Profession:
Scenic Designer / Costume Designer / Creative Director

Date & place of birth:
September 24 1971; Kingston, UK

What led you into the field of stage design?
At school I was considered hard to categorise because I was interested in a diverse range of subjects and wasn’t able to settle on a single field of study. As I continued to vacillate between fine art, literature and music over five years of further education, people from all fields repeatedly told me that stage design was probably the only thing I was fit for.

Eventually, I capitulated and visited the Motley School of Theatre Design. A small post-graduate course taught only by practicing designers, I immediately felt at home and conceded that I had probably found my kind.

For many years you worked mainly in the areas of theatre, opera and dance — which projects would you highlight as the most interesting?
My first major opera project — Macbeth at Theater an der Wien, Vienna in 2003. It was the first time I’d been given a canvas as broad as my ambition and a director whose taste for illusion was equivalent to mine.

We used a version of Pepper’s Ghost, the angled mirror trick used by Victorian magicians to create ghosts. It was built into a revolving box and the audience couldn’t work out when they were viewing real people or when they were illusory. They were forced to question their perceptions, which was entirely the world we aimed to create around Macbeth.

How did you come to design Kanye West’s 2005 Touch The Sky production?
Kanye was intrigued by my work on the 2003 Barbican show for the post-punk band, Wire. A friend of mine overheard Kanye sacking his stage designer by phone, so he directed Kanye to my website.

The Wire design was a product of sheer audacity and naivety. When I met Wire I told them I wasn’t interested in the shape of a rock band as I had seen it habitually presented — the eight-legged, humpbacked band shape with a jumble of instruments and wires set against a black space.

I insisted on isolating them in gauze and mirror boxes, rigging them up to ECG machines, projecting their fluctuating pulse readings and neuronal activities around their silhouettes.

Our last issue focused on Take That’s The Circus Live tour and your amazing design — how closely did you work with the boys?
Those four men have an infinite stream of ideas and Kim Gavin, the show’s creative director, has the unique skill of synthesising and editing the flow of concepts, and introducing some truly inspiring visions of his own.

The central shapes of the design evolved over the course of a flight home from Las Vegas. Kim and I kept sketching circus big tops. My instinct was that the shape should be iconic and immediately recognisable but that the movement of the piece should be subversive and unpredictable.

My feeling was that we needed to create a very particular and individual visual language that found its references beyond the classic images of Barnum & Bailey. I showed the band Magritte paintings and Kim brought films of the Catalan physical theatre group La Fura del Baus and the work of street puppeteers Royal de Luxe.

What was it like to work with Chris Vaughan on both Take That and Mika?
Chris has been very supportive throughout my very rapid learning curve. My knowledge of the parameters involved in a touring concert design was basic. Chris understood that whilst he needed to initiate me into the realities of the craft, my ideas needed space to evolve and that parameters can always be questioned.

Crucially, he introduced me to Malcolm Birkett who, along with my long-time associate Bronia Housman, is the true brains behind the designs, turning sketches or models into potentially viable schemes.

Is there anyone you would describe as a mentor or a significant inspiration?
There are many: the light installation artists James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson, the fine artists Cornelia Parker and Rachel Whiteread, the stage designer/director Eric Wonder and Achim Freyer.

What occupies your free time?
The ever-surprising acts of imagination by my two year old daughter; novels, poems, exhibitions, opera, theatre and cinema — all very necessary ‘fuel’ for my imagination — and as much time up hills with views as possible.
  
Your favourite record of all-time?
Knapperbusch’s recording of Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’.

What would be your advice to a teenage Es Devlin?
The advice that Jim Fowler, my tutor during my foundation course at Central St. Martin’s, gave me. He said: “Whatever you enjoy doing you will do a lot, and whatever you do a lot you will get good at, and if you get good enough at anything someone will probably pay you to do it.”