The Monster Ball Tour: Development

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Background
Development
Tickets & Dates
Show
- Opening acts
- Summary
  - Theater
  - Arena
Merchandise
Personnel

Development (Theater version)

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Gaga explained that she wanted to put together an expensive looking, beautiful show which would be affordable by her fans. She explained that the tour is a "pop-electro opera" because the theatrics and the story elements interwoven in the tour are played like an opera. According to her the design of the show is innovative and forward in terms of creativeness: “I’ve been thinking about ways to play with the shape of this stage and change the way that we watch things,” she says. “So what I’ve done is I’ve designed a stage with Haus of Gaga that is essentially a frame with forced perspective, and the frame is put inside the stage.” On each side of the stage, two giant screens provided live closeup of the stage in order to make it possible for everyone to see inside the "box". The boxed perspective set, lined with tapering walls of Nocturne V-Lite LED video screens, was designed by Es Devlin and built by Tait Towers, complete with lots of moving parts.

Forcing the perspective further is a sloped floor, while cross-stage travellators expand the horizontal dimension. A self-propelled set truck moves various objects from the back to the forestage.

"I begin as a cell and I grow and change throughout the show. And it's also done in what now is becoming my aesthetic, which is, you know, it's part pop, part performance art, part fashion installation—so all of those things are present... It's a story, it's me battling all my monsters along the way. I'm playing all the music from The Fame, all the music from The Fame Monster. And the stage that I designed with the Haus [of Gaga] is a giant cube that sits. Imagine you were to hollow out a TV and just break the fourth wall on a TV screen. It forces you to look at the center of the TV. It's my way of saying, 'My music is art.'"

—Gaga describing the whole concept of the original show.

Gaga explained, the theme of the show is evolution. According to Gaga, the songs on The Fame Monster represents the personal demons that she had faced. Hence while developing the record Gaga spoke about original sin and demons inside human beings. She said, "So we talked about growth, and that led us into this kind of scientific space, and we started talking about evolution and the evolution of humanity and how we begin as one thing, and we become another." This theme of monsters and evolution is supposed to play a part in the fashion for the tour, which according to Gaga is "another level from where we were with The Fame Ball. [...] It's going to be a truly artistic experience that is going to take the form of the greatest post-apocalyptic house party that you've ever been to." Although Gaga stated that she was inspired by the things she and Kanye were doing with the Fame Kills tour, she concluded, "...I made a decision based on integrity not to use any of the things that we had designed together." Later, she agreed that it was "the great lost tour".

Development (Arena version)

210StageDesignMB — Sketch shown on Oprah.

Near the end of the U.S. leg of the tour, Lady Gaga said on twitter: "monsterball is amazing,enjoy while u can. im already redesigning it for 2010, the haus tells me there's hospitals who accept people like me" (Dec. 19, 2009)

Gaga told MTV News on Saturday, hours before her Monster Ball stop in San Diego.

"The re-vamping of the Monster Ball Tour is just something feel she has to do, especially since the current version of the tour came together at the very last second. "It's kind of funny because, after Kanye and I split up for this tour, I was really unsure if I could get a show together in time for my fans," "But I didn't want to disappoint them and not tour over Christmas, and I had a new record coming out, so... what's exciting about this show is that I was able to put together something that, in truth, I never would have done if I had a longer amount of time." "So, I put together a show that is so perfectly an avant-garde-performance-art-fashion installation, put in a blender and vomited on as a pop show. It's kind of this amazing theme of evolution, but it's in a garage, and me and all my friends are kind of exploring the music." "But it's a very vacuous space. It's a box, it's a runway, and we have to transform that space to feel like eight different acts throughout the entire show. But for the next version of the Monster Ball, which is going to be in February when I begin in the U.K. with my arena tour, I'm throwing out the stage. My team thinks I'm completely psychotic. But I don't fucking care what they think."

Lady-video-wall — Performing Just Dance during act I - New York City.

Gaga wouldn't divulge too many secrets of the new Monster Ball, but she did say that Danish pop act, Alphabeat, will serve as the opening act. And she also hinted that her fans will be in for a very big show, in just about every conceivable way.

"Well, just to give you an idea, the stage is about four times the size of the one we're on now and conceptually, it's completely different."
"One thing that has been lost over the past 10-15 years, in pop music, is the idea of showbiz. And this is definitely going to bring that back."

Media

Android Inc. created five phone commercials released in Japan in late November of 2010, sampling the Jumping Film video merged with images of the phone. A screenshot of the Little Monsters Film was featured in Vogue Hommes Japan Vol. 5 in 2010.

Fan Film

In a unique step, Lady Gaga, image-maker, Nick Knight, and fashion-filmmaker, Ruth Hogben launched a one-off collaborative project, inviting Gaga's fans to submit their own video imagery for inclusion in the interlude. The inspiration is sharp, simple, and brutal: the Apocalypse, symbolic of both destruction and rebirth. Gaga, Knight, and Hobgen selected imagery from the submissions, and the videos were then spliced together and reinvented as exclusive imagery, played alongside Gaga's live performances. During the first version of the tour, the video was shown during her performance on the piano. The last version is shown at the very end of the show.

Outtakes

SHOWstudio released on October 7 and 18, 2011 backdrops cut from the show for undisclosed reasons. These backdrops were probably intended for the Arena Version as these particular songs did not have any.