Drowned World Tour - Development

Development

The tour was divided into five segments, namely Cyber-Punk, Geisha-Anime, Country-Western y Latin-Spanish. Each segment represented a phase of Madonna's career. Madonna's publicist Liz rosenberg announced that the tour was designed as the grandest spectacle amongst all the other Madonna tours. Designer Jean-Paul Gaultier was signed up to create the costumes for the tour. He came up with the concept of creating the costumes of the tour as a fusion of punk and Scottish fashions. Other costumes designed by Gaultier had geisha, cowboy and Spanish themes in them. Other designers associated with the tour included Dean and Dan Caten, creaters of the DSquared2 fashion line. The dresses developed included a torn shirt and zippered black pants, indicating the early days of her career, and leather chapped jeans and ghetto fabulous costumes, indicating the phase of her career at that point of time. Black wigs and white makeup would demonstrate the Ray of Light and the geisha themes. A hybrid of clothes from the music video of the Madonna song "La Isla Bonita" (1987) and the 1996 Madonna starring musical Evita were also created. The setlist for the show consisted mainly of songs from the last two studio albums Ray of Light and Music. Among her pre-90s hits, only "Holiday" and "La Isla Bonita" were added to the set list. Dave Kob, FOH engineer for the tour, commented that,

"The show is extremely technical, extremely fast-paced, and the variety of music is amazing. It goes from screaming heavy metal to techno dance, to Country and Western; there's even a flamenco hootenanny where everyone comes down front, beats on logs and plays acoustic guitars and pennywhistles. Then it goes back to 'Holiday' which is an old dance number. It keeps you steppin'.
Madonna sings everything live. She's been that way from the beginning of her career, even with all the athletic dancing. She's a hard worker and she expects everybody else to work as hard or harder. I respect that."

The stage was as huge as a tennis court and was made movable. Above the stage was a vast electrical grid, composed of truss sections, chain motors, cabling and the control devices that linked electronically or mechanically with the performances happening below. Four gigantic video monitors formed the backdrop of the stage. Other equipments included a mechanical bull and equipemnts for aerial movements. The sets were built in sections by three companies. A permanent crew of around hundred was hired. Monitor mixing was handled by four monitor engineers, with two of them for Madonna's monitors. Blake Suib, one of the engineers, commented that Madonna was a perfectionist and she knew when a sound, coming from the speakers, sounded bad or good during rehearsals. By the suggestion of music director Pat Leonard, they tried out using 14 kHz of sound frequency in their live speakers, which was unusual to use at that point of time. Also they came up with the idea of using isolated amplifiers to pick up the sound of the instruments indivitually. Suib commented that "the creative process of coming up with new ideas, implementing them, and then soberly evaluating their results was time-consuming but worth it." The poster and the logo for the tour was developed by Chase Design Group. They wanted to make the logo as much aesthetic as possible. They developed a custom icon and logo type to convey the unique and ethereal qualities of Madonna's show, which was described by the group's founder Margo Chase as "a multilayered musical and spiritual journey through diverse worlds." Chase commened that since "Madonna is a student of Kabbalah, she requested that we include references to that body of knowledge." The resulting logo and poster, included both Arabic and Hebrew references. A number of designs were prepared by Chase and the one ultimately chosen by Madonna made it to the main poster of the show, which featured Madonna's face-shot from the "What It Feels Like for a Girl" video shots.