VAREKAI

Cirque du Soleil’s highly successful montage of breathtaking acrobatics, theatre colour, spectacle and humour has made its concept of modern circus a global brand and an energetic crowd-pleasing experience that continues to wow and win audiences worldwide. With seven travelling shows and seven long-running productions, the new year shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall still represents the only time a touring show is performed outside of Cirque’s own big top arenas.

    This year, with Harvey Goldsmith promoting, it was the turn of the Varekai show to make its UK debut and take up the six-week residency at London’s landmark venue as part of its world tour.

    The standard Varekai production tours in 104 trailers — which include everything from the big top venue to the sound, lighting, power, IT and all technical elements right down to the kitchens, dressing rooms, showers, etc — with 190 personnel. It’s a completely self-sufficient set-up: all they need is a water supply to plumb in to.

    The content of 16 of those trailers came to the Albert Hall, explained touring production manager Rob Naumann, who is responsible for all things technical including site logistics. Naumann’s technical team normally consists of 33 people, 26 of whom worked on the RAH production, liaising closely with the local suppliers and UK-based transfer project manager, Andy Peat.

    Cirque has used Britannia Row for sound, Neg Earth for lighting and Summit Steel for rigging to supply the RAH shows for some years, and in all cases, it’s essentially a dry hire, which, once installed, is operated and run by Cirque’s own technical crew.

    Planning for installing Varekai into the venue for its six-week run began in January 2007, and intensified from September onwards. The get-in commenced over the Christmas period, followed by rehearsals ready for the January 8 press night.

    Andy Peat’s role as the person ‘on-the-ground’ in London involved integrating all the local suppliers and liaising between them, Naumann and his team on the road and head office in Montreal. “A show like this builds up in layers,” he explained. “Each layer that gets exposed involves more people.”

    He added that fundamentals like organising a major get-in over the festive period meant that basics like crew had to be booked well in advance, so establishing a structured workflow was a key to ensuring his job ran as smoothly as possible.

    Peat is building something of an industry reputation for working on idiosyncratic and off-beat shows, of which this is no exception. Cirque shows are always galvanising, interesting and enjoyable for many reasons, he explained. “There’s an incredibly high level of professionalism with all the Cirque crew, and meticulous attention is always paid to detail.”

    With 138 points in the roof, Summit Steel actually broke its own record for the number of load points rigged in the RAH. It’s the seventh year that Summit has installed the rigging infrastructure for a Cirque production in the venue, and Varekai’s main challenge for rigging was the sheer scale and complexity combined with the amount of spreader trusses needed to ensure that the show rigging was in exactly the right places.

    Summit project manager Chris Walker led a team of 12 riggers. They started work on Boxing Day, following on from work completed by an overnight crew of five riggers who took care of pre-rigging and proof testing of the anchor points in the run up to Christmas.
    The main crew worked in two split shifts to get everything finished and ready for the first rehearsal on December 31, after which Summit left one stand-by rigger to babysit through to press night.

    The first elements of rigging to go in were approximately 450 metres of trussing, which was arranged into a series of spreaders, mother grids and drapes trusses hung from the roof of the RAH. The 14 tonnes of Cirque’s show rigging was then suspended below.

    Cirque’s ‘pseudocupola’ structure was then installed. Mimicking the cupola of their usual big top, the 8' wide by 30' long rectangular steel construction normally sits between the four tent masts, but this one was specially fabricated for the RAH and fully flown.

    Below that was the catwalk, with sections of the ‘passerelle’ which traverses the arena from upstage left to downstage right, connected on either side. Many of the aerialists make their mid-air entrances from the catwalk so strategically that it’s a core piece of stage set. The ‘passerelle’ would normally run between two tent masts, but these could not be installed in the RAH because of sightline issues.

    Instead, two custom built half-masts extending 24' downwards were suspended from the upstage corners of Summit’s mother grid, using specially commissioned adaptors from James Thomas Engineering. The mast sections were required because various rigging elements are attached to them including the safety nets for the final Russian Swing act, and the floor-mounted performer-flying winch wires which then divert throughout the structure via a series of pulleys.

LIGHTS
Varekai’s lighting is designed by Nol Van Genuchten — it is his first cirque production as LD although he has worked with the company as assistant and associate LD for several previous productions. The design involved a lot of close collaboration between him and set designer Stephan Roy, a process that involved a continual exchange of ideas.

    For the RAH installation, they took the original big top design and established which lighting positions would be available, which were on the mother grid, pseudocupola, passerelle, catwalk, the RAH’s gallery and second tier, the stage right mast and the floor.

    They also took into account issues like the height of the seating in the RAH, which in places is above where the performers are working and so completely changes the perspective — and also dealt with concerns like not shining lights in people’s faces.

    The rig was almost doubled for the RAH, making up for having less positions available and the increased heights and throw distances. The moving lights are usually six Martin Professional MAC 2000 Profiles, and this was boosted to 12 at the RAH, with the addition of another eight High End Studio Beam PCs.

    Upstage, they added a flown scenic ‘cloud’, made from crumpled mosquito netting material, which filled a normally absent void at the back of the ‘forest’ of aluminium piped stage set, and the Studio Beams were mainly used to light this. The forest is highly reflective and great for creating off-beat and slightly magical effects, as Van Genuchten put it: “It doesn’t need much light to give it a personality.”

    They also added about 60 ETC Source Four Profiles and PARs to their normal count of around 300 plus five 2kW fresnels. Dimming was ETC Sensor, follow spots were three Robert Juliat Marius units, and they also used an MDG low fog system and a Look Solutions Viper for smoke in the traps and at the back.

    Cirque’s head of lighting, Christian Laflamme and his assistant Alexandre Cousineau take turns to operate the Varekai show on the road, using a Compulite Micron 4D console with full hot back-up, and they work with two other Cirque lighting crew plus locals.

AUDIO
Sound was designed by Francois Bergeron, who first worked for Cirque 18 years ago — he is another example of the intense loyalty that the company inspires from its crew and creative personnel.

    Sonically, his main challenges for the RAH transfer were the “verticality” of the space and the fact that there are people all the way from the orchestra pit right up to gallery level in the vast auditorium covering a 270° viewing area. The big top has a similar configuration, but seating is limited to one level. The surround was also challenging as it’s a tool utilised to deliver the narrative.

    He specified an L-Acoustics ARCS system with more speakers than usual to cover the wider audience areas — all kept in as close proximity as possible to the audience to limit reverberation around the hall. They used eight flown arrays of four enclosures and two clusters of six, along with eight MTD 108s for downstage fills, eight SB-218 subs under the stage and six MTD 115bs for the surround.

    Cirque brought in their own Yamaha PM5D consoles for monitors and FOH, plus a Yamaha DM2000 at FOH for additional inputs from two keyboards which are sub-mixed in this and sent to the PM5D as a stereo mix.

    There were seven musicians in the band with two singers, and the two main characters also have mics — a total of 15 radios, plus 10 IEM mixes running on a Shure PSM 700 system.

    It wass Bergeron’s third time at the RAH with Cirque and he reckoned it was the best sounding yet... “thanks to the various people who work hard day-to-day in Varekai’s sound department.”

    On the road, Varekai’s audio is looked after by head of sound Dominic Dorion and his team of Danny Racine and François Cote. All three of them alternate between running FOH, monitors and backstage — a common modus operandi for long-running shows that helps keep everyone fresh and focused.

    The show itself, created in 2002, still has plenty of zest and vitality, which is quite remarkable for a touring show of that duration, and also surely one of the keys to Cirque’s continuing success and the passion of those working on it.

    Other suppliers for the RAH run included Blackfriars Scenery and Universal Stars, who supplied the drapes, Gallowglass, who supplied the local crew and trucking which was by EST.

    Eat To The Beat handled catering, and ESS built the exterior Swing Wing technical structure which served as a rehearsal space for the Russian Swing acrobats and the trapeze artists.
TPi

Photography by
Louise Stickland