On Sunday, July 23, 2023, I attended the closing show of “On the Wings of Hermès” at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica. This was a live, traveling exhibition that began in France and went to Japan and Taiwan before its only US stop in Santa Monica.

A photo opportunity once inside the entrance.

Once inside, there was a snack booth with complimentary popcorn, chips, and drinks.

Promptly at show time, attendees entered the main hangar space and were shown to the first seating area. The program was divided into seven scenes, with seating for each scene. Above every scene was a giant projection screen. What followed was an exhilarating combination of watching the live video (filmed on cinematic cameras), the cast members, and the background commotion.

Scene I: Reverse Gravity

Director Jaco Van Dormael and choreographer Michèle Anne De Mey, together with the Astragales dance company, created this experience for Hermes titled “Pegasus and the Quest of the Seven Lightnesses.” Per Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Hermès Artistic Director:

This work metaphorically illustrates the lightness that is omnipresent at Hermès: in the delicate hands of our craftsmen sewing with two needle at once; in the elegance of materials, and in the subtle notes of a perfume. It is an experience which sparks the imagination, designed by artisans of dreams.

The first scene opened with a countryside landscape set atop a rotating platform as a narrator boomed over the speakers. All the props were right side up.

As the scene continued, one of the crew members rotated the platform to an upside down state. The video feed from the stationary camera showed everything as “floating”—the props were tethered to the landscape. The scene concluded with a rotation back to normal. Attendees moved from scene to scene, and one pleasant touch from the design team was that scenes were not located next to each other, thus allowing attendees to get different seats.

Scene II: The Flight of the Migratory Gloves

The cast members donned black long sleeved tops and colorful Hermès gloves. From the video feed, and even in plain sight, it looked like the gloves were birds, flying along a changing landscape that was constantly being handled by the stage crew to remove old scenery and slide in new scenery.

The scene concluded with a lone gloved hand, now an ice skater, skating through a winter landscape.

The landscape at the bottom of the screen (where landscapes were placed once they were off camera) was a town with lights. The scene on camera is after leaving the town.

Scene III: The Circus

Continuing with the hand choreography, the third scene featured a circus setup. Circus horses pranced around the big top and walked a tightrope.

Each scene had its own control center. The cameraperson manually operated the camera and cast members manipulated lights, scenery, and props.

Scene IV: Anamorphosis

As a photographer, this was my favorite scene. There was a clever use of forced perspective—an optical illusion to make things appear larger, smaller, or a different distance away than they really are. The main part of the “room” was in the black box. There was a gap for the cast members in horse heads to walk through, and the back wall was set behind the black box. If you look closely at the bottom of the photo below, you can see that the red throw pillows that are at the bottom of the video feed are actually floating on invisible string in front of the camera. This allowed space for the cast members to manipulate props in the front of the “room.”

In the next photo, cropped to show detail, notice how the small chair that used to be under the desk on the right of the video feed is now larger and seemingly pulled out from under the desk. At the bottom of the photo, you can see that the chair is floating near the throw pillows.

Scene V: The Opera of Four Bags

This scene needs no explanation. Four Hermès Kelly bags, expertly controlled by puppeteers, sang the overture to Rossini’s Barber of Seville, King’s Singers arrangement. The scene concluded with crew members throwing roses onto the stage and a Pegasus flying away with a Kelly bag. It was an incredible buildup for the remaining scenes.

Scene VI: No Gravity

The penultimate scene featured two dancers in tandem with a landscape. One camera showed the landscape and practical effects like smoke. The stage where the actors lay showed this camera's feed. A second camera, mounted on the ceiling pointing down at the stage, captured the dancers and the landscape feed into one feed for the audience. No camera trickery, just extensive technology. Fans blew as the dancers tumbled across the stage laying down to appear floating in the audience feed.

The audience feed was a layering of the landscape feed and the top-down dancer feed.

Scene VII: Rewind

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As soon as the narrator’s voice started playing backwards, even without knowing the title of the scene, you could tell a rewind was coming. The scene opened with a top-down shot of a lightbox showing sand art. Cast members’ hands gradually destroyed the art. At the midpoint, there was a seamless transition into a live video feed rewind that presented the scene as intended—meaningless sand transformed into art—with the narrator’s voice playing normally.