A movable fest could be coming

Some things never change, so it's a good bet that a decade from now the star of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival will be some scruffy kid hailed as "the new Bob Dylan" (every decade has one) or a London band the British press calls the single greatest thing in the history of amplified music (those turn up at a rate of three per year).

What \o7will \f7be different is the main stage they play on. That's because Paul Tollett, the promoter for the massive festival that today kicks off its 2006 edition, believes that it's time to think outside the box when it comes to your basic rectangle stage for outdoor festivals. And "outside the box" may mean a giant robotic stage that moves like a metallic crab. Really, no joke.

"That's one of the designs, yeah, believe it or not, but I don't know really what it will look like exactly, but I do know it will be different and it will move," Tollett said. "Right now, stages are what they have always been, which isn't really anything special. We're going to try to change that."

Today, Tollett is in Indio, where Depeche Mode, Franz Ferdinand and Kanye West are among the first-day performers at Coachella, which will draw a crowd of 50,000 today and more than that on Sunday. But across the country, in New Haven, Conn., a glimpse of the future of the premier Southern California festival might be on display. There a graduate class of architecture students is presenting final projects, and the assignment is to completely re-imagine the stage of Coachella and to make it move.

It's more than an academic exercise to Tollett, who flew out to the Yale University campus a few weeks ago to review the works in progress. He came back not only impressed, but resolved to make his Coachella stage more than it is. "I know for a fact," he said, "that we will move toward some of the things we saw in those plans."

One reason is the young fans of today (and, even more, the young fans of tomorrow) put a premium on high-tech visuals and grand theatrics that move them viscerally. The rave scene has atrophied in recent years, but its aesthetic imprint was certainly made. Likewise, the CGI world of films and the hyper-reality of video game art have attuned generations to a show that promises a bit more than a microphone, amps and a raised platform.