in closeup.
As the show’s first finale “1999” also had the tour’s biggest technical feat: A rising platform, lifting the stars up closer to the balcony. Platform’s are a staple of arena shows, but aside from being emblazoned with the tour name, the lift moment still avoided maximalism.
“I wanted things to feel industrial, minimal, but still dynamic,” Strauss says. “It doesn’t have this big poptastic element of, ‘Oh, it’s a flying saucer.’ It’s just a platform. It’s the most minimal it can be, and we’re not trying to hide that.”