Off Stage — Behind the Scenes at WHO Ibiza

WHO Ibiza is an immersive evening experience at the historic Teatro Pereyra, bringing together live performance, theatre, acrobatics, music and fine dining. Running throughout the summer season, the night gradually shifts from stage to dance floor, with WHO Nights carrying the experience into the early hours.

For this series, photographer Victoria GEE takes us behind the scenes, into the moments before the lights go up.

There is a hallway backstage where the light only falls in one place. Everything else stays dark on purpose. A single beam drops from above like something out of an old film noir, and inside it, a body takes shape. Shoulders set. Chin lifted. The corset laced tight enough to remind the skin it’s there. Satin gloves, worn soft from a hundred nights before this one, pulled up past the elbow, fringe trembling with each small movement. Every hook, every seam, every inch of lace pressed against skin is a decision about who’s about to walk out that door.

Victoria GEE’s camera waits in the shadows the way a stagehand waits, patient, half invisible, and catches what’s real: the tilt of a head lost in thought, a hand resting on a hip out of habit rather than pose, a tattoo half hidden by a strap, ink and skin telling a story nobody asked for but everyone can read.

Because that’s the job nobody talks about. The bad night’s sleep, the ache in the lower back from last week’s rehearsals, whatever happened at home before they walked through that door, all of it gets folded up small enough to fit under a costume. What’s left, what the room sees, is only the character. It takes years to build that kind of discipline. It takes a body that’s been trained to hold a line, to breathe through discomfort, to turn stillness into tension and tension into something the audience can feel from their seats without knowing why. This is physical work as much as it is emotional work. Nobody claps for the stretching, the vocal warm ups, the hours spent getting a silhouette exactly right in a mirror lit by a single bulb. But without it, none of the rest exists.

WHO arrived at Teatro Pereira as something different from the usual Ibiza night, less a party built around a DJ booth, more a theatre built around a feeling. The island has always had its temples to sound, but this one leans into spectacle in a more literal sense: performance, character, narrative threaded through the hours after midnight. It’s a space where the island’s appetite for transformation, for becoming someone new once the sun goes down, gets a stage built specifically for it.

And so, before any of that happens, before the doors open and the room fills, there’s this: a corridor, a spotlight, a woman becoming a version of herself built to be seen. Everything else, the noise, the crowd, the night ahead, starts here, in the quiet.