LightSoundJournal.com: Cirque du Soleil has been delighting and mesmerizing audiences every year since its founding in 1984. The Company’s highly theatrical and acrobatic touring performances – known around the world for their dramatic creativity, imaginative storylines and audience engagement – are also recognized for their no-compromise production values: from sound and lighting, to costuming and stagecraft. In March of 2020, Cirque’s touring operations were brought to an abrupt halt with the onset of the pandemic.
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I will admit that I am quite inept when it comes to sound design and sound engineering, so this article was very enlightening to read. I was genuinely surprised about how much variability there can be between brands of microphones and systems like this. It’s cool to think about how many different facets a seemingly simple system will have; specifically when the team was considering RF signals, environmental factors, how many frequencies available, and the time for maintenance. The extremely versatile design of the bodypack and the compatibility of the Sennheiser Digital 6000. I’ve never heard of bodypacks being placed “inside the thigh…, behind the neck or under the arm.” It really seems like they can be used in any application and under any circumstances. Furthermore, it’s nice that Sennheiser reached out to offer training classes to allow their products to be used to their maximum capacity. I think that is something that should be adopted as a standard for companies to do.
This system is insane! All of the sound technicians are so incredibly talented! I have never been lucky enough to see a Cirque Du Soleil performance in person but I have been able to see clips online and the fact that all their performers and even some equipment are miced up is so incredibly impressive. This Senheiser’s Digital 6000 Wireless Microphone System seems so incredibly powerful and useful, especially for a cast so large. Not only powerful but also easy to transport which is incredibly important for touring shows like this. The best of both worlds for certain. Cirque Du Soleil is pretty consistently a trailblazer for the technical theatre world and I am absolutely certain that this is another such instance. How impressive to be able to swing back from the pandemic with such powerful equipment that can help expand the way you perform.
With the sudden halt on productions due to COVID, Cirque du Soleil and their production team were able to reevaluate their sound system and make new decisions for their recent relaunching of productions. This included deciding what wireless mics they were going to use for their touring productions, and this article documents how and why they decided to use Sennheiser’s Digital 6000 Wireless Microphone System. One of the largest issues for the sound team to overcome was finding open RF bands for the microphones. Mics transmit their signals to their receivers using radio frequencies, which are becoming more and more crowded as more devices start using radio waves. This Sennheiser system is able to fit all 10 microphones onto a band as small as 6 to 8 RF, which is extremely low compared to older and/or cheaper systems available. This makes finding clean signals on tour a lot easier than it used to be. The engineers also talk about how they appreciate the small size of the body pack transmitters and how the microphones send back important information to the engineer through the Sennheiser Wireless Systems Manager(like battery levels and on-mic mutes).
This raised the question for me: how often do larger performances, onces with particular theatres that have been running for years with likely no chance of stopping in the foreseeable future, do they ever change their in-house systems? Is there ever a second glance towards the engineering of the show or is it more along the lines of only if something goes horribly wrong? I at first wanted to see if the cost would be able to be justified but it must only be if the quality of the experience would be aggressively changed for the audience involved, which would mostly be in the sound experience. A lot is likely hard to change if you want to respect the original designers and builders if they are working on other jobs, or in scenarios like this where you have the time to actually change and look through everything since they have the money and the opportunity instead of remaining without much to do.
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