Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour: Unpacking the Symbolism of Queen Bey’s Disco Cowboy Wonderland

By Charlotte Collins

What do giant robot arms, a news desk, and an enormous horse sculpture have in common? They’re all currently traversing Europe with Beyoncé’s Renaissance world tour, which kicked off May 10 in Stockholm, Sweden. Following her album’s release last July, the Beyhive has been growing restless in the absence of any Renaissance visuals—which fans have come to expect from the songstress after her groundbreaking visual albums Beyoncé, Lemonade, and Black Is King cemented the Grammy winner as a trailblazer of world-building within her artistry. She even poked fun at the brewing discontent during an interlude in the concert: “You’ve asked for the visuals, you’ve called for the queen,” a voiceover with accompanying text read out on the big screen. “But a queen moves at her own pace, b*tch, decides when she wants to give you a f*cking taste. So get your fork and spoon, if you got one.”

Barring the official debut of videos fans have only seen in snippets and teasers thus far, Beyoncé’s production design for the Renaissance concerts treats stadia of attendees on the 40-city, 57-show extravaganza to some of the most thrilling—and playful—wonders of the artist’s touring career. Equal parts retro psychedelic and chrome-futuristic, concertgoers AD reached out to agree that Renaissance looks to offer the singer-songwriter’s biggest-budget touring set yet. Stufish Entertainment Architects and Es Devlin Studio are to thank for the tour’s stage design (along with presumably plenty of input from Beyoncé herself, who is credited as director, executive producer, and creative director.)

Beyoncé wearing a metallic iridescent ensemble by Georgian designer David Koma on the first night of the Renaissance tour. She previously wore Koma’s designs to the 2020 Oscars.

Rodrigo Fantini last saw Queen Bey at her On The Run II Tour in 2018. A Beyhive faithful, he attended the first two dates of the Renaissance tour in Stockholm and will rejoin the party in a few months when she stops through SoCal. He described the production for the set as “crazy expensive.” Though AD could not confirm the production budget, Forbes claims that the Renaissance world tour could bring in as much as $2.1 billion. The publication estimates that ticket prices alone will net between $680 million and $2.4 billion (on the very high end), but merchandise sales are expected to inflate those figures further—Forbes projects those could earn the mogul approximately $171 million. By comparison, Beyoncé’s 2018 On the Run II Tour with husband Jay-Z grossed over $250 million, also per Forbes. Her last solo tour, 2016’s Formation, brought in over $256 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

“Of course she’s an amazing singer, I love her songs, but besides that I was really impressed by the visuals,” Fantini says. “I think this is the best done so far for her tours…. And I feel that they put a lot of effort into all the details that they have for each song, it feels like for each song there is something different going on.” Reportedly clocking in at roughly three hours’ run time, Renaissance has no opening act.

Seated in the near-stage Beyhive section on night one and in a further-flung seat on the second evening, Fantini felt the large-scale stage set translated well at both short and long distances. He described the aesthetic of the era—which more or less officially debuted in concert, without any music videos for fans to build off of—as “very futuristic.” Case in point, the singer dons multiple resplendent metallic looks throughout the concert and during her performance of the track “Cozy,” she dances to the beat in sharp staccato motions while flanked by two towering robot arms, roughly twice her size. Like the famed vogue face-framing flourish that became a hallmark of the ’80s ballroom dance culture she draws from in the album, the robot arms end in rectangular shapes that frame and move with the singer. “The choreography is based on the robot arms’ movements and that was really impressive because it has to be perfect timing,” Fantini says.

There are 22 lighting crew members and one overarching lighting designer for the Renaissance tour, per Beyonce.com.

One of the most eye-catching features for Fantini was a point near the end of the show during which Beyoncé straddles a disco-ball-sparkly horse (which he said came across as roughly horse-size, as opposed to a much larger bucking half-horse figure that appears at another time in the concert) similar to the one she’s seen on in the Renaissance album cover, lifting off from the main stage to the Club Renaissance section seating nearby.

Robin Joris Dullers detailed the same “magical” moment at her later Brussels concert in similar fashion, recalling the vocalist as “an angel floating midair.” The horse remained on stage for attendees to snap photos with post-performance. Dullers had last seen Beyoncé in 2016 and says that compared with his previous experience, this concert “had definitely scaled up.” One set feature he felt was almost too gargantuan was a large metallic vehicle atop which she performs her 2020 remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” before transitioning into “Partition,” a hit from her 2013 self-titled album. She raps and bounces to the beat while a pole jutting up from the car-like structure anchors her movements.

By Katherine McLaughlin

By Rachel Gallaher

By Katherine McLaughlin

Beyoncé credits 20 dancers for the Renaissance tour on her website, including popular ballroom artist Honey Balenciaga.

Dullers found that feature was a bit uncharacteristic for the singer and “not Beyoncé style.” Though other fans disagree: Royal Williams attended the concert’s second stop in Brussels and found herself impressed by the set element, which she described as “a silver, kind of tank-like” structure onstage. She felt it nodded to low-rider cars and the hydraulics-powered hops they’re known for. The choreography for that point in the show combined with the silver vehicle felt reminiscent of a ride on a mechanical bull, to Williams, which could be a gesture to both Beyoncé’s own and “Savage” rapper Megan Thee Stallion’s shared Houston heritage. The metallics and robots of the show give it a futuristic vibe, but Williams interpreted features like the vehicle in alignment with the pieces of cowboy culture the singer has woven throughout this era (including the cowboy hat she wears in one of the few images released with Renaissance, as well as the obvious: the album cover, which shows her atop a horse).

Despite differing fan reception to any particular elements of the show, it does appear Beyoncé is taking a more playful approach with Renaissance. Though she’s sometimes seen as a mysterious figure for the distance and privacy she maintains in spite of her fame, the Grammy winner references her fan-bequeathed status as Queen Bee(/Bey) directly with a Mugler bee costume, dancing around a news desk to her fast-paced “America Has A Problem”—fitting, as the track incorporates beats similar to those used on television news to signify breaking updates.

Williams recalls previous concerts as very curated with good production value but says that more props were definitely incorporated into the Renaissance tour shows, upping the ante and making it worth the cost of admission as well as the voyage from Medellín, Colombia, to Brussels. Like Fantini, she’ll be stepping back inside the world Beyoncé has built out again when the tour makes its way to California. Her overall assessment of the show, in terms of its stage set: “The budget is definitely there.”