Voyage

them do that.”

However, Ludvig made it clear that while the technology and choreography was absolutely top notch, the underlying focus of the concert was not simply the ABBAtars.

“If you come to our concert and leave feeling like ‘Wow, that was cool technology’, then we will have failed. …It has to be about emotion, it has to be about the audience feeling something like you do when you listen to music that you like. …It’s about coming into a space where you feel something for two hours, where you get transported, transcend-- something that music can do. And we’re doing everything we can to enhance that experience. So yeah, we have really cool avatars, and they are completely lifelike, and they’re incredible, but they’re only a vehicle. It’s not about them. It’s not about how cool they are. It’s about the whole experience.”

Ludvig explained further, “The unique challenge is that we’re creating a concert with a band that isn’t there… and we still don’t know if we have risen to that challenge. We don’t know if it’s going to work. But we know we have a very good idea. And we know that we’re doing everything we can to make this experience a beautiful one.”

And that wasn’t the only challenge. From Covid to Brexit, there have been many, many challenges, especially those that came with exploring the uncharted territory.

Svana didn’t even know where to begin with the amount of challenges they faced. “I mean, the base level of doing something like this, [something] that hasn’t been done before is the amount of research and development that you have to do. And the resilience that you have to have to carry on when you go down the wrong road and something doesn’t work out? Well, you try something 10,000 times and you can’t make it work, you know, you’ve got to constantly evolve and change and adapt. That was... difficult because it takes such a long time. It’s taken four years to do this, because it’s the first time it’s been done. Next time, if I ever want to do it again, I could probably do it in 18 months, because we know now how to do it.”

That “unlimited, never ending stream of catastrophe”, as coined by Ludvig, included figuring out the set list. “We probably had about 60 different versions of a setlist. It took a long time to whittle down the catalog into these 22 songs,” Svana revealed.

From organizing toilets in the London arena to discerning between lights to answering questions for the 10 piece live band (created by James Righton of the Klaxons), Svana and Ludvig have been very busy. Ludvig recounts, “It’s been a very long and complex process. But again, it’s fun almost all the time. Because… again, like all kinds of creative processes, or any kind of art or music or cinema… there are no rules. So that’s both really daunting, but also liberating, and lovely, because you can do whatever you want. And that’s scary. But it’s also fun.” One of Svana’s favorite moments were the 5 weeks filming in Stockholm, where ABBA and ILM employees went to actually capture ABBA on camera.

“Filming them was joyful… I’ll never forget those weeks. I mean, ...one day, it might be ‘Oh, today we’re going to do Winner Takes It All and Chiquitita’, let’s say, and you spend all day watching ABBA perform Winner Takes It All and Chiquitita. And, you know, it’s just fun. It’s just lovely. And then you have lunch, and you come back after lunch. And you know, you do it again, it was really relaxed. It was really joyful. It was really emotional.

As for one of Ludvig’s favorite moments? As it turns out, the ABBA members had to shave their beards in order for the motion capture suits to work. “They said, ‘We’re not going to shave our beards.’ And we had like, 100 people for ILM sitting next door waiting to start to shoot. They said, ‘No, we’re not doing it.’ And then we said, ‘Well, then we can’t do it. Then we have to shut the whole thing down.’ They were like, ‘Yeah. And that’s what has to be.’ But of course, they’re reasonable.”

In the end, money still was not a big factor to ABBA rejoining and rerecording-- in fact, the work on the show brought them to create another album, not the other way around.

“Benny and Björn went together into the studio and said, right, if we’re going to do this concert, we’re going to have to write some new songs. So they wrote ‘Don’t Shut Me Down’ and ‘I Still Have Faith in You’ and a couple of others in that initial session that they had in the studio… Then they listened back and they were pretty happy and they had fun in the studio. The studio has always been great fun for them. And then they went, Well, why don’t we just do a few more, why don’t we just do an app. And that was the motivation. And it didn’t take much. I mean, none of us persuaded them to do anything… They loved being back together again. And it was just fun.”

Overall, Ludvig recounts the experience as a joyful reunion.

“They get to be back on the stage, but look like they did in 1979. I think they like the idea. They like that it hadn’t been done before. They like the adventure of it. They like the sort of unknown territory aspect of it… They had a great time. I mean, they’re used to it. They’re professionals. But I think they enjoyed the process and still do.”

RACHEL CHUNG, REVIEW SECTION EDITOR