Speaker
Speaker
Speaker
Speaker
21 November
14.20
The Greatest Show in the World? In Conversation with ABBA Voyage Producer, Svana Gisla
Svana Gisla
Abba Voyage
Producer
Speaker Biography
Svana Gisla is the Emmy and Grammy award winning producer of Abba Voyage. She has produced many of the most iconic music films of the last 20 years – from Kylie’s Can’t Get you out of my Head to Daft Punk’s Get Lucky, David Bowie’s Blackstar and Beyonce and JayZ’s On the Run tour film for HBO. But when she was invited to Stockholm in 2017 to discuss an experimental film with Abba founder Benny Anderson, no-one would have predicted that within 5 years they would have revolutionised the world of live experience.
Abba Voyage is a phenomenon: seamlessly combining digital humans of iconic performers, live music, advanced lighting, robotics and show control systems in its own bespoke arena. Every performance unites 3000 people in a joyous, digitally enabled but undoubtedly ‘live’ experience.
Last year Svana told the UK Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee that the idea of a technology driven metaverse “scares” her if it means “getting our younger generations to dive deeper into the loneliness of being inside a screen all day”. Abba Voyage was deliberately designed as a large group experience rather than a virtual one because “we’re pack animals, group experiences are more natural for humans”.