One of the hardest things about writing about Cirque du Soleil is keeping up with the endless iterations that the Canadian company goes through to create fresh theatrical experiences. And the skill sets required! From scuba divers to magicians, trapeze artists are probably the least exotic professionals involved. The circus company is legendary for thinking outside the box and into the tank or up in the air, after reinventing circus in the 1980s it reinvents itself on a regular basis.
This month, Cirque du Soleil goes in yet another direction, both geographically and artistically. Geographically, Cirque du Soleil’s ALIZÉ will open in the company’s first permanent home in Europe. The new base is in the transformed Theater am Potsdamer Platz, the largest theatre in Berlin, Germany, which has been revamped to fit the new show. Artistically, the show will feature “acromagic,” and while all Cirque shows feature an element of magic, this one promises to up the “how did they do that?” factor.
Live Design spoke to Cirque du Soleil ALIZÉ’s technical director, Simon Larose-Lachance, and John Thurston, show systems – design and management project manager on the show, and while they refused to give away some key components of the show, (it is magic after all), they did let slip some of the processes and innovations which will make it possible.
To begin with, while the show is not based in and above a 1.5 million gallon tank like O in Las Vegas, there is a wink to it in the new theatre. Simon Larose-Lachance says, “Because we love that show so much, we decided that we needed to make some connection with the old legacy of Cirque. We chose an effect from O, but we flipped it around.”
RELATED: Cirque du Soleil Takes the Plunge Into O's Underwater World
The effect references the massive velvet curtain that disappears with a whoosh for a breathtaking reveal of the aquatic world of Cirque du Soleil's O, but instead of sucking the curtain away off stage, it heads in the opposite direction, to the audience. New directions all around.
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While the Vegas shows are still a huge draw, and the company is still selling out tours around the world, including regular stops in Europe, performing in a big top (shows such as LUZIA and KURIOS) or in historic buildings such as London’s Royal Albert Hall, (OVO) can have some technical limitations, even for Cirque du Soleil. In partnership with Live Nation, Berlin offers a chance to create on an extraordinary scale.
Live Design: What are some changes you have made to Theater am Potsdamer Platz to accommodate this show?
Simon Larose-Lachance: The house itself was already a very good fit for magic. If we were to build a theater, which we have for multiple other resident shows, we typically do a thrust stage with a surrounding audience to keep this traditional circus vibe integrated. Having a proscenium is much easier for the type of magic effects that we're doing in the show.
In terms of venue modification, we worked on the structural capacity of the building to sustain all the kit that we added for the acrobatic performances. And to make life more interesting, we decided to do a lot of this acrobatic performance over the audience. That meant the catwalk and the walls had to be reinforced. The same with the grid that was already there, a few lighting bars that are now filled with winches, and we added a false proscenium arch and forestage. The sightlines were not ideal to go further into the audience because there are two balconies, but we have found ways around that.
Because we are in Germany, we needed to have German engineers and be very specific in terms of code. But we also worked with Cundall https://www.cundall.com/ [from Britain] and have worked with them many times before, they are very good at translating entertainment requirements to any engineer around the world, and we also worked with Statico. There was some digging into old paperwork to make sure the building matched the plans and could handle what we were doing. [The theatre was built in 1998 but has been extended several times.]
But when everything has flown out and you look at the empty stage you cannot see how much work has been done. The challenge has been to create the invisible things, because the biggest investment was in things that remain unseen.
LD: How much of the show was locked down before you started renovations?
SLL: The schematic design was the key in this space. So, early discussions involved the technical director and show director brainstorming with the creative director and production manager just to get the first impression.
Because of the experience we have with circus, we could draw the theater layout--where we could put winches, some of the track and trolley placements were established, and the skeleton for the acrobats. This first draft of what the theater requires gave us a good base to start from, even though we changed many things around later.
For instance, at the beginning of the project when I came in, I was told, “No video projection on this show.” I thought, “Really?” But the creative evolved and now we're using projection for transitions.
So things changed, but there is still so much synergy between each element.
LD: How are you holding all these parts together?
SLL: There is synchronicity between the physical circus acrobatics, the magic, the show systems and bidirectional communication, automation and lighting.
There is one magical stage manager who does the whole ballet, but we also run on time code, we run on time code and every single performer is tracked so that we know where everyone is and the music is looped to make sure the performers can retry a trick if they need to and stay in time with the lighting in the right place. [The show is partially prerecorded and partially live with three musicians.]
We use VYV Photon https://www.vyv.ca/products/photon/ and VYV Albion https://www.vyv.ca/products/albion/ tracking system and media server.
We are using LiDAR to allow us to see in the dark and that positional data is converted to PosiStageNet and we then feed that into lighting, automation, stage machinery, projection etc. Everything has to be tracked with great accuracy and tightly choreographed because our systems are heavily automated.
LD: What modifications were made for the magic parts of the show?
SLL: Oh, there is plenty of magic! The magic equipment allows us to do so much. We had to modify the whole stage to support our all the gear. We have very large and heavy trampolines and other scenographic elements that we bring on stage, and we had to redo the whole stage structure to allow it. And we have a special way to make things literally vanish, onstage, but you have to buy a ticket for that!
In many scenes where we're doing changeover right in front of the audience, there's no curtain, but they can’t see. It is a big logistic challenge for the technical team and stage management and another reason we are using LiDAR to detect and track everyone. It is a new feature on the VYV system, creating a real-time 3D model of the stage which is imperative with so many people on a relatively small stage with huge scenic pieces.
There are 34 cameras for the performance just for tracking where things are and making sure that everyone sees everything.
LD: How big is the stage if it is “relatively small?”
John Thurston: The proscenium opening is 18 meters, so it's a good size theatre for touring purposes. For Cirque du Soleil, there were challenges, especially the backstage area which is not optimal. But to his credit, Simon came up with the idea for a revolving stage storage system, where in the changeovers, we send used props under the stage and unused props for the next section come up on a revolve. It functions as a sort of looping dumb waiter which doubles the stage area. It is the only way we can fit the show in there.
LD: You have two lighting designers working together on this show, can you tell us why?
JT: The illusions require a lot of collaboration between the lighting people and the magic people-it has to be so precise. Martin Labrecque has a lot of experience with Cirque and with some magic from a show in Orlando, and Nicolas Descoteaux is very well versed in lighting for circus.
It is also a long time to be away from Montreal so it helped to work as a team, and they covered everything together. I cannot overstate the technical precision required in the programming sessions as well. We had day shifts and night shifts the lighting design and programming was almost a 24-hour operation for the last two to three months, they had to be there for performer rehearsals and then when we finished staging at 11 or midnight they were programming from midnight to six.
LD: What was critical to the success of this project?
JT: Back in October 2024 Simon said that we needed to really “see” the project, and so we were really happy to have a bespoke system created for Cirque by Creative Vision in London.
It can take technical drawings from AutoCAD, SolidWorks and Vectorworks and make a 3D environment where we can check seat views.
We were able to do the creation in a real time rendering environment and give the designers the opportunity to see the visual effects as we planned them.
The invisibility system was part of that rendering and was really fleshed out once we made it in 3D, we could understand where things would be seen and where they wouldn't be.
LD: Did you change your approach to anything once you could see the show in 3D?
SLL: We had made a big investment in using kinetic lighting around the whole theater but in previz realized it would not work as designed under the balconies.
JT: Essentially, it is a winch system with over 400 little fixtures that are run from the grid above the auditorium, we are using the smallest custom-made strings and fixtures and the little fixtures are controllable from a grandMA. They are hung on automated winches so that they fly independently to make patterns and the result looks like an indoor drone show. For under the balconies, we could not use a winch, but we have fixtures that are lit in sync with the flying fixtures. Those rows of bulbs don’t move, but they turn on and off to create the same effect.
Seeing the effect in previz meant we saw the balcony challenge early on in the design process and were able to solve it before moving into the theatre.
LD: Were you able to use previz to help mask areas of the stage to protect the magic?
SLL: I know what you are thinking of, the velvet masking on magic shows, right? But there is no velvet masking on our show, it is a specialized black. It is something like Vantablack but Cirque du Soleil black covering the whole theatre. The quality of that material, plus the precise positioning of things, is part of how we make things invisible. They are very intricate tricks.
LD: So once you had the show in previz were the acts and technical concepts locked in?
SLL: No! There is a level of dynamism on this show where sometimes a creative will say, “ Hey, you know that thing that we've locked in and priced and it's already in fabrication? Well, guess what? We've just turned it upside down, backwards.”
Once you give yourself over to that process and make it normal, everything's fine. But if you come from a place where one phase closes and the next opens, forget it. It doesn't work like that here.
LD: Are you using a grandMA for all the lighting?
JT: We have two full size and two light so that if we were to lose one or two we could still run the show on one full size and one light.
LD: How do you keep the lighting truss and rigging for scenic elements and performers separate?
SLL: It is very intricate, but every line is protected with donuts to keep them separate We call them donuts because they look like that but not sure what they are called. The rigging is complicate because there is a track and trolley system over the audience and two track and trolleys over the stage.
We worked with Waagner Biro from Vienna on the truss systems. We are moving over 60 axes of automation for this show. There is so much automation actually, that on some Cirque shows in Las Vegas there are up to 200 crew members but on ours there are 35 for the whole show. Everything is integrated and designed with efficiency in mind.
LD: Do you have a dead man switch in case of emergency?
SLL: I don’t like to call it a dead man switch but yes, we use Operator Presence Control and two Automation consoles on the show—one is running the backstage for changeovers and one is running everything that the audience sees and the acrobatic acts. So when an act is going, one person is focused on the act and one person is focused on the changeover backstage, there are dedicated operators for each with their own console. I would say the backstage automation is as complex as the act, there is a lot going on backstage.