Es Devlin is known today for her extraordinary ability to integrate the power of music, light and performance to produce the finest design of stages and sets, in the past few years. She uses the latest technology to help make mind-bending visual narratives in most of her sets. She uncannily connects with all her clients, understands the depth of their works and their personalities and realizes sets that truly reflect their work and their thought processes.
She was born Esmeralda “Es” Devlin in London in the year 1971. With a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Bristol University, she went on to pursue a foundation course in Fine Arts at Central St. Martin’s, after which she specialized in theatre design. During her studies, she got a chance to work on Le Cirque Invisible, a circus that was known purely for its ability to entertain people at an uninterrupted stretch of two hours. She was involved in the props making for the show.
Her initial work was in theatre design, where she worked on Betrayal by Trevor Nunn in the National Theatre in London in 1998. Since then she has been working on sculptural designs for theatre. In 2016, Es Devlin had worked on a set for Verdi’s “Otello”, an opening for that year’s Met show. The stage was a mystifying two-storey structure, consisting of imitated spaces that had stairs connecting the first floor to the second and windows and doors in the Palladian style. The design was derived from the palace of Cyprus, where the play is set. She stated in a New Yorker interview that the space was a metaphor for the lack of privacy of the characters in the play. They are always being overheard or watched. Es approaches her designs by studying every niche about the project she lands, be it a play or a rock concert to recreate the essence of the artists on the sets. The sets are essentially a byproduct of what the artists create.
Devlin has made large scale touring stage sculptures in collaboration with Beyoncé, Kanye West, Adele, U2, The Weekend, Lorde, Pet Shop Boys, in London. In all these shows she tries to study the artist’s work and brings to life, pieces of memories and incidents of their childhood or life that inspired them to put it in their work. For example, for the Kanye West concert, there were two parts of the stage raised 5 meters above the level where the audiences would stand and watch. Es’s idea was that the audiences treat these rappers are someone whom they can look up to, thus, symbolizing their experience of what they feel about their artists in their minds.
She believes that during performances, most of what the spectators experience lie inside their minds, reducing the stage to a mere accessory or tool that helps to manifest the pure essence of the artist’s work, what they want to translate into their mode of works.
This attitude towards stage designs was influenced by something that had happened in her childhood, where her siblings and she would lock themselves up in a broom cupboard and just close their eyes shut, trying to imagine different kinds of spaces in their minds- A trip to their desired fairyland in some cases, where they would spend much of their time dreaming, imagining and living.
The way Es works, tells us about the power of imagination over its physical manifestations. She has won numerous awards for set designing to date. With designing the stage for the closing ceremony for the 2012 London Olympic games in her bag of accomplishments, her firm is also the one responsible for the London pavilion at the 2020 Expo going to be held in Dubai. This pavilion, in particular, represents the futuristic on a different scale and puts them in a different light. She put herself into her work, creating sets for artists for all genres, defining set deigning in today’s age, breaking most stereotypes.
