ArtRave: The Artpop Ball (stylized as artRAVE: the ARTPOP ball) was the fourth headlining concert tour by American singer Lady Gaga. Supporting her third studio album Artpop (2013), the tour ran from May 4 to November 24, 2014. The tour dates included cities where Gaga had canceled shows of her previous Born This Way Ball tour after suffering a hip injury. The ArtRave tour was preceded by a seven-day residency at the Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan, New York.
ArtRave's concept and name are derived from the similarly named release party for Artpop. The stage resembled a cave and consisted of two sections connected by catwalks made of translucent lucite, allowing the audience to move underneath the catwalks while still being able to watch the show. Gaga's costumes in the show included one with tentacles, one with bejeweled wings, a rave-inspired outfit and a necklace made of marijuana leaves. Costume designers and choreographers aspired to make a single, coherent show. The lighting fixtures used for the concert were from Clay Paky and the main idea was to create an immersive rave experience with the lights. They were also designed to accommodate minor changes in the show sequences. The tour received positive response from reviewers, but some criticized it for being disjointed.
ArtRave: The Artpop Ball was produced by Live Nation, and promoted by Absolut Vodka in the United States and O2 in the United Kingdom. Tickets for several shows sold out immediately once available, prompting additional dates. Negative reports about the tour's commercial performance were dismissed by Live Nation chairman Arthur Fogel. Gaga repeatedly placed within the top-ten of the Billboard Boxscore lists for the 2014 tour grosses. At the end, ArtRave: The Artpop Ball grossed a total of $81 million from an attendance of over 999,000. Billboard also listed it as the ninth best concert tour of the year with 76 reported shows. On November 24, 2014, the concert was streamed live from Bercy Arena in France.
Background
While releasing her third studio album Artpop, Gaga held a private event in New York known as ArtRave, where she performed songs from the album and showcased art pieces. Later, she took the concept of ArtRave and created ArtRave: The Artpop Ball tour. After abruptly cancelling the North American leg of her previous Born This Way Ball (2012–13) tour due to a major hip injury, the tour began with its first leg in the United States on May 4, 2014, in Sunrise, Florida. ArtRave: The Artpop Ball had the singer visiting cities where she canceled tour dates in order to undergo the surgery, as well as playing new cities. Gaga explained to The Independent: "When I'm onstage with the Artpop Ball, the point of the show is to take what was the mess of my life and make art of it – to raise the spirit of artistic dreams and creativity and take all the things I was feeling in pain about, and rage... I take a much more meditative approach to the performance. I've got wide-open ears. The ArtRave has routines, and there's a performance-art aspect that has been designed." Prior to the beginning of the tour, Gaga headlined six shows (March 28, 30, 31 and April 2, 4, and 6) at the Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan, New York, and these shows were the final performances at the venue. A seventh show was also added for April 7 and officially closed the venue.
Gaga also held a one-off concert for ArtRave: The Artpop Ball inside a six-storey vending machine at Doritos' annual South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival at Austin, Texas. The city's Music and Entertainment division had initially denied permission to Gaga for playing inside the venue citing that it was for "public safety concerns". Don Pitts from the division said that the venue being in close proximity with a parking lot was the reason they had to cancel Gaga's application. On March 6, 2014, it was announced that Gaga would indeed play at the venue. Tickets were sold to the fans through different competitions and challenges. Randal Lane from Forbes reported that the concert would support Gaga's Born This Way Foundation and charity events, but nevertheless opined that "the way they're doling out the tickets is still crass". The concert was criticized when artist Millie Brown vomited a green liquid over Gaga during the performance of "Swine" from Artpop. The performance received complaints about "glamorizing" eating disorders. In response to the controversy, Brown told MTV News: "I can understand why people would make that association, but my performance is really not a statement about eating disorders themselves." Gaga herself told Today "Millie and I know that not everybody's going to love that performance, but we both really believe in artistic expression and strong identities, and I support her and what she does. Artpop, my new album, is about bringing art and music together in the spirit of creative rebellion, and for us, that performance was art in its purest form."
Development
Stage setup
For the tour, Gaga told Capital FM that she wanted something other than the "Monster Pit" arrangement she previously had in the Born This Way Ball tour, since she was always limited to performing on one portion of the arena. Hence Gaga and her team thought of building two stages, one main stage and an accompanying one on the far end of the arena. It would be enhanced by the addition of a catwalk which would wind all around the arena floor, enabling the singer to interact with the audience. In March 2014, Gaga tweeted a picture of the stage which showed a runway extending from the main platform up to the general admission seats and then bifurcating into two additional runways, ending in small stages within the audience. At the end of the first runway, another platform was constructed which descended into the crowd directly. Gaga noted that the long runways would be made of lucite rendering them translucent, so that the crowd can dance underneath it while still being able to watch the show. The main stage was described as a white cave, reminiscent of Atlantica from the 1989 Disney film The Little Mermaid, and featured a digital backdrop showing stars and the moon.
The band was placed inside the white dome like structures on the stage, described by John Jurgenson from The Wall Street Journal as like the planet Tatooine in the Star Wars series. At the end of one of the Lucite runways, a piano was hidden beneath enormous stalagmite-like structures reminiscent of Superman's Fortress of Solitude in the comics. There was also a bar overlooking the piano area, where the audience could order drinks while watching the show. Following the reveal of the image, the hashtag #LadyGagaTourStage started trending globally in Twitter. According to Stacy Lambe from Out magazine, the stage took over 21,000 hours to construct, including the catwalks. There are 15 inflatable trees which are air hosed on the stage to re-create a garden during one of the segments. The whole set up took three hours to dismantle and 21 trucks to carry it from one venue to another. Production manager Jason "JD" Danter explained that the whole set up started from 8:00 am, with lighting and sound checks taking six hours to complete.
For the production of the show, Gaga enlisted choreographer Richard Jackson and together with him and her creative team, the Haus of Gaga, they came up with ideas regarding how the show should be constructed and what music should be performed. They also had to find a way to co-mingle all the different ideas to make a single, coherent show. For the choreography, which encompassed all the stages present, Jackson had to employ a different approach, so that the audience could see the performance from every angle.
Costume design
Gaga did not preview the costumes for the tour until the opening night. There were seven outfits created for the show, all throughout the different segments. The first was a bejeweled leotard which had the Jeff Koons blue gazing ball attached in the middle; the ball was previously used in the album cover art for Artpop. Gaga accessorized the dress with a pair of feathered wings while wearing a blond bob wig reminiscent of her looks from The Fame era. A rave inspired outfit was worn for the last segment and consisted of colorful dreadlocks and legwarmers made of fur. She added a shirt consisting of straps and plastic sleeves with it. One of the complex outfits was made of latex and consisted of a polka dotted leotard and a number of tentacles attached to the dress as well as a headpiece with two tentacles from it.
The singer also wore a short dress coupled with a platinum bob wig; another version of the dress had a gown attached to it, with Gaga wearing a long wig inspired by Donatella Versace. Before the final performance Gaga wore black latex pants and a top, with a green wig on her head and a necklace made of marijuana leaves. Finally, Gaga also wore a seashell bikini top and voluminous wig; the ensemble had been worn by Gaga in previous live performances for the Artpop era. Her dancers wore neon colored outfits with matching head gears and accessories. Gaga also had a number of unique props, including a Gibson Flying V guitar during "Venus", a plastic chair shaped like a claw and a keytar which was shaped like a sea horse.
BBC News reported that some of the costumes for the tour were designed by Sunderland University fashion graduate Dayne Henderson. He had been chosen by one of Gaga's stylists after seeing his tweet to the singer with a photo of his design which included clothing inspired by fetish fashion. Henderson developed hoods, masks and head pieces for Gaga and her dancers. He had to produce the clothes in latex, and within 12 days had to deliver it to Gaga's management.
Lighting fixtures Production and lighting designer Roy Bennett used Clay Paky's A.leda B-Eye K20 LED-based moving lights and Clay Paky Sharpys as lighting attachments. Also around 120 B-Eyes by PKG, were obtained for the tour as well with lighting control from three full-sized grandMA2s and 10 NPUs. According to lighting programmer Jason Baeri, "Bennett's approach to the show was to make it an immersive rave that reflected Gaga's non-stop party aesthetic... That means active, alive, vibrant and high energy—it requires us to be just as active on stage as in the crowd. The audience is every bit as much a set piece as they are a room of spectators, so we had to include them as part of Gaga's same party not just watching the spectacle from afar. Cue wise, that's almost like programming two shows at once: Both had to behave as one cohesive element."
Bennett had started designing the lighting from November 2013 and three months later presented it to Gaga. She approved off the audience experience theme that Bennett developed. The B-Eyes, which were previously used in the Roseland shows, were mounted above the video screens in the tour. Sharpy rigging were used throughout, in the front of the stage, rear, side, as well as on the pods over the audience. They were the main lighting accessory for the tour. Baeri explained that they had faced technical challenges, due to high pixel content. The B-Eyes added a total of 4,500 pixel and was varied through all possible configurations. The lighting effects varied along with the tone and the inflections of the song being performed. Clay Paky was distributed by A.C.T Lighting in North America. Solotech were signed as the video contractor, while 8th Day Sound group were the audio contractors throughout the tour.
Concert synopsis