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Cirque du Soleil's Kà
FEBRUARY 2005 SEES THE OPENING OF CIRQUE DU SOLEIL'S MOST CHALLENGING AND AMBITIOUS PRODUCTION TO DATE.
In 2004, Cirque du Soleil celebrated the 20th anniversary of its conception in Quebec, where founder Guy Laliberté gathered together a group of fellow street performers to "amuse audiences, see the world, and have fun doing it". The Cirque's mission has always been to invoke the imagination, provoke the senses and evoke the emotions of their audiences. In pursuing their dream over the past two decades they have literally re-invented the circus, taking their unique combination of acrobatics, mime and clowning - enhanced by original music and lighting - to the far corners of the world.
Twenty years ago, 73 people worked for the Cirque du Soleil; today it has 3,000 employees worldwide including more than 600 artists, and Laliberté is still heading the company. The Studio, its international HQ based in Montreal's Saint-Michel district, is the only creation and production centre for the entire organisation, where all the shows are conceived and developed. The size of a Hollywood film studio, the facility and its resources, and its dedication to training, are the qualities that place the Cirque head and shoulders above any other entertainment organisation on Earth.
While the Cirque's travelling shows form the bedrock of their performance schedule - since the Cirque began it has performed in 100 cities around the world and by 2003 there were no less than nine Cirque productions running on three continents, performing to more than seven million people - over the past 10 years they have also been developing residential shows in the US, particularly in Las Vegas.
The Cirque has a preferential agreement with the MGM Mirage hotel group in Vegas, and currently has three highly successful established shows running in theatres within the group's hotels: Mystere at Treasure Island, the water-based O at Bellagio and Zumanity at New York-New York.
However, the Cirque's latest offering, Kà, at the MGM Grand (in preview from November 26 2004 and opening in February '05) is set to top them all. The MGM Grand is a vast, 5,000-room mega resort on the Vegas strip which has been undergoing a major makeover, and no expense has been spared on custom-building its new $135 million theatre to house Kà and the production's extensive backstage training, dressing room, workshop and office space.
MGM company officials believe it will usher in a new era of stage production, and Gamal Aziz, MGM Grand's president thinks the new Cirque show will take the casino to new heights in profits. "It was our intention to lead, not to follow," he said. "When you are a leader you take risks. The bar has been raised to an extraordinary level."
Kà combines acrobatic performances, martial arts, puppetry, multimedia and pyrotechnics to illustrate the nature of duality. By applying the visual vocabulary of cinema to a live spectacle, Kà tells the vibrant, epic saga of separated twin heirs - a boy and a girl - who embark on a perilous journey to fulfil their linked destinies. As the plot unfolds, danger lies in wait for them at every turn, with rock slides, sea storms and death-defying exploits adding to the thrill of the journey. Archers and spearmen hunt the twins relentlessly, as their quest takes them through a succession of challenging landscapes - from a mysterious seashore through menacing mountains and foreboding forests.
The show's creative elements are essential to invoking the world of Kà and conjuring an entire empire onstage. The costumes for the international cast of 72 artists have an Asian influence, as reflected in the lavish imperial court costumes and robust martial artists' warrior uniforms. Additionally, the mood is set by Renà Dupàrà's original score, which incorporates soaring melodies and richly textured arrangements driven through an elaborate audio system that literally surrounds the spectator in sound.
It is important to note that Kà is very much a work in progress that TPi was privileged to preview in rehearsal. Inevitably, the production will have been subject to a number of small changes by the time it officially opens. As Production Manager, Stephane Mongeau has been in charge of the production budget and the technical equipment budget including the theatre construction. He is ultimately the man 'holding the stopwatch', ensuring that the show is safe and ready for its February opening deadline.
He said: "Our goal is a 90 minute show, 10 times a week, two times a day, 470 shows a year for at least 10 to 15 years. We've brought in all new equipment, including a lot of prototypes - all the grids are brand new from Stage Technologies - so we've spent a lot of time on testing in situ. Even after two and a half years if I could ask for one thing it would be more time!"
CONCEPTION
Said Caron: "In 1987, we did a show called Le Cirque Reinvente, and were credited in the press for changing the way to present a circus show. With this show, because we already have three on the Strip, I wanted to create something where the performance will be totally different. So I researched about projection and travelled around the world trying to find technicians, artists and new designers to help us. Our vision was to use circus skills to put them on to an epic story and come up with totally new ideas about the way to present it. This is an important challenge for Cirque because we try to make an epic story like a silent movie. It took Lord Of The Rings three films that lasted nine hours. We do it in an hour and a half!"
Trained as an acrobat and classical dancer, Lyn Heward, Kà's Executive Producer, is the guiding force behind activities related to creation, production and artistic and technical follow-up for all Cirque shows. She insisted: "Kà isn't an acrobatic show in the typical Cirque du Soleil tradition. It uses the full human physical potential, still incorporating our theatrical elements, but showing that it's actually human beings that control and dominate this set."
Laliberté hired Robert Lepage as the director; Caron brought all his research to the table and they worked together to hire the creative team. From the start it was obvious that the creation of this show was going to involve extremely close collaboration between all departments, and an extraordinary collection of talent was assembled to head up the team.
Caron's research was drawn towards a strong Eastern influence, which would be reflected in martial arts displays, make-up and costumes, and given to the creators as the starting point for their storyboarding and designs.
Lepage and Laliberté were contemporaries on the Quebec scene and knew each other by reputation. This is the first opportunity they have had to work together. Lepage observed: "Guy wanted to start touching on puppetry, martial arts and have more structure to the story-telling. He knew that I was foremostly a theatre person and that I'd done some puppetry before, but also that I'd worked with a lot of new technology.
"In my shows there's a lot of physical work and choreography, and one of the difficult challenges of Kà is to tell a story without a single word being spoken. While the Cirque shows always have a 'through-line', its always very poetic and vague, leaving freedom for audience interpretation. Coming up with the story line for Kà was very tricky, because I was trying to see what kind of puppetry we could incorporate. We finally decided to work with Michael Curry, who made the puppets for The Lion King on Broadway [and worked on the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics]. His puppets are very precisely modelled and he came in with his own aesthetic and his own vocabulary."
Innovation of the human form in puppetry and costumes has long been Michael Curry's speciality, although he's not entirely happy with the term 'puppetry' - "We've called it everything from object manipulation to figurative kinetics, but it's like the garbage man calling himself a sanitation engineer! To do this, you have to have the sensitivity of a dressmaker, the engineering skills of an engineer and the aesthetic sense of a sculptor."
Lepage was interested in a turtle for the sand, and this provided Curry with the starting point from which he invented 13 creatures for Kà. "I love turtles anyway," he said, "so it was an immediate connection and I intentionally tried to give him the sort of wisdom of the ages. Contortionists and people with very pliable bodies intrigued me. A couple of my favourite creatures that I developed utilised the very few people on earth who can do these moves: the crabs are really exceptional in that there really are just a handful of people who can do that. There's also the starfish for the sand scene and, in fact, the sand and the forest creatures were my two main areas of focus.
"In the forest scene we also have the snake, a large acrobatic scorpion and the stick bug from the Amazon. Then there are some small magnetic worms that crawl, and our Potato Bug also makes an entrance."
One interesting creature in the forest scene has been dubbed the Morning Glory. "It symbolises procreation and the love between the Firefly Boy and Twin Sister. They have a child, so I wanted something sensuous, something that in an evocative way would describe their connection and their procreation. The Morning Glory comes in like a jellyfish entering the scene, but it's completely organic like a flower in the middle of an inhospitable environment. The forest is a complex, vast scene that is hard to direct attention and focus, but I think we've accomplished our objectives."
It was Lepage who gave Kà its identity with fire. "I saw how the vocabulary of O changed the standards of Vegas shows. And as a kind of a joke I said, well, O is about water, so we'll do a show about fire. It wasn't really a bad idea, because it's an opposing show to O, and one of the things that interested me most fire's dual nature of creation and destruction.
"Theatre started when people gathered round the bonfire but today, fire is computers, it's a microphone, cameras, projection, video - that's the bonfire that we're dancing around now with our stories, and I think you have to have that fresh attitude towards these tools."
ARCHITECTURAL CHALLENGES
The painting of the Posts and Beams in the auditorium and the galvanised corrugated steel land drainage pipes used to represent trees in the forest scene, plus other intricate renderings within the show, were executed by Montreal artist Christine Giguere. The work took several months, with teams of assistants in both Montreal and Las Vegas.
"Robert and I talked about how the show should have an Oriental influence, and he wanted to create a show that worked with a kind of cinematographic language. Scenes changing seamlessly from one scene to the next with no delay, no curtains, but still achieve in those seamless changes quite substantial changes of perceptual geography," said Fisher.
"The other preoccupation from the beginning was that we wanted to create this feeling of disorientation which was, in some way, consistent with what we know now from the new visual language in movies like The Matrix. As we were talking about how to translate these large-scale forms of narrative, up came the idea of some sort of very all-embracing architectural treatment to the room."
By October 2002, the framework was in place... and then the script changed. Fisher: "I saw in Robert's revised script that the way to deal with it was to have two stages and be able to bring them out in different directions into the void. You could seamlessly transition between a group of people on stage A and they could go off into the distance, and the people on stage B could come up from below or whatever, and that became the pattern of it. So we completely re-designed it, and came up with this new technical arrangement for supporting the stage as it is now."
AUTOMATED DECKS
"It's a very suspended world and whenever you want to take a step you have security nets, you can't just walk simply from one place to another. You have to think very hard about how you are going to choreograph it. Every time you want to make a change in a scene you have to go through all the departments, so it's been extremely tough."
Instead of installing a new stage, two major, multi-tasking, automated decks were built to move in and out of the void. Manufactured by Tomcat USA and weighing 90,000lbs, the extraordinary 'Sand Cliff' deck measures 50' wide by 25' deep and six feet tall. It consists of seven steel main structure pieces, six aluminium I-Beam deck frames, 10 cladding frames, 10 catwalk components, three elevators, 18 nosing deck frames and 15 aluminium acrobat rail frames. The entire deck had to be broken down and shipped out on six flatbed trucks.
The deck was manufactured to sit on a centre hub in the theatre and is moved into place on a cantilevering structure. The hub is 10' in diameter and allows the deck to rotate and 'stand up' vertically. Inside the deck are three 5ft circular elevators that are used for performers to exit and enter. There is also a tunnelling system, show and work lights, drive units for the elevators, high voltage distribution panels, a lighting dimmer/storage area and peg actuators within or inside the deck for performers and stage technicians.
There are 82 rod actuators that pop out of the deck surface for performers to use to climb up the deck when in a vertical position. When horizontal, the deck was built to hold synthetic sand (cork granules) with all four sides actuating so that when the deck tips, the sand can be dumped. There are also acrobatic rails on all four sides, and the surface of the deck is a painted scenic treatment and also contains a projection tile for use with show video projection.
Mark Fisher commented: "In the basement plant room there are six 250 horsepower pumps which therefore when they're all running flat out, put out 1,500 horsepower. They drive into a vast rack of accumulators which allow them to pressurise nitrogen to about 3-4,000 psi so we can get this huge volume of oil under pressure in the system and bring the Sand Cliff deck up. It can basically travel the 40 feet at around a foot per second, and an electric motor spins it around."
The Tatami deck upstage of the Sand Cliff deck is a cantilevering 35 sq. ft. platform that comes out 40 feet and travels downstage about 40 feet out over the void. The Sand Cliff deck can be either underneath it, in front of it, level with it or above it - each of these moves are seen in the show. Around the stage are five smaller lifts/platforms that also appear in different scenes.
Fisher analysed the scripts in order to conceptualise this moving machinery and consulted Lepage on how to get from one scene to another. Said Fisher: "Robert wanted to do it in front of the audience in real time so that it would make story-telling sense. The flow is absolutely the key and between those transitions you've got three or four minutes in which the crew have to do all of these remarKàble invisible scene changes.
"For example, take one little scene like the one with the pillars that the acrobats jump over, and the Archer's Daughter, which sets the relationship between them. It was a typical scene which I talked to Robert about where there were problems making the story-telling work with the acrobatic performance. By coming up with the structure that they now have, you get character development for Archer's Daughter, and the very good acrobatic performance by the spearmen that you can applaud. Then you get a little bit of story-telling, which is the moment when the twin brother is captured. All of that is in about three minutes.
"The scenery for that is a 200 foot width of structure with these 10 and 15 foot high pillars on it which arrived in from Montreal in two 40-foot trucks. It has to deal with the sightline and the structure that the pillars are on as well as the crash mats and everything for the people to fall on. The technical crew have to move two semi-trailers worth of stuff out of the lift between then and the next time it all has to be cleared, so they have three and a half minutes to get a colossal amount of stuff back into store, and they don't have very much time to get it out! Those are the sort of things which are the untold adventures going on down in the basement to make one little scene like that."
How would Fisher compare this to the kind of effort that's prevalent in rock shows? "Take two trucks' worth of scenery? It would take even Jake Berry [U2 & Rolling Stones production manager] at least half an hour to get that shit out of two trucks, and these guys get it off the stage in two minutes. They practice it. Lyn Heward observes that you have to repeat a motor co-ordination action at least 100 times before you're fluent with it, and that's exactly what they'll do before the public see the show."
RIGGING & SAFETY
With Head Rigger Tony Galuppi about to take over his role, Paquin's team totals 37 show riggers and 18 maintenance riggers who work flat out to ensure that Kà is, in sporting terms, match fit. There are two grids - the rigging is hung off the high 'steeple' grid at Level 157 (ceiling height), and the floating 'forest' grid is used to suspend 55,000lbs of hardware, such as the 'trees' and 'swing poles'.
Ultimately, safety is Paquin's main priority. He said: "It's like you work with no floor, so the risk of people falling off, regardless of equipment malfunction, is insane to some level. My job is to bring it back into a controllable, safe environment, and our big considerations are the nets. I use two safety nets - the Sand Cliff net and the other Tatami net, obviously to secure whenever the Tatami deck is out.
"Just the safety inspection of the equipment alone is a 24/7 exercise. The performers have to place implicit trust in the engineers. I'll make sure its safe but I can't help them when they're on the deck, so they're responsible to a certain extent for their own safety. In the forest scene we have 28 artists descending on the truss, and we rely 100% on the artist to clip in correctly. In the worst case scenarios, however, throughout the theatre there are emergency stop buttons that will stop everything moving."
LIGHTING DESIGN
The lighting crew amounts to 24 people - the largest lighting crew to date on a Cirque production. Lafortune: "There are lighting people in that theatre 24 hours a day, doing one thing or another because they are also in charge of anything electrical in the theatre. Judith Farmer, our lighting director, has so much on her plate because she has to respond to my needs and those of many others. Our show console operator is on the back-up console naming and altering cues blindly while I program live, so we're able to do two jobs simultaneously, which saves us a lot of time."
Well before any staging structure was in place, Lafortune started collecting artwork and tried to characterise the various environments. "I found there's always this sense of dichotomy - the Emperor's Court vs. the Archer's Den," he said. "With the Emperor Court I was looking at pictures that were very light and I started writing down words like paper, floating lanterns, delicate, thin, silk. It had an incandescent character, hence the archers being at odds with the Emperor's Court.
"The character of lighting would be a lot closer to HMI sources, so that's how things started finding their definition. HMI is a large arc source, when you turn it on it just kind of vibrates for a little while, and then it comes up to temperature slowly, like the sources you would find in a parking lot where the light is not flattering because of the greenish tint and flatness. I chose those because I didn't want the archers' environment is not supposed to be inviting, they thrive on a very disruptive aesthetic."
Cinematic influences were often at the forefront of design conversations, and Lafortune began to watch and take notes about a wide range of movies. "I looked at Orlando by Sally Potter, Dune and Blade Runner, which is an obvious reference to anything that's post-modern industrial. So I made a montage of clips from all of these films that defined the character of the lighting for our show. I made numerous copies for a lot of our people so that they could see where I was going, and so we all converged. Once all of this was approved, then it's just a matter of finding out how, technically-speaking, we could now make this happen."
The lighting fixtures form a fairly conventional package, but there are exceptions (see boxout for equipment spec). It's a huge rig - "My gosh, who are we not buying from?!" laughed Lafortune - and counting the Post and Beams and everything that is beyond the proscenium it's in excess of 3,300 fixtures. They include many Lekos, conventionals, HMI sources, and lots of very small sources that Lafortune integrates into scenery. Beyond the proscenium there are huge 4kW, 6kW and 18kW HMI fresnels that typically are used in the cinema.
Commented Lafortune: "There isn't really a conventional grid system - it's quite random and we're hanging fixtures anywhere we can! We knew that for safety purposes the priority had to go to rigging. Luckily, Jaque Paquin and our crews have worked together for quite some time, so we're always fairly capable of managing things.
If there is any one place I've got the majority of lighting it's probably in the basement against the upstage wall and just upstage of the proscenium at our catwalk position, which is 55 feet up from what we call Level 100 [audience position], and Level 70 which is 30 feet below, and where all hell breaks loose in between scenes, where we're doing transitions.
"It's a major challenge because everything is in a constant movement and it's three-dimensional. I certainly haven't had to do it before. Despite the theatre being big, it doesn't have a lot of depth, so we need fixtures that have a fairly wide aperture. Those big HMI fresnels give us the output, but because they generate a tremendous amount of heat, that creates some difficulties when colouring them with gels and keeping the gels cool.
"Another problem to overcome is that the distance between the lights and the nets is 10 to 12 feet, because the nets have to give. The heat of the HMIs can cause the nets to dry out, and that's not good! But luckily there's a solution to every problem, it's just a matter of taking the time to find the right one. For each scene we light the crash mat and/or the net in a generic fashion to make sure that the full impact surface is lit. The nets work well when lit horizontally because they're transparent. If you come in from below you want to make sure that you're angle is not too steep because then the people are blinded when they fall into the net.
"The experience we've had is that lighting people who fall in silhouette always works for us. It works because we see the silhouette fall against a screen of haze, and it also helps us light the surfaces into which they're falling. When we light from below in a back light setting, it's amazing because when you're looking at it from the audience it's perceived as a very dark setting, but if you look down into the pit where the activity is, there's as much light down there as in Wal-Mart!"
Rather than focus lights from traditional theatrical positions, Lafortune created many individual "pockets" of light. The proscenium wall and side walls are all black, and he estimates there are 1,700 lighting fixtures just in the posts and beams in the house.
"I had to create a sense of depth and infinity which I did by lighting from within the Posts and Beams, not from outside. This entailed numerous lighting sources and we had to invest in these little LED colour mixing devices [from ColorKinetics] - they're not too obtrusive and they allow us to get some of the colour out of the posts, which is something that Mark Fisher and I collaborated on. We wanted to have an incandescent quality because that is the defining lighting character for the Pageant, the Emperor's Court."
Lafortune features more small LED fixtures inside the Sand Cliff deck. "The lighting gives it a different presence," he said. "It's not just a machine anymore, its something that has meaning. We integrated in the deck some incandescent fixtures and some LEDs which give us a certain blue-ish tint, and they are light in weight which was an important consideration."
The Archer's Den scene provides Lafortune with his one chance to light everything. He explained: "We knew when we were doing Archer's Den that we wanted to be in a very industrial setting. Instead of trying to create something industrial we just lit the space for what it is and as we've got all these hydraulic pipes for the gantry we decided to light them for the scene, and it came together magnificently.
"Typically, I use the environment as a canvas and paint it, exploiting as many possibilities as the space has to offer. The stage is so big and in certain instances I lit it so big that the actors were being dwarfed, so we had to pull back on a lot of scenic lighting and bring it back to a more human scale."
DIANA SCRIMGEOUR REPORTS EXCLUSIVELY FROM REHEARSALS AT THE MGM GRAND IN LAS VEGAS ON THE ASTONISHING DESIGN THAT REDEFINES THE TERM 'STATE-OF-THE ART'.
In 2002, Laliberté asked Guy Caron, a founding artist and long-time director of Cirque productions, to embark on research for Kà and be its Director of Creation.
Mark Fisher was invited to undertake the substantial task of re-designing the entire theatre as well as the staging for the show. His initial research was based on an ancient Japanese temple design that led to his 'Post and Beam' structures that flank the stage and the sides of the new auditorium. Fisher's first task was to obtain an agreement to re-design the theatre to provide a much more dramatic space architecturally. A lobby - arguably the most impressive in Vegas - was created to make a dramatic interface and processional route between the casino and the theatre.
Key to the staging of Kà is the surprise that the new theatre dispensed with its old stage, leaving a void in which to present the show. Said Lepage: "If you want to have a performance you can't walk on a 60 foot pit. Even with the circus you always have the ground, but here there's nothing here but a hole. You have to invent every entrance and your relationship to gravity is tremendously important. Either you have a harness, wear a string, know how to fly or you come in on some kind of plateau that brings you in. There's nothing stable: there's no solid ground or floor in this show so all the all the scenic elements are mobile.
"I've worked on a lot of shows, including O, but I've never pushed things this far and I can't compare Kà to anything that's gone before," said Acrobatic Equipment and Rigging Designer, Jaque Paquin.
The design process for Kà has been a slightly different experience for the Cirque's Lighting Designer, Luc Lafortune. "Working with Robert has led to a much more theatrical way of doing things, something more literal, with a sense of continuity," he commented.