‘ABBA Voyage' Gives The Titans Of Pop A New Life In The Digital Frontier
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Loading... - Nicolas Stewart
- 06 Sep 2022
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“ABBA Voyage,” the superstar Swedish band’s “live comeback” concert via cutting-edge digital technology, is the kind of spectacle so novel that we don’t yet have a vocabulary to describe it.
For now, “amazing” will have to do.
Holograms have acquired a reputation for creepiness and tackiness, thanks to shows from the dead by singers Whitney Houston and Roy Orbison. But judging by “ABBA Voyage,” digital technology has triumphantly caught up with aspiration.
This production, which landed in a purpose-built structure, christened the ABBA Arena, in East London in May 2022, has to be seen to be believed. Body doubles, one-hundred-sixty high-tech cameras, a thousand or so animators, and terabytes of computing power (courtesy of George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic) have captured the movements and expressions of ABBA’s four individual band members, now all in their seventies, creating wholly lifelike avatars for this amazing recreation of the band in concert in their prime, circa 1979.
The arena, which comfortably holds 3,000 people, resembles a squat hexagonal space-ship, conveniently parked across the street from a Docklands Light Rail stop. The press is calling it a “digital concert residency,” a phrase that, when searched online, so far exclusively returns references to “ABBA Voyage.” It’s remindful of the way early talking movies were referred to in The New York Times as “audible pictorial transcriptions.”
Indeed, this does feel like something new.
Directed by Baillie Walsh, “ABBA Voyage” is a platonic ideal of a concert recalled in joyous memory, the same sequence of 20 classic songs (19 and an “encore”) goosed along by a 10-piece live band, five days a week, presumably to give the pixels a rest. Read More…
