Melding genres as diverse as grunge, pop, hip-hop, and country into his unique style, multi-award-winning artist Post Malone’s four albums have sold over 80 million units. That speaks to his popularity as a crossover artist, and he’s renown for his energetic live shows.
Post’s team asked us to build a network of seven circular stages of varying sizes, connected with runways for his Twelve Carat arena and stadium tour around the US and Canada.
We built the runways from our modular Mag Deck staging to ensure efficient touring, customized with a gray-painted plywood surface and supplied rolling Mag legs and black encore softgoods with clear polycarbonate applied to the inside staging perimeter. Two custom prop lifts were built into the upstage center and center stage circles.
The upstage center structure was the largest stage at 24 ft in diameter and 6 ft high, with a central circle measuring 20 ft across, a downstage center at 16 ft and four downstage right and left circles measuring 12 ft across. Each stage features custom decking with a metal grille surface and custom black-painted plywood sub-decks on 6 inch casters. The stages also feature custom steel grates for pyro flame effects.
Reinventing the wheel
Above six of the seven circles are custom-fabricated circular lighting pods that move up and down and perform penny rolls, a 3D effect that is built into Navigator’s motion-control feature set to make show-programming more efficient. The initial lighting pod concept was a traditional box tube welded assembly, but time constraints meant producing seven of them wasn’t feasible. Faced with a challenge, the engineering team did what they do best and literally reinvented the wheel with a pinned plate solution that could be machined and assembled in a fraction of the time of the original concept.
In addition, our proprietary TAIT Navigator Automation Platform™ controlled the vast mother grid via 32 Nav Hoists and stage lifts with a total of 34 axes controlled using the Navigator front-end control system. With the lighting pods floating mere feet above Post onstage, Navigator’s safety PLCs provided real-time monitoring of all parameters and included a redundant e-stop system for performer and personnel safety.
Post Malone’s 38-date Twelve Carat Tour opened in Omaha in September 2022 and featured support from rapper Roddy Ricch. The tour visited arenas and stadiums across the US and Canada.
Special thanks to our partners Production Manager Dennis Danneels; Creative Director Lewis James; and Lighting Designer Dan Norman.
