Behind Tyler, the Creator and Doja Cat’s Coachella Performances – MASHAHER

For an artist looking to break Coachella, it pays to enlist friends at a cutting-edge production firm. At this year’s festival, L.A.-based Silent House has laid claim to designing and executing the elaborate productions for three of the four headliners. While its concepts for No Doubt skewed to a traditional rock-band setup, the studio went wild — and fully cinematic — with the stunts and set pieces for Doja Cat’s and Tyler, the Creator’s extravagant shows.

“Just in the cyclical way of things, we’ll be wherever our clients are, but to have this many of us (from the company) with this many headliners on one festival is quite extraordinary,” says Silent House Studios president Alex Reardon. (Of this year’s four headliners, only Lana Del Rey worked with a non-Silent House team). That two of them were rappers whose ideas tend toward the avant-garde allowed for barrier-busting: “Neither Tyler nor Doja Cat have ever come at any of the shows that we’ve been involved with them on from a point of cliché.”

On Monday, after the first go-round of Coachella 2024 (and ahead of a second weekend coming April 19-21), Silent House’s designers unpacked just what went into Doja’s and Tyler’s most feature-film-worthy scenes, as seen by livestream viewers as well as audiences on-site in the desert.

TYLER, THE CREATOR

Besides being the president of the studio division of Silent House, Reardon has personally worked as Tyler, the Creator’s creative director and designer for the rapper’s last three album cycles. “I’ve done the BET Awards and Grammys with him, and developed a great relationship with not just an extraordinary musician and talented creator,” he says, “but actually one of the nicest, most generous, kind, funny people you could ever hope to work with.” And also somebody who decided, at least for the purposes of Coachella, that his lost calling was to be a stuntman.

Tyler’s stage design had the rapper dressed in a ranger uniform, sitting in a trailer in a Monument Valley-style desert. Just your average hip-hop scenario, right? A filmed segment portraying Tyler inside the vehicle led to an expectant spotlight focusing viewers’ attention on something about to happen with the vehicle — and then “Tyler actually was launched through the wall of the trailer, out about 80 feet, and landed on the thrust on a wire on an apex,” explains Reardon. The simulated explosion required the combined talents of pyro experts and movie stunt choreographers.

“The fly guys said if you have him in the air too long, it loses impact and gets a bit Peter Pan-ish,” notes Reardon, so they had him quickly land on the ramp, to avoid an elongated floating effect… but not so quickly that viewers would miss the whole thing.

The stunt coordinator was Pat Romano, “a very, very, very experienced and safe pair of hands to pass this off to, and a great guy as well… I was able to sculpt a moment that Tyler had wanted to do by bringing the pyro team into the conversation with the stunt team. I told them the pyro guys, ‘You have to create an explosion that creates a believable effect as to how a six-foot human being is being projected this far. So it has to be a fireball, and it has to be bits of balsa wood coming out on air mortars.’ I said, ‘Think about this as a film, not a live concert. Think about that one shot.’ And then in rehearsals, we’ve actually worked out exactly how far down the thrust the cameras had to be in line. And then we coordinated with the very cooperative people at Coachella to make sure the live stream and our IMAG on different cameras appeared to be in exactly that same place. And I think we absolutely nailed it. You couldn’t watch that without smiling.”

Reardon also wanted a big finish to bookend the rapper’s set. His team concocted an idea where Tyler would walk vertically up a cliff wall, hang on to a ledge for dear life, then be blown across (and off) the stage by a simulated wind gust. Again, this involved some basic wire work and a very willing participant, with a bit more pyro to finish his trip from one side of the stage to the other with a bang. “Tyler certainly put the work in, because it’s not an easy thing to do at all, especially the vertical wall walk.”

(Coachella’s livestream cameras actually missed capturing the entirety of his exit, which was better seen in fan footage, but with any luck that will be rectified with the feed for weekend 2.)

How did the idea for doing these semi-comedic stunts come about? From an unlikelier inspiration than you might imagine. “In preliminary discussions,” Reardon says, “Tyler was referring to old 1920s black-and-white movie sketches of people clinging on to clock faces,” Reardon says, a la the feats of stunt-happy silent-movie geniuses like Harold Lloyd and Bister Keaton, and that “was really where the stunt ideas came from.” As for the milieu, “I think it came from him just being in the desert and saying ‘We should do a desert thing’… It was all very amorphous at the beginning, and then as we went down various different paths of what it could be, we ended up with sort of sandstone striations, which served very well for what we have to give him, which is in essence a playground to work within to create the show.”

Tyler’s set was hardly characterized entirely by the action moments that bookended it. Indeed, he brought it the energy level down about as much as is possible, even to a mirthful extreme. Following through on the idea that he is camping alone in the desert, one of the rapper’s quirkier notions was to munch on a snack during a quiet moment.

“He said to me, ‘I think I want to be up there eating something, and I said, ‘Well, if you’d gone camping, what would you want?’ He said, ‘Oh, I’d want a PB&J.’ And then he was surprised that he was actually getting a PB&J, but I said, ‘You asked for it, you got it.’ There was a quite interesting scene backstage before the show where one of the production assistant was very carefully making sure that there was the right amount of peanut butter and right amount of jelly. We get very scientific! I never would’ve thought someone could spend so much time and attention making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But it’s in the detail, as I say.”

DOJA CAT

No PB&Js or relaxed desert idylls for Doja Cat. For her production design, “we were creating, essentially, an abandoned quarantine lab onstage,” says Parker Genoway, who is Doja’s creative producer and production/lighting designer at Silent House. (He works closely in collaboration with Doja’s creative director, Brett Alan Nelson, and choreographer, Parris Goebel.)

There was no storyline or narrative to her set, so it’s not as if the abandoned lab motif was an idea the audience was necessarily meant to pick up on. Still, it might help explain why she made her entrance at the top of the show in a Hazmat suit. Even after the star shed that particular skin, “We brought that in so that even our whole stage crew., as you saw, was wearing Hazmat suits as well, so everyone was an extension of the show.”

Stripped of that bulky gear, Doja Cat had a number of eye-popping costume changes, including a platinum-blonde-meets-Bigfoot look that involved a whole troupe of dancing Yetis; a white, furry bikini of sorts; a broad-shouldered yellow leotard; and corsets that alternately looked like they were made of plexiglass or soft, bony material. But what viewers may remember most is a series of big, brash set-pieces.

One sequence had a 40-foot-long dinosaur skeleton trailing her down the thrust stage that extended in an L-shape through the audience. The New Substance-crafted dino “took eight people to operate,” says Genoway, noting the dino was handled by “a combination of stage techs who held the weight of it and dancers who articulated some of the movement.” The dino did have to get back to the stage at some point, so, given the narrowness of the ramp, “you can imagine the rehearsal that goes into a dinosaur making a three-point turn.”

Then there was the gleaming satellite stage set 250 feet into the crowd, where a spotless Doja began the show in that Hazmat suit. She returned to that same spot at the end, where there was now a full mud pit awaiting her and her dancers. “It needed to be thick enough, not watery, with enough body to it so clumps of it could be on her shoulder,” says Genoway. “It was a lot of trial. We had to audition mud.” (Ultimately, they ended up going with a formula close to what was used in the golden age of mud wrestling exhibitions.) Here was the exact inverse of Woodstock ’94, as festivals go, in a way: At Coachella, the mud stays strictly onstage.

Genoway was also proud of a moment in Doja’s set where she appears to swig from a bottle of whisky, then throws it down… igniting a fire wall that extends 200 feet wide. With the pyro as foreground, it’s at that moment that a platform she’s standing on starts rising 30 feet above the stage floor. (She was visibly tethered to the platform, so some viewers might have expected another flying effect, a la Tyler… but no, that’s just to prevent Doja becoming a giant stain on the Coachella stage.)

“Anytime we ask our artists to do something that might be a little bit uncomfortable, we want to also have done it ourselves,” Genoway notes. “With those floating platforms, I was definitely sure to go up and test those and make sure it was something that I felt comfortable with before sending her up there above a big, 200-foot long line of fire, 30 feet above the stage floor plus another seven feet from the stage to the audience.” (But, he adds, “She is so down to do anything, and oftentimes she’s the one asking to do these crazy things, so it’s just fun to be able to support her in that. She’s not safe and neither is Tyler. We love working for these artists that are gonna push the limits and not be like ‘I’m comfortable here, I’m gonna stay here.’”)

Desert winds play a big factor in what Silent House can design… and what backup plans they have to have in place if a real storm kicks up.

“Originally when we designed those platforms, they came back with a wind rating of 5 miles-per-hour of sustained wind,” Genoway says. “And we said, ‘Absolutely not, not worth doing.’ It will always be 5 mph sustained wind at Coachella. So we re-engineered them and refigured out the spacing so that they had enough sway in play to be able to execute at a higher wind speed. If we hit 15 miles-per-hour of sustained wind, we were gonna have to go to our backup plan, and continue to use them but not with performers on them. I was just looking at the weather app over and over, but the wind ended up playing nicely and we got to do what we wanted to do.”

With the dinosaur, “anything that’s crowd-adjacent is engineered to the highest level of safety. So, the dinosaur was wind-rated up to 40 miles an hour of sustained wind — which is actually after the point that the festival would’ve closed down anyway, so there were no scenarios in which that was gonna have to be killed. … I think that was special, in that I personally haven’t seen anything like that out in the audience of this scale before this festival. It was pretty beastly to operate, but made for a pretty exciting moment.”

The Silent House team is preparing to do it all again on weekend 2, with some tweaks to make sure everything gets caught perfectly by the festival cameras.

Says Reardon, “I think the people on livestream see more detail, but the people in person get more vibe. I think it’s one of actually our core tenants at Silent House, to make sure we’re designing for both. Because more often than not, anything we design is gonna be broadcast; at some point, someone’s gonna come and shoot the show. So from the earliest inception of any show, we’re always thinking about how do we make sure that both of those two things are hit equally, to make sure that everyone’s experience is as good as everyone else’s.”

Usually, Silent House would drop out of the equation and hand things over after the opening night of a tour, so Coachella’s two weekends mark the rare instance in which they have to stay on and not take a breather after night 1. “The adrenaline just carries you and carries you, and then when it’s over, you’re just out.

“But it is just insanely rewarding,” Reardon adds. “I’ve been doing this for 35-plus years, “and when the house lights go out and tens of thousands of people start screaming, that is what I refer to as the sound of our office. It’s a beautiful sound, and it’s just that wonderful human experience of being out there in a live space doing good work for good people.”