Landing in a foreign country after midnight always feels uneasy. Two years ago, I stepped off a plane in Astana, the second coldest capital city in the world. After Ulan Bator since you ask.
It was almost 1am and the temperature was close to minus 20ºC. The guard at the border control looked serious. He was sporting an oversized peaked cap and barked at me in Russian. I had little in the way of a response. So I smiled. And said ‘Expo’.
Astana was the host city for 2017’s World’s Fair, or Expo 2017 as it is better known. The theme was ‘Future Energy’ and as an oil and gas nation, Kazakhstan was well placed to play host. The natives know this and were proud to be part of a landmark event on a world stage. The guard smiled back, stamped my passport and waved me on my way, to a hotel bar and so to bed. The following morning, refreshed by dreamless sleep and a stack of pancakes I set off for the Expo site. It had warmed overnight and the temperature had hit an almost balmy minus ten.
I was travelling with my colleague Roy Webber who is Head of Technical at Stage One. He’s a very useful travel companion in that he doesn’t grumble much, is fleet of foot through an airport, and doesn’t need much sleep. He goes everywhere with a rucksack full of lasers and is splendid at measuring. We have yet to learn the international gesture that universally translates as ‘We have brought these lasers not to kill you but to size up your apertures’.
The journey to the Expo site was striking. The taxi was weaving through a capital city built inside twenty years. The blend of architecture almost defies categorisation. Sculptural artworks sit amongst complex geometric high rise. Acres of glass and steel run alongside carefully groomed piazzas. It’s a city where neoclassical domes rub shoulders with awkward postmodern schemes. It’s Abu Dhabi in the snow. It’s everything, all at once. And we liked it.
It brought to mind an opening ceremony. A blend of the ancient and the modern. A nod to the past with all eyes on the future. An ambitious and spectacular show. A display of strength and majesty to create enduring memories. A coming together. A celebration. And like every good opening ceremony, it was all set in the context of a loose and often confusing narrative. Indeed, the lure of a ceremony project is why we had made the trip in the first place. We had travelled to Astana to take part in a tender interview for the supply of seven bespoke stage lifts. Regular business for us, albeit in the context of a very compressed time frame.
So there we were. Talking about opening ceremonies, in a city that had all the hallmarks of an opening ceremony. There was a charming recursive feel to the situation.
We explored the site, we took measurements, we examined costs and drew up schedules. We talked about power and speed and payloads. We called back to base. We presented our best offer. We shook hands and promised to call soon.
For the Astana Expo 2017, we produced seven stage lifts. These engineering workhorses helped deliver a series of dramatic shows including the opening and closing ceremonies of the first ever Expo to be hosted in Central Asia.
You can find out more about that here.
Astana really was a great place for an opening ceremony. The evidence was everywhere. Take a look at some of our other ceremony projects in the video below…
