It entertains more than 9,000 people every night in Las Vegas alone; now the spectacular Cirque du Soleil has set its sights on this part of the world
CHIRAYU NA RANONG
Cirque du Soleil, that contemporary take on the circus genre (minus the clowns and performing animals), has certainly come a long way since its infancy. Back in 1980 it was a small, cash-strapped troupe of street performers called Les E'chassiers. Today, the Quebe'c-based organisation employs a staff of almost 4,000 who hail from 40-plus countries and include more than 1,000 acrobats and dancers.
Since its name change in 1984, Cirque du Soleil estimates that its productions have entertained close to 80 million people on five continents! And earlier this year it pitched camp in that goldmine of tomorrow, Macau, from where it will henceforth direct its Asia-Pacific operations.
Playing nightly at the gigantic Venetian Macao Hotel, a casino-cum-resort, Cirque's latest production, Zaia, had its premiere at the end of August before a packed house that included the likes of Jackie Chan. The company's first permanent, Asia-based show, it quickly became one of the hottest tickets on the Cotai Strip. (A second, long-running production is due to debut a few months from now in Tokyo Disneyland.)
Zaia, which means "life" in Greek, is the name of the main character, a young girl who, according to the official synopsis, "journeys into space on a strange, yet familiar voyage of self-discovery. As she travels, she encounters the beauty of humanity and eventually brings it back with her to share with the inhabitants of Earth." You could have fooled me, though! I gave up trying to follow the story right around the time a polar bear floated over the stage!
So I'm not going to even begin to pretend that I comprehended the plot of this abstract and visually mind-blowing piece, because, frankly, I don't think it actually matters. The real stars of the show, as with any Cirque production, are the gifted and immensely supple players - 75 of them in this case - who put on a series of amazingly fluent and energetic performances.
Zaia is a seamless blend of acrobatics and dance, of which a multitude of styles are on display. The highlights include, "Aerial Bamboo", feats performed by two artistes while hanging from a pole suspended in mid-air; and "Chinese Poles on Globes", a breath-taking variation on the classic circus act: acrobats cling to poles shaped like weathervanes (symbolising the points of the compass), the uprights held by colleagues who have to balance on oversized orbs.
A segment called "Rola Bola" features a character who resembles Charlie Chaplin's tramp. He makes his entrance from above, via a ladder, and then uses various "found objects" - pipes and planks - to construct a rickety structure on stage, adding to it until it is high enough for him to reach the ladder again.
One of the climatic points of the evening comes during "Fire Dance" (which apparently took months of rehearsal to perfect). A character called the Sage, the incarnation of an African shaman, performs a dance in the dark, twirling a stick that is lit at both ends. Other dancers and acrobats gradually join in until a throng of performers, all wielding flaming sticks, criss-cross the stage before fading back into darkness.
The show ends with a most energetic piece that involves the use of a giant, X-shaped centrepiece that looks like two huge teeterboards. Over a dozen acrobats "attack" this X from all directions, launching themselves into flight, leaping and bouncing back and forth to supply a most rousing finale for a by-now totally spellbound audience.
A major element in the success of the spectacle is the design of the venue itself. Costing in excess of 5 billion baht (US$150 million), this planetarium-like theatre seats 1,852 under a 24m-high ceiling. In keeping with the theme of Zaia the space has been decked out to suggest the interior of an imagined structure, a replica of what Mayan astronomers may once have used to observe the heavens.
"For me, Zaia is an inner journey through time and space," explained set and props designer Guillaume Lord. "The set, in which arcs and perspective lines predominate, evokes the viewpoint of a human eye looking through a large observatory telescope."
During the course of the show giant objects including a bronze-plated replica of the sun and blocks of "ice", each weighing in excess of 270kg, float around, their "orbit" made possible by a heavy-duty, oval-shaped track fixed to the ceiling. Another major contributor to the special effects is a self-supporting sphere, a 2,300kg contraption almost 8m in diameter which can beam images in a 360-degree radius using six projectors mounted inside it. The backdrop to the stage is a device called Star Drop which can recreate the night sky using more than 3,000 fibre-optic lights to simulate glittering stars and faraway planets.
Though the plot was, at times, difficult to follow, the performances in Zaia were utterly captivating and well worth the price of admission (for details, visit http://www.venetianmacao.com/en/show/party - packages/pid/5). In the next year or two, another permanent Cirque show is due to open in one of the new hotels on Macau's Cotai Strip. Couple that with the upcoming production in Tokyo Disneyland and it looks like Cirque du Soleil is here to stay.
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