[imagesource: PR Pic]

ABBA’s return to the stage has left audience members stunned and emotional.

Hints about their next performance, ABBA Voyage, were dropped last year, with talk of hologram versions of the four members taking to the stage.

Except they’re not holograms so much as digital avatars, or ABBA-tars as they like to call them, singing all those classic hits on a massive screen.

The real-life members were in attendance – Bjorn, Benny, Agnetha, and Anni-Frid – and stepped up to the stage after the mind-bending setlist (including ‘Waterloo’, ‘SOS’, and ‘Knowing Me Knowing You’) was performed by their de-aged digital selves.

It has been 40 years since their last public performance and 14 years since their last public appearance together, so their jaunt down the red carpet outside the 3 000-capacity ABBA arena was quite a scene.

Image: Tolga Akmen/EPA

Fans were transported back to the late 1970s when they were at the peak of their fame, per The Guardian:

Watching the four figures on the stage, it’s almost impossible to tell you’re not watching human beings: occasionally, there’s a hint of video game uncanny valley about the projections on the giant screens either side of the stage, but your attention is continually drawn to the human-sized avatars.

They gaze sadly into each other’s eyes during The Winner Takes It All, deliver cheesy speeches between songs – “I wasn’t married at the time,” says the figure representing Björn Ulvaeus, explaining the genesis of Does Your Mother Know [that you’re out?], “or was I?” – and protest at the British judges giving them nul points during the 1974 Eurovision song contest.

Twitter has a snapshot of the ABBA-tars:

This👏is👏ABBA👏Voyage👏 pic.twitter.com/6kGQ2zu1TU

— ABBA Voyage (@ABBAVoyage) May 26, 2022

After the performance, the actual humans appeared on stage.

Tonight, @ABBA took to the stage to thank their fans. pic.twitter.com/iV5tUqES7C

— ABBA Voyage (@ABBAVoyage) May 26, 2022

The Guardian gave the event a spectacular full five-star review:

By the time the show hits its finale with Thank You For The Music followed by Dancing Queen, any lingering sense that you’re not actually in the presence of Abba has dissolved.

It’s so successful that it’s hard not to imagine other artists following suit – you strongly suspect the surviving members of Queen will be on the blower to Industrial Light & Magic before the week’s out.

DW explained that the four ABBA septuagenarians performed each of the 20 songs of the concert dressed in special motion-capture suits in front of 160 cameras for five weeks so that their movements could be captured and recorded for the digital show.

This:

Image: Baillie Walsh

Turned into something like this:

Image: Dolce & Gabbana / TT NYHETBYR?N / Picture Alliance

Their movements and facial expressions caught on camera became reference points for hundreds of animators and visual effects artists from Star Wars VFX company Industrial Light & Magic to create the impressive ABBA-tars:

The “ABBA Voyage” concert merges live performance and virtual show: A band of 10 musicians plays all the songs live on stage alongside the ABBAtar holograms.

Agnetha and Anni-Frid’s voices and backing vocals are taken from the original recordings of the songs, as are Björn’s piano and Benny’s guitars.

The Mirror revealed that Kylie Minogue was dancing on her feet and Kate Moss, a few rows in front. continually had her arms in the air.

Also in attendance were Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Jarvis Cocker, Keira Knightley, and Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf and his wife Silvia. A real-life Dancing Queen?

While other musicians’ hologram concerts have fallen flat in the past, ABBA’s not-hologram virtual concert is creating waves, and seems “destined not merely to run and run but be repeatedly copied”.

[sources:guardian&dw&mirror]