"I woke up to a single line of light." Have you ever considered the similarities between hotels and the art of stage performances? Once you start to investigate, they are more alike than they seem.
Stage designer and multi-hyphenate artist Es Devlin has a knack for taking her audiences, listeners, and observers on an unforeseen journey. Devlin often explores narrative and storytelling in her own creative work; her creative practice began in the 1990s in stage direction, and has evolved to span across art, architecture, dance, lighting, opera, poetry, and always drawing. No matter the size or scale of the work she’s creating, whether it be on an intimate niche play in London’s West End, or with artists such as Kanye West, Beyonce, Adele, and The Weeknd on large scale concert tours, or with the Metropolitan Opera staging Mozart’s famous Don Giovanni, you can count on leaving the experience with the feeling of wonder. Devlin transports her audiences, even if just for a few minutes, to a parallel universe that allows us to explore another side of ourselves, taking us out of our day to day lives. Hotels often achieve a similar effect: upon entering, you step into a carefully crafted world. Whether local or abroad, the best hotels create narratives that elevate your experience and immerse you in an enhanced reality.
Devlin has incorporated many of these hotel-like characteristics into her own work. At Room 2022, she transformed 7,000 sq. ft. of the Miami Beach EDITION into an interactive exhibit featuring a mirrored maze, prompting contemplation about the hidden realities within hotels. She meticulously recreated a hotel room so convincingly that guests mistook it for an actual suite within the hotel. Here, her work explores themes of dislocation and disorientation often associated with hotel stays. For the exhibit, Devlin wrote and narrated an original poem about waking up to "a single line of light," capturing the universal experience of seeing a sliver of morning light through curtains in a hotel room anywhere in the world. This moment suspends us between dream and reality until we get out of bed and draw back the curtains.
Devlin delves deep into research before crafting each installation or performance. For GucciCosmos, a traveling exhibit that launched in late 2023, she explored the early career of Guccio Gucci, who started as an intern at London’s Savoy Hotel. In 1899, Richard D’Oyly Carte built the Savoy Hotel next to his Savoy Theatre in London’s West End, offering his theatregoers luxury accommodations. A lover of opera and drama, Carte installed London’s first electric lift in the hotel, known as The Savoy’s Red Lift or "Ascending Room", all the walls and ceiling painted a bright red. The lift took over five minutes to reach the top floor, so Carte hired interns to operate it, engaging guests with conversation, libations, and sweets during their journey upward. One such intern was young Guccio Gucci, who gleaned deep insights into hospitality from the guests he served to later apply to his family’s leather goods business in Italy. Devlin reconstructed the red “Ascending Room” as the entrance to the GucciCosmos exhibit. Just like at the Savoy Hotel, Devlin’s lacquered red room transports visitors into a new universe, something beyond the ordinary and into the extraordinary. Interestingly, there is an element of hospitality in Devlin’s work. Inviting her audiences into the performance and allowing them to expand their collective consciousness is akin to the power that hotels have in providing their guests with a similar transformative experience.
