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Beyoncé is gone but not forgotten at Coachella

The Beyoncé stage lives on at Coachella.
(Makeda Easter / Los Angeles Times)
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It’s been a full year to the day since Beyoncé’s historic Coachella performance on April 14, 2018. This year, she’s gone but not forgotten. She’s also set a bar few artists can live up to.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that in the middle of this year’s festival campgrounds sits a living piece of Beychella history — her two-story stage, a pyramid-shaped structure modeled after stadium bleachers.

Just a year ago, Beyoncé made history as the first black woman to headline Coachella. One Times music critic called it “one of the most impressive things I’ve seen in my 20 years of professional show-going.”

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During the two-hour set, the pop queen sang more than 25 songs and had multiple costume changes in a tribute to homecoming performances at historically black colleges.

About 100 musicians and dancers filled the Beychella stage during the performance, including brass and string players, a drum line and a baton twirler.

The stage is part of an Adidas-branded pop-up during the festival, said the company’s Reginald B. McKinley II, and comes “from Beyoncé’s teams and conversations with Coachella.”

The stage is framed in Beychella yellow and includes some of the set’s lighting. Because Coachella is about the Instagram as much as it is the music, there’s a yellow runway where onlookers can snap photos.

At night, the stage is completely illuminated.

On Wednesday, the superstar will release a Netflix documentary about the groundbreaking Coachella show, called “Homecoming.”

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Todd.Martens@latimes.com

Follow me on Twitter: @toddmartens

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