Baillat Studio builds intrigue without imagery for The Cortège

A funeral without a body. A procession without words. A theatrical experience designed to help audiences grieve something they may not even realise they’ve lost. The Cortège unfolds at dusk across the Los Angeles landscape, inviting participants into a wordless journey through movement, costume, puppetry and spectacle. For Montreal-based Baillat Studio, the challenge was translating something so fundamentally physical and ephemeral – an experience rooted in collective presence and sensory immersion – into an identity that could carry the same atmospheric weight. The brief arrived with tension embedded at its core: the identity needed to explore the space between the ‘Ancient & Eternal,’ the ‘Grim & Joyous,’ and the ‘Decaying & Fresh.’ The experience positions itself as a festive funeral for our times, a container for collective grief in what it describes as a rapidly expiring culture and scarcity of shared meaning. “Our work honed in on the aspects of duality and transcendence, evoking tradition in a contemporary context,” explains Graphic Designer Leon Lo. That duality runs through every design decision. The colour palette, developed through numerous iterations in close collaboration with the client, holds light and dark, earthy and otherworldly, grief and celebration in careful balance. “It echoes the sky at transitional moments of the day, the land with which the performance engages, and a certain idea of the light behind our eyelids,” Lo shares. Static assets use contrasts and transitions between dark, muted colours and bright, vibrant ones, while gradient textures evoke a mystical, sacred allure throughout the system.