Michael Patrick Kelly
Traces Tour 2026

By LS Kohn, ZNL · 21 September 2026

It begins the way it ends: with a silhouette. On stage the artist appears not as a figure but as a contour, and at the end he returns to the contour. That is the best idea of the evening, and it explicitly comes from the artist himself, grown out of the previous tour. That deserves recognition: a musician who holds back his own visibility has understood that light is not only a means of emphasis but also a means of withdrawal.

This is exactly what makes the following two and a half hours need explaining. For what happens here at the beginning and at the end is a deliberate retreat, the decision not to show something. What happens in between is not the opposite decision. It is the absence of a decision. Two songs in concealment, an exit into the dark, and in between two hours of unbroken outward display. The framing knows what it is doing. The main part does not.

And even the framing knows it only by half. Before the contour stands on stage, the artist enters the hall from behind, right through the audience. That is a strong thought: for a few minutes he removes the boundary between stage and auditorium. Only he is accompanied by followspots at full intensity, and the walk through the crowd becomes an entrance into the circus ring. One waits for the fanfare. The clown arrives. Once on stage, he then stands in the dark, almost no light left for him, only contour.

Theatre has a clear verdict on this sequence. An entrance builds dramatic stakes by withholding what it later shows; it leads from darkness into light, not the other way round. Whoever puts the protagonist into the followspot first and then withdraws the light has used up the exposition before it begins. The withdrawal then no longer reads as a deliberate act but as an oversight, as if the followspot had lost the artist halfway. The best idea of the evening is refuted by its own prehistory.

The centrepiece of the stage is a huge, curved LED wall. Clean, bright, reliable: from a technical point of view there is nothing to criticise. As far as the design is concerned, however, we are dealing with a format whose novelty has been outdated for some time. Developments in screen formats are no longer news: what is presented here as a scenographic statement is in reality nothing other than a curved ultra-widescreen display the size of a hall.

And this curvature carries its origin within it. It is designed for a single spectator sitting exactly in the centre at a certain distance in front of it; for that person the curve is the promise of complete immersion. In a hall, however, several thousand people sit in the wrong seats. What envelops one person tips into a slanted surface for another, into a format that optimises its effect and leaves its distribution to the lottery of ticket buying.

From the auditorium the impression is that of a drive-in cinema. You sit in front of it, the image is large, the perspective is frontal, and the relationship between viewer and surface is regulated one-sidedly. That the stage was stretched strongly in the horizontal direction is a well-considered decision and deserves unreserved praise. A flat, wide stage set needs no height and therefore no arena. It suits halls in which a large conventional production would no longer be economically viable. In its press release, the agency speaks of the economic realities of the industry. That is honest, and it is solved with craftsmanship. One should, however, remain consistently faithful to that honesty and not present the cost calculation of a tour as an artistic revelation. A good economic decision does not gain in quality simply because it is passed off as a vision; on the contrary, it loses credibility as a result.

The production’s real work lies in dissolving the classic IMAG, that is, live image magnification on separate surfaces. No detached camera images, no hard cuts: instead a seamless embedding of the live image into the digital content, readjusted for every hall and every camera axis. That involves considerable effort, and you can see it.

One would only have wished that this seamlessness would also give rise to interaction. It does not. The artist is placed into the image world but does not act within it. The image does not react to his presence, he negotiates nothing with it; the integration remains a matter of edge smoothing and not of dramaturgy. The result is an aquarium: a carefully lit, clearly delimited space that one looks into, without anything looking back.

How little image and song know each other is shown by “Wildflower”. On the wall stand withered trees, not a single leaf, then the confetti cannons fire. One may probably understand this as reforestation: the foliage is delivered afterwards, by compressed air, made of paper, and it falls as leaves do, downwards, onto the audience, fifty metres from the tree. Whether the song gives any occasion for this image idea is answered by the lyrics themselves. “Wildflower” is a declaration of love to a woman, full of sun, summer and wind. A tree does not feature in it, least of all a bare one. A wildflower is precisely that which grows without a gardener; here it is shot out of a pressure vessel. At least the wind is there. It comes from the confetti cannon.

That the surface can do more if you let it is shown immediately afterwards by “The Day My Daddy Died”. The song is a farewell to the father, told from grief, gratitude and forgiveness. The image world for it is dark, heavy, almost unreconciled, and therein lies its intelligence. It can be read as an accusation, as what the lyrics no longer say because they have already forgiven. Image and word tell two time levels of the same relationship, and the audience sits in between. That is subtly conceived, and it is the moment of the evening in which the LED wall knows more than the song. Whether it needed the displayed portrait of the father is another question. It may have been the artist’s personal decision to anchor the moment emotionally, and that decision is his to make. In terms of design, however, the portrait takes away the accusation’s suspension: where the image had just been hinting, it now shows.

Added to this is a formal language that cannot deny its origins. It was the great automobile presentations of the glory years that invented this aesthetic, and with a very specific aim: the curved panoramic surface draws the horizon, the gentle content world creates the atmosphere, and the light has only one task, to make the exhibit in front of it look good. No contradictions, no friction, no ambiguity: a product that raises questions sells worse. A stage figure that raises none does not carry the evening. This is exactly where the appropriation breaks in two. What protects the product deprives the artist of his raw material, because on stage ambiguity is not a risk but the basis of the work. Except that here it is not a vehicle on the turntable but a singer on a lift platform. The principle has remained the same, the object has changed, and with it, really, the purpose of the whole arrangement.

On the lift platform: in the middle of the stage there is a video cube fitted with LED on three sides. During “Lazarus” it rises, the artist lies on it and lets one leg dangle over the edge. Is that supposed to be essential for the entire dramaturgy? What we see is a Tom Thumb on a cube who can dangle his feet.

That is not meant maliciously but is a question of scale. A platform that raises the body and thereby makes it appear smaller, while the surface behind enlarges it to ten metres head height, creates a conflict: two sizes of the same person in the same field of view, and neither of them is the real one. A show design would make this conflict its subject. This one illustrates it. The moment works as a postcard; it is designed for the fourteen seconds in portrait format that will be uploaded afterwards. It does not carry a dramaturgical axis.

At “Glorious” the lift platform returns, this time with a piano, and here the visual language finally runs out of breath. The surface shows soft rays, flares, such as are known from any image library for the uplifting, and the lighting programming, too, seems to have had nothing to offer at this point that it had not already shown before. The platform rises, the artist plays, and as quickly as it appeared, it is gone again as soon as the song tips into its sing-along section, which does not want to hide its kinship with Robbie Williams.

To this belongs the obligatory audience shot: the camera turns around, and the hall sees itself on the wall. A lift platform that rises for a chorus and sinks again before the next is not a statement but a short visit. And an audience cheering itself on the LED wall is the shortest way to fill a surface to which one otherwise has nothing more to say.

On to the lighting. The rig is flawless and, let this be stressed explicitly, was selected with expertise. For the rock numbers, large front lenses, a dense beam, a beam look that sits. A semi-automatic followspot system, for which there is practically no alternative at this scale. On the floor, low-profile multifunction fixtures, precisely controlled, placed inconspicuously between the musicians: flat in the best sense of the word and, where the programming is concerned, occasionally flat in the other. Added to this are light lines above and below the wall as well as floor spots in the floor set, run by one of the big console systems. And what is missing from the order list speaks for it just as much. Strobes are nowhere to be found, and whoever thinks for a moment during “Lazarus”, “America” or “Shake Away” that they were simply forgotten soon realises: they are not missing. The songs carry their tempo themselves; the light does not have to hammer it into the eye once more. That pop music can do without monster strobes is an insight that is astonishingly rarely applied in this industry. Here the retreat is, for once, a decision. Whoever buys in this way knows what he is doing. Precisely for this reason the question remains why this knowledge ends at the order list and does not arrive at the console.

For here too, the moving lights are not programmed outside the usual patterns. The bars run their fans, the beams their sweeps, and the movements reproduce exactly what the same devices have been doing in the same halls for years. This is not a reproach to the movement as such, a cleanly set fan is a legitimate tool, but to the uneventfulness behind it. When the light can do everything and risks nothing, what remains in the end is an inventory, not a handwriting.

It becomes clearest, of all places, with the title song of the tour. “Traces” is a melancholic mid-tempo song about the traces a person leaves behind when they have gone: memories that echo in streets and places, rain, silence, echo. The light answers with a thunderstorm. The fixtures race through the hall, chases across the bars, sweeps across the beams, one running light after another. Are those meant to be traces of light? Then they are those of a funfair, not of a memory. A song about what remains gets a light that lets nothing remain: no movement stands longer than until its repetition. Whoever had taken the lyrics seriously would have built the opposite, a light that stays put, afterglows, fades. Traces come from lingering, not from speed.

And then there is the open zooming into the auditorium. The light lines shine with wide-open zoom directly into the audience in order to compensate for the luminance of the LED wall. From a physical point of view that is understandable. From the perspective of perceptual physiology it is an attack. Whoever counters the wall with glare shifts the contrast problem from the stage to the spectator’s retina, and to the detriment of the one who paid for the evening: after such a volley of light the eye needs a few seconds to readjust, seconds in which the artist is simply invisible, because one has been dazzled in order to see him better.

The brightness of the wall is not a natural constant but a value set by someone. It could have been reduced. Instead, the excessive level serves as an argument to justify the next excessive level, and the whole is called “compensation”. That is not compensation. It is an arms race with one’s own content, fought out in the auditorium.

On stage itself it does not get quieter. At the most beautiful moment of the evening, the duet “Salve Regina” with Jennifer Haben, two voices stand in the centre, a hymn, a number that lives on silence. The light’s answer: all available backlights, around seventy fixtures, all on the centre. Do the maths, and each of the two singers has thirty-five fixtures at their back, a staffing ratio that any daycare centre can only dream of.

If you divided the same devices arithmetically among the six-piece band, just under twelve would remain per head; in the duet the attention triples, in the very song that needs it least. The punchline is then written by the optics: seventy fixtures from behind turn two people into two silhouettes. The best idea of the evening returns, this time not as a decision but as a side effect.

Where the show, on the other hand, finds itself is in its monochrome colour worlds. When the production dares to cover surface, beams and bodies with one and the same colour, exactly the cohesion the concept promises emerges: no more distinction between front and back, no separation between content and light, but a single state. That is powerful, that is distinctive, and in exactly this moment one senses what this stage could have become had the retreat been given as much time as the edge smoothing.

Twice it succeeds completely: in “Keep Hope Alive” and in “Home”. Here the hue in the video and the light colour of the fixtures merge into a single tint, the wall stops being an image and becomes light itself; the space becomes a colour space. These are the strongest images of the tour, and they deserve praise without reservation. In “Keep Hope Alive” only one last step is missing: the artist himself remains exempt from the colour. A little colour light on him, and the surface would have become a space in which he stands, instead of a space in front of which he stands.

The rest is administration at a high level. Ten months of development time, one and a half weeks of band rehearsals, four days of production rehearsal: in this industry and in this year that is a luxury almost nobody affords any more, and one clearly sees that the time was invested in the right places. The show runs. The middle section runs on timecode, so that the same quality is delivered every night. There is nothing wrong with that; a fixed running order is not worse craft than a hand-operated show, but a different one, with its own precision and its own appeal. The criticism is not aimed at timecode, but at the fact that the staging has not kept a place free for itself. For the much-praised liveliness takes place outside it this evening. In the gaps. When the artist breaks through the structure, brings fans on stage or picks up the acoustic guitar alone. A design that had anticipated these moments would be present in them. This one is not. The apparatus can do everything except add something to the evening that was not already fixed ten months earlier.

From this follows an observation that goes beyond this single visit: empty promises and ageing standards, all of it in flawless execution. The surface promises a whole world and delivers a backdrop. The integration promises fusion and delivers retouching. The light promises compensation and delivers glare. Only the silhouette keeps what it promises, because it is the only one that makes no claim, as long as one does not send a followspot after it first.