www.cirquefascination.com: Toruk is one of Cirque du Soleil’s most high-tech shows and features the largest set. The show requires a team of 100 to make it possible, and the Kansas City Business Journal talked to Production Manager Thomas Duchaine to learn exactly what it takes to pull off the show.
4 comments:
Wow this show looks like a lot of work. Cirque du Soleil shows are huge and take so many people to maintain and run all of the equipment. They need to be very careful with choosing venues and investigating on whether they can actually fit their set and make sure the set will safely be hung in the air. I think it is really interesting how they need to inspect the roofs of every building to ensure it is strong enough. There must be a lot of different tests and measurements done. It would be horrible if they loaded in the set and it actually broke part of the building because it was too heavy. I am sure many people would get hurt and there would be a huge lawsuit. It must be a very stressful but fun job for the Production Manager to ensure everything is going smoothly on tour. There are so many different things that he needs to look out for and make sure happen. It would be really cool to work for Cirque du Soleil one day.
A show that is 120,000 pounds is almost ridiculous to comprehend. Granted, weight comes in all forms, but it's still kind of ridiculous that that is what we come to think of as being normal. 27 trucks to transport a show also seems kind of insane, especially from a monetary standpoint, when accounting for the drivers, the gas, and the routine maintenance that the trucks will require. The pictures from load in are especially baffling, looking less like a theatrical production and more like an art farm, as many ants move a crump further down the line. Arena venues make sense for a show this volume, not only based on quantity of set, but of amount of tickets sold. Most arenas sit upwards of 15,000 people, which is potentially a lot of money for the show. I can't imagine what it must be like to swing from trapezes in a space of this magnitude, and how it must feel to fly among this. I would like to hear more from the production manager about what types of discussions happened during the budgeting phase, and what possibly could have been cut from the show to fit into certain parameters. Does cirque even need to cut anything?
The sheer scale of this show is amazing. For me it didn’t really sink in until I looked at the pictures at the end of the article. It’s one thing to read that there’s 120,000 pounds of stuff in the show and that it takes 27 trucks to move and so on. You can try to picture that in your mind but its such a huge scale compared to our work here that its hard to do. Its another thing entirely to see these zoomed out photos of stadiums that are completely full of just truss and rigging equipment. Their set isn’t even loaded in for those pictures and the scale is already shocking. Reading this article just further reinforced my opinion that it would be fun to someday get to work on or even better (in my opinion at least) design a Cirque Du Soleil show. Having access to those kind of resources would be amazing and allow for the creation of amazingly detailed worlds.
Cirque productions are all about creating massive spectacle—stadium-size spectacle, even, so the stats on this Cirque tour while impressive are not that surprising. Even still, 100 hotel rooms seems like a difficult feat on its own—do they just book an entire hotel? I think what impresses me most about Cirque shows is how much engineering goes into every tour stop, because the scenery and rigging is so complicated (and it definitely isn’t something they can afford to mess up). In the article, Duchaine disagrees with the argument that Cirque accomplishes what it does because of their large budgets, claiming it is the people who make it happen. While this is true in a sense, there’s no question that large Cirque budgets are necessary for creating productions at this scale and level of sophistication. You definitely do need a team of passionate and dedicated people, but they all have to get paid. So, while it’s nice to think otherwise I’m still a believer that Cirque productions owe a lot of their might to their budgets.
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