Souk Wonders (2025), Diriyah Season — a Dragone creation transforming 6,500 m² of indoor space at the Mayadeen Venue into an immersive Najdi marketplace, with production design by Patrick Larsen, Studio Bound.
Souk Wonders, Diriyah Season (2025) — an immersive Arabian marketplace spectacle, a Dragone creation. Production design by Patrick Larsen, Studio Bound.
For Diriyah Season 2025 we built a town inside a warehouse. Souk Wonders is a Dragone creation commissioned by the Diriyah Gate Development Authority — roughly 6,500 m² inside the Mayadeen Venue, turned into a Najdi marketplace. I was the production designer.
Early Dragone concept render — the Najdi marketplace imagined at golden hour, mudbrick towers, tented stalls and a tightrope strung across the square. The design language that the built world would later answer to. Created by Dragone.
A labyrinth, not a stage
You don't sit in front of Souk Wonders. You wander it. Mudbrick architecture, tented stalls, alleys, places to get a little lost. Performance happens around you, not in front of you. At this scale it's closer to urban planning than scenography — the route has to feel like wandering and still move thousands of people through a coherent night.
The marketplace built at full scale inside the Mayadeen Venue — Najdi towers, crenellated rooflines and warm interior lighting holding the geometry of an entire town under one roof. Production design by Patrick Larsen, Studio Bound.Street level inside the souk — La Bourgade quarter, with guests moving between mudbrick façades, lanterns and rattan café settings. The labyrinth working as a place to linger, not just to pass through. Production design by Patrick Larsen, Studio Bound.
Theatre inside a market
More than 120 performers — 30 Saudi dancers, 30 Samri dancers, 30 international artists, with Saudi singer Ghada Sheri headlining. An Illusion Room, a 3D projection-mapping room, about fifteen food stalls. All of it had to live in the same town, at the same time, with people eating, walking and watching at once.
The Mizan — a monumental sculptural balance at the heart of the souk, its swinging platforms used as performance pods carrying singers, dancers and storytellers above the crowd. Scenic design by Studio Bound.A nighttime set-piece on the upper ramparts — guests gathered close, performers staged across rooftops and battlements, the marketplace itself becoming the auditorium. Scenic design by Studio Bound.An aerialist crosses the souk on a luminous drum, lit against a wash of deep blue — vertical theatre layered above the horizontal life of the market. Scenic design by Studio Bound.A tightrope walker traverses the city walls under a single shaft of light — the architecture redrawn in cool blue, the design built to perform as cinematically after dark as it does by day. Scenic design by Studio Bound.
What it's part of
There's a lot of this kind of work happening in Saudi right now. The country is investing heavily in cultural seasons, and a lot of bare industrial spaces are being turned into worlds for the length of a season. Souk Wonders is one of those.
"The Human Chorus" — the souk dissolved into pure light and silhouette, the same set that read as a sunlit marketplace earlier in the evening now reframed as a nocturne. Production design by Patrick Larsen, Studio Bound.
