Renaissance World Tour
The Renaissance World Tour was the ninth concert tour by American singer-songwriter Beyoncé. Her highest-grossing tour to date, it was staged in support of her seventh studio album, Renaissance. The tour comprised fifty-six shows, beginning on May 10, 2023, in Stockholm, Sweden, and concluding on October 1, 2023, in Kansas City, Missouri. It was Beyoncé's first tour since the On the Run II Tour in 2018 and was her fourth all-stadium tour overall.
The concerts lasted between two and a half and three hours and were split into six or seven acts, with Beyoncé performing the tracks from Renaissance in order, interspersed with songs from across her discography. The stage consisted of a giant screen with a large “portal” in its center, and featured sculptures, robotic arms and ultraviolet technology.
According to official figures provided by Billboard Boxscore, the tour broke ticket sales records worldwide in 2023, becoming both the seventh-highest-grossing concert tour and the highest-grossing tour by a female artist of all time that year, the highest grossing single-year concert tour, as well the highest-grossing tour of all time by a black artist. It also achieved the three highest monthly tour grosses in history and ranked at number one on the Top Tours Year End 2023 list. The shows received critical acclaim, with particular praise for the production value and Beyoncé's vocal performances. The tour boosted both local and national economies and was a sociocultural phenomenon. Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, which chronicles the creation and execution of the tour, was released in cinemas on December 1, 2023.
Background
The tour was teased on October 23, 2022, when Beyoncé auctioned a ticket for an unspecified show. It was sold for $50,000 in a charity auction at the Wearable Art Gala to support the WACO Theatre. It included two tickets to the concert, first-class airfare, a three-night hotel stay, and a personal backstage tour led by Beyoncé's mother. On February 1, 2023, Beyoncé announced the tour via her Instagram account.In March 2023, Business leaders in western Sydney began advocating for Accor Stadium to take priority over Allianz Stadium for a Beyoncé concert in New South Wales, due to Accor having twice the audience capacity to accommodate her ticket demand. The possibility of Allianz Stadium securing a Renaissance World Tour concert has chiefly provoked the New South Wales government to end a 57-year ban on holding more than four concerts per year at the stadium. The ban could be lifted as soon as October 2023 to allow the venue to host Beyoncé in 2024. The Premier of New South Wales said that this could bring local businesses "an additional $1.3 billion." The concert cap has existed since 1965 due to noise complaints from nearby residents, but now the government is pushing to increase it to 20 concerts per year.
In April 2023, Beyoncé rented an indoor arena, Paris La Défense Arena, in Nanterre, to rehearse for the tour. She underwent knee surgery just a month before the rehearsals and was in rehab while the tour started. Khirye Tyler and Dammo Farmer are credited as the tour's music directors, with Damien Smith as head of the music production and Tiffany Moníque Ryan as Vocal Director. Producer Amorphous assisted with the show's musical arrangements, while composer Emily Bear was the featured pianist for the tour.
While the tour was not advertised with an official opening act, guest DJs occasionally performed sets before the start of the show, as well as rapper Doechii, in various cities. The selection was curated by the tour's creative director Andrew Makadsi, and was noted for its centering of figures from dance music and queer nightlife scenes.
Ticket sales
Alongside the announcement of the tour, it was also announced that a public on-sale for the North American leg would initially not happen, with all initial ticket sales for the leg using Ticketmaster's Verified Fan system. In addition, all the cities in the North American leg of the tour would be split into three different registration groups that would all have different registration periods and on-sale times.Jay Peters of The Verge noted that this spreading out of demand appeared to be an attempt by Ticketmaster to prevent an incident identical to the 2022 Ticketmaster fiasco of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour that had occurred less than three months earlier, in which the website crashed during the Verified Fan presale. Peters questioned how effective the strategy would be since people could sign up for each of the registration groups instead of just one. In light of the mismanagement of Swift's concert ticket sales, and the U.S. Senate hearing it sparked, the Senate Judiciary Committee tweeted from their official Twitter account, "We're watching, @Ticketmaster," in reference to the Renaissance World Tour ticketing.
In light of this, Ticketmaster has implemented new policies to try and combat difficulty for concertgoers and to "create a less crowded ticket shopping experience for fans". Registration does not guarantee a ticket. Instead, a "lottery-style process" affects who is placed on the waitlist and who is given a unique access code after registering as a Verified Fan. Tickets bought in European markets also cannot be resold on Ticketmaster for more than their original price.
Presale
The first pre-sale in the UK on February 2, which was exclusive for O2 customers, was met with "overwhelming" demand and caused the O2 Priority website to crash. Over 200,000 people were trying to purchase tickets for one of the London dates, of which fewer than 7,000 were available. After fans voiced their upset and caused "O2 Priority" to trend on Twitter, O2 released an apology acknowledging the "huge demand" and reassuring fans that they are working to resolve the issue.A pre-sale on February 3, which was organized by Live Nation, saw over 3 million people trying to get tickets for dates in the UK, France, Sweden and Poland, which caused Ticketmaster to crash. In the first few minutes of the second UK pre-sale, over 400,000 people joined the queue to one of the London shows, which then extended to over 800,000 people. More than 600,000 people were in the queue for tickets to the Edinburgh show. In France, over 260,000 people were trying to purchase tickets for the Paris show.
General sale
Millions of people were trying to get tickets upon general sale in the UK, causing the Ticketmaster site to crash due to the "incredible" demand. After more than 370,000 people queued for each of the two London dates, a third date was added. The third London date saw half a million people queuing for tickets, leading to a fourth date being added. The fourth date saw another half a million people joining the queue, leading to a fifth date being added.Beyoncé's shows in Paris and Marseille sold out within minutes, with hundreds of thousands of fans trying to buy tickets and the Stade de France site crashing. Martin d'Argenlieu of Stade Vélodrome said that they had not seen such demand for a decade. Additional shows were added in Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Warsaw due to high demand for the first shows announced in those cities. Financial Times reported that economists at Danske Bank believe that Beyoncé's decision to start her world tour in Stockholm led to a surge in local hotel prices that resulted in inflation in Sweden exceeding expectations, further calling it "astonishing for a single event".
According to Ticketmaster, the ticket demand exceeded the number of available tickets by more than 800% in Toronto, Chicago, East Rutherford, Landover, Atlanta, Inglewood, and Houston, to all of which additional shows were added consequently. Live Nation said that, despite the newly added dates, the majority of fans will not be able to purchase tickets: "Demand drastically exceeds supply".
Production
Staging and lighting
The tour was planned in the lapse of four years and three identical stages for the show were developed, with one stage being set up in a city while the other two travelled to be constructed in the following destinations. The design process took eighteen months and was held in charge by Es Devlin Studio and Stufish Entertainment Architects, along with Beyoncé and her creative team, Parkwood. The staging consists of two separate platforms connected by a broad ramp: the A stage with a circle shaped cavity in the middle of a giant, flat screen; while the B stage is subdivided in a circumferenced structure surrounding the so-called VIP section "Club Renaissance", with an extension of the ramp acting as the radius of the layout. It also features monumental sculptures and metallic tanks, mannequin-horses, robotic arms, pyrotechnics and ultraviolet technology. Beyoncé was treated for bronchitis and had nearly continual sinus infections as a result of excess inhalation of the various smoke effects on stage.Costume design
Beyoncé had multiple outfit changes throughout the show, under the styling of Shiona Turini. Every concert featured anywhere between 1 and 8 new outfits debuted.The wardrobe features a silver beaded Alexander McQueen catsuit, a white bell-sleeved Anrealage gown that transformed into a multicolored masterpiece underneath a UV light, a custom silver Courrèges bodysuit with a striking circular cutout, a pearl-embellished Balmain bodysuit, hat and sunglasses, a metallic feathered frock courtesy of Coperni, a colorful mesh minidress by David Koma, a bejeweled Loewe bodysuit, and a bee costume by Thierry Mugler. Additional accessories and jewelry were custom-made by Tiffany & Co. Among the collection of designer pieces, MYKITA sunglasses are also part of the variety of ensembles showcased in the show.
Beyoncé wore 148 costumes over the tour's run, many of which honored local designers at each stop of the tour, including Jacquemus in Marseille, Robert Wun and Stella McCartney in London, Iris van Herpen in Amsterdam, and a Fendi design inspired by the artist Antonio Lopez in Barcelona. For the June 18 show in Amsterdam, Beyoncé celebrated the Juneteenth holiday by wearing exclusively Black designers, including Feben, Maximilian Davis for Ferragamo, Olivier Rousteing for Balmain, Ib Kamara for Off-White, LaQuan Smith, and her own Ivy Park collection.