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Christina Aguilera’s Abu Dhabi show delivered the biggest-budget music production to date in the UAE.

After months of preparation, local-based event promotion company, Flash, teamed-up with Live Nation, to deliver the biggest-budget music production to date in the UAE, Christina Aguilera’s Back to Basics performance.

Christina Aguilera took to the purpose-built stage to perform her 80 minute show in front of a smaller than expected crowd, of just over 12,000 fans, on the lawns of Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace on October 24.

The show, which was Aguilera’s first official Middle East performance, ran smoothly organisers say.

However, some disgruntled fans were claiming the length of the performance, which was not followed by an expected encore, was too short and did not deliver “true value for money” considering they had forked out US $222 for premier tickets and $80 for the cheapest seats in the house.

Despite this, Flash says Aguilera gave the same performance and put in the same amount of time on stage that she did during the US and European legs of her Back to Basics tour.

Although the performance may have ended abruptly in the eyes of the audience, they were not privy to the time pressing issues that were manifesting themselves behind the scenes.

As Aguilera was making her exit from the stage and while fans stood waiting for more; the on-site production crew were ready for the lights to go down, so they could begin disassembling the stage equipment in time to have it loaded and flown-out again within hours to its next destination.

Coming off the back of a very busy UK summer festival stint, production manager Lee Charteris brought his trusty crew of Malcolm McIness (site manager), Katie Maddison (production assistant) and Jane Martinez (artist liason) to help him build and prepare the production site.

Charteris says in terms of touring productions this was one of the biggest-budget and largest show’s that has ever travelled to the UAE.

A Russian Antonov air freighter flew in 17 tonnes of equipment from Kiev where Aguilera performed on October 21, and all the equipment was freighted-out again straight after her Abu Dhabi performance to Los Angeles, Chicago and London.

“It was a big stage production with four female and four male dancers, lots of costume changes, a 10-piece backing band, a large upstage video screen and there was a big central staircase centre stage that Aguilera and the dancers performed around,” says Charteris.

Aguilera, known for wearing provocative outfits in the past, brought a large wardrobe of costumes with her and Charteris says the organisers did not enforce any costume restrictions for sensitivity reasons.

“No costume changes were imposed. That was left up to her to decide. You shouldn’t mess with the artists’ integrity and it was a liberal-minded crowd anyway,” he says.

According to Charteris, Aguilera’s show was the biggest production in the UAE to date, and he says it “upped the ante” of the whole production process, with around 70 trucks required to transport all the gear.

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