Terhal — Arabic for "journeying" — is a Dragone creation that ran in August 2025 at the purpose-built Mayadeen venue in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia. I did the set design.
Saad's journey
At the centre of the show is Saad, a young Saudi man who wants to shape his country's future. He travels through the Kingdom's landscapes and traditions and comes back to his village wiser. The story keeps moving — different worlds, different chapters. For me that's both useful and hard. Every chapter wants its own environment, and all of them have to belong to the same place.
Two stages in one
The main stage is 36 metres across and split into two performance areas. Scenes can run in parallel or trade off without the lights going down. It's as much engineering as scenography — the room has to fill a purpose-built theatre, read for a large live audience, and reconfigure cleanly every night across a long run.
The chandelier as a character
The signature piece hangs overhead. A kinetic chandelier built from light — three concentric LED rings, each in four independently moving sections, choreographed to move with the show. Less a fixture than another performer. Designing around something like that pushes everything beneath it: sightlines, rigging, the whole stage picture has to give it room to rise, open and transform.
The cast
More than 120 performers. Over 60 Saudi artists alongside 60 international ones, drawn from more than 20 nations. Traditional Saudi dance, acrobatics, stunts, FX, aerial work, a dozen aerialists on custom rigs, two horses doing vaulting routines. The set has to frame an intimate folk dance one minute and a high aerial sequence the next, with the same confidence.
Architecture, lit like cinema
At this scale you design at the scale of architecture and light it like cinema. Each chapter gets its own world, but the evening still has to read as one place. I think about it less as "set" and more as a building the show lives inside.
The first Dragone show since Franco
Terhal carries weight for the Dragone team. It's the first creation to open since Franco Dragone passed, and he was involved in most of the development. I've worked inside Dragone projects for a long time — Splendor in Wuxi, Amystika in Vegas, work across the Gulf. This one feels like a continuation of that.
Part of what's happening in the Gulf
Terhal sits inside Diriyah Season, which is part of the broader cultural build-out across the region. A lot of the bigger live work I do now lives in this orbit.
