Sometimes the best answers are the most obvious ones, and when it came to the creative for the latest festival offering from MDLBEAST, A Thousand and One, this was most certainly the case. As the festival’s creative team assembled in the project’s early ideation stage, they pondered potential themes for a brand-new festival. “The answer was right in our faces,” recalled MDLBEAST Chief Creative Officer, Ahmad ‘Baloo’ Alammary. “The stories from 1001 Nights are our fairy tales, our own folklore, and they are the perfect fantasy to build a homegrown Saudi festival around.”
Speaking to TPiMEA from Ibiza – where he was about to start a run of his own performances in his other profession as a DJ – Baloo delved further into the unique themes of A Thousand and One. “We plug themes into everything we do, but they are usually based on the context of the festival,” he explained, referencing fellow MDLBEAST festival Balad Beast, which draws heavily on the architecture of the location. “With A Thousand and One, we were playing with something very different. These are fantasy stories not based on history or location, which means we have all the liberties in the world to change it up and let our creativity run wild.”
Inspired by the way that modern cinema takes the old Arabian Nights tales and transforms them into stories that take place in a world with today’s urban sensibilities, Baloo and the wider creative team set about building a fantasy realm shrouded in narrative in which timelines are fluid. “We had a lot of fun with the theme,” Baloo smiled, recalling a series of mock adverts that were placed around the festival site strategically with humorous slogans inviting festivalgoers to ‘Get that 40 Thieves Look’ and ‘Buy your magic carpet now – first payment on us’. “We brought an almost Times Square-like advertising feel with a 1001 Nights twist,” he reminisced.
A Thousand and One saw MDLBEAST’s multiuse site at Banban transformed from the sprawling festival setup usually in place for flagship festival Soundstorm into an altogether more intimate venue, with the site’s Underground area reconfigured for the occasion. “We are lucky to have these grounds, and we approached them very differently to how we would for Soundstorm,” confirmed Baloo. “We created something fresh and fun, and the difference was palpable on site.”
Narrative was front and centre in every creative and technical decision. “The minute we decided to do a festival based on old-school Middle Eastern folklore, we wanted to find the most interesting stories, then build stages based on the locations from these stories,” Baloo commented, explaining the creative process, which invariably starts with writing the audience experience. “We consider what we want the audience to see, hear, feel and smell when they enter the festival,” he added. “We figure out what the main touchpoints are and create a journey through them.”
The use of the Banban festival grounds for more than just Soundstorm is part of a well-defined strategy to develop the site into a year-round multipurpose venue. MDLBEAST now has a permanent team on site to handle management of the venue, led by Senior Venues Manager, Nic Hurlston. “We’ve established a year-round presence here at Banban to maintain the venue, managing the assets, structures and utilities, and essentially preparing the venue for projects to come in and execute,” he described, explaining his team’s remit.
The presence of Hurlston and the venue management team meant that on-site lead time could be reduced significantly. “In the past, the venue would have gone idle in between shows before coming back to life, whereas now we’ve established standard operating procedures and keep the facilities maintained, we’re much more efficient in allowing projects to come in later and hit the ground running,” he explained.
The remit spans everything from cabins and CCTV to digital signage, car parks, and everything in between that would previously have had to be installed ahead of each show, with everything linked to the “heartbeat of the site”, the Event Management Centre. “Our team is all about creating a more efficient venue, providing a support structure and being an advocate for the flow of information across permanent venue team and the project team,” Hurlston added. “We have great relationships with all the key stakeholders and that is aided hugely by the year-round communication we’re able to maintain.”
Also playing a vital role in preparing the site was Special Projects, which works extensively with MDLBEAST and TAIT on projects throughout Saudi Arabia, supplying site management and procurement services. Director, John Wilson, recalled the “huge undertaking” for the Special Projects team. “On A Thousand and One, we had around 15 managers on site for each discipline – from power and water to Site Coordinators, Site Assistants, Site Managers and Infrastructure Managers, all working to produce the event,” he revealed.
For Wilson and the Special Projects team, the main challenge revolved around creating a “site within a site”, making the former Underground area act as a self-contained festival site, while maintaining access and services for the wider Banban facility, which remained open for various other activities throughout. “We utilised the West Entrance, ensuring complete separation from the rest of the site throughout the build, the show and the breakdown,” he explained.
With more than 100 items of plant on site often working within confined spaces, the Special Projects team had a lot to manage. However, Wilson maintained a laser focus on the task at hand. “Our priority was ensuring that all areas were fully prepared for the event team to come in and build before pivoting to become a support service during the show days,” he recalled. “Even the best-laid plans can change, and we remained ready to jump on any requirements as and when they arose.
“I’ve been involved in events for the best part of 40 years now and I’ve never seen anything done to this level of detail,” Wilson concluded. “We work with some fantastic companies and more importantly a great bunch of people who all understand each other. It’s a pleasure to be part of the team.”
Photos: MDLBEAST
