Noah Kahan’s Great Divide Tour Brings Home to Stage

Noah Kahan began his Australia and New Zealand tour with two shows in Melbourne. The Great Divide tour’s stage design brings the idea of home from Kahan’s songs to the stage at stadium scale. Rachel Duncan, Benny Or and Sooner Routhier described the process of translating Kahan’s home in Vermont into the stage design.

The creative team created a moodboard based on the creative direction of The Great Divide album campaign. The team also received access from Kahan and his team to new music, documentary previews and photographs of Strafford, Vermont, the artist and his hometown. At the center of the stage design is a transformable perspective house representing the idea of home, while a digital facade allows the house to dissolve and transform during the show.

Two walkways flank the stage, with one designed using concrete and the other using a forest floor. The largest design challenge was combining the digital and physical components of the house into one cohesive object. The show was designed to adapt to venues at different scales, from arenas to baseball and football stadiums.

The Playground previously designed and produced Noah Kahan and his management’s We’ll All Be Here Forever tour in 2024. The creative direction for The Great Divide was shaped by Kahan’s request that everything return to the music and the feeling created by the music.