Christopher BarrettThe company behind the set designs for major touring artists including Adele, Beyoncé, Rolling Stones and Elton John, is to invest further in bamboo staging having debuted it at Global Citizen 2025 in Belém.
The company, whose countless major projects include the design of the temporary London venue for ABBA Voyage, said the Global Citizen event served as a large-scale test for sustainable stage architecture and set a new benchmark for environmentally responsible design in the live entertainment industry.
Steel and aluminium are the most widely used materials for truss systems, rigging, and frameworks due to their ability to handle heavy loads, but Stufish said it has found bamboo’s tensile strength rivals that of steel, making it suitable for lightweight frameworks and modular designs for major tours. At Global Citizen, the scenic elements were built almost entirely from bamboo, seen as a low-carbon alternative to conventional stage materials.
“The 2025 Global Citizen represents a major step forward in live show design. Our goal was to show that sustainability and spectacle can coexist in the same space,” said Stufish Entertainment Architects CEO & design director Ray Winkler. “By rethinking what a stage can be made of, we hope to open doors towards a lower-carbon future in live entertainment”