Thursday, January 16, 2025
Cirque Du Soleil on transforming the Royal Albert Hall for Corteo
www.cirquefascination.com: With Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo opening tomorrow, 9 January, at the Royal Albert Hall, its technical director Gerard Edwards-Webb discusses how and why his team completely redesigned the layout of the venue for the show.
Since Queen Victoria opened the Royal Albert Hall in 1871 you could be forgiven for thinking the venue has seen it all. It has hosted everything from Jimi Hendrix to The Proms, Sumu wrestling to an indoor marathon, but it has never been transformed in the way that Cirque du Soleil has for its production Corteo.
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Cirque Du Soleil transformed the Royal Albert hall for its upcoming production. Continuing the trend of redesigning theaters for productions. Is this a new thing? Or has this been in the industry long before recent shows like Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club and Cirque Du Soleil’s Corteo. These drastic transformations often involve redesigning the seating arrangements, often creating entirely new sections. These changes are expensive and time consuming. At what point do they actually pay off? How hard will it be to transform these theaters back to their original state? Many of which are historical theaters they have been around for ages. Could a show with poor sales put a theater under due to these massive alterations? On the other hand, these transformations push the bounds of immersive theater (one might say breaking through the proscenium ;), bringing audiences more into the world of the world show. Is this the future of theater?
This seems really cool! As a sucker for beautiful and historic interior architecture, I understand the concern that some people might have about the theatre being transformed in this way. However, I really do think that this is the point of theatre in general. To create something new and to push the boundaries. This is especially fitting at the Royal Albert Hall, which Queen Victoria established to specifically be a place of new and exciting experiments and productions. I also like little niche facts and details, so I was entertained by the fact that Royal Albert Hall full capacity is normally around 5,200 seats, and that a Cirque show usually brings the number down to 4,000. This is crazy to me, to think that a Cirque a show reduces the seating capacity by 1,200, or about 23%. I wonder how that affects the average ticket price and the overall effects on the budget and production of the show as well as revenue for the theatre itself.
I wish they had included pictures in this article, but they described everything pretty well. It was funny to hear them describe the weight of the acrobatic performance as "hanging 11 elephants from the ceiling". I think it's really cool that they had the opportunity to transform this building, opening it up for even more diverse performances than it usually sees.
I've always been fascinated by Cirque du Soleil. Acrobatics is one of my favorite types of performance to watch, and they always do such a good job with it. I remember seeing for the first time when I was in elementary school and having such a good time watching the show. I was able to see two more of their shows last year, and even get a backstage tour of the Disney Drawn to Life show. It was awesome to learn about how they do all of their tricks and see the technical side.
I think that being a part of this process would be insanely cool. Not just adding to a space for a show, but almost completely redesigning it seems like it would be such fun. I wish that the technical director was able to go into the process of it in some more detail, instead of mostly talking about how it looked. I think that idea of the audience facing itself and being able to see the reactions of the other side will really add to the experience. I would be curious to see the statistics of audience enjoyment that way compared to how they would normally be seated. I feel like if you could so easily see other peoples looks of joy and astonishment, it would really amplify your own.
It's always been common for big budget shows to make renovations to the theatre’s themselves but I find it interesting that Cirque du Soleil is following suit with that. The fact that they described their changes as making it like its two proscenium theatres back to back is fascinating to me. With the organization they’re going for it's going to be much more difficult to mask the technical aspects of what's going on. The fact that they’re purposefully choosing to sacrifice a lot of seats is interesting to me as well, they have to be pretty confident that they’re going to profit off of this show over time since they won’t be making the revenue as fast as they would’ve been anymore. Unfortunately I’ve never been able to see a Cirque du Soleil show but i really hope to be able to see one in the future.
I admire Cirque du Soleil’s ability to be unafraid to change the space to fit their show and not alter the show to fit the space. It would be so easy for Cirque to just have a show that fits the space and doesn’t make waves, however, this performance is shaping up to be one of the shows to use the Royal Albert Hall in an incredibly creative way. I have never seen a circus performance, much less one by Cirque du Soleil, but from images taken of the show I am incredibly intrigued by this form of storytelling. There are many ways of telling a story, and at CMU I feel like we usually focus on the audible aspect of storytelling, staying away from the visual-only forms of tales. It makes sense given the types of majors offered here but I would love to see a play that is told through only visual performance and not through dialogue.
Cirque du Soleil has pulled off an extraordinary transformation of the Royal Albert Hall for Corteo, running from January 9 to March 2. I don't think Cirque ever fails to amaze me with what they can do, and this is no exception. This bold move splits the venue into two halves, with audiences facing each other and the stage positioned in the center. It's crazy to me that people can genuinely think of these ideas and execute them so intelligently. It’s such a daring feat that is truly commendable. The technical director, Gerard Edwards-Webb, describes the massive undertaking, which included moving and redesigning seating, installing a higher exhibition floor, and hanging 67 tons of equipment equivalent to 11 elephants. I could literally never imagine doing that, but I think through years of collaboration with the Hall, it made these things so possible. The article explained how This show marks the heaviest and most ambitious transformation Cirque has ever brought to the Hall.
I love getting to read through the physical production perspective of anything, but especially so with Cirque du Soleil due to all of its (quite literally) moving parts and dynamic concerns. 67 tonnes hanging from the grid was a pretty surprising number - 11 elephants’ worth! I love the set up where the audience is dual with the performance between the two groups - I think it's very interesting from a performance standpoint, but also from a marketing perspective. I wonder how audiences have reacted and will react to being able to see the other half of the audience, and if that changes the show itself at all or how people perceive it. The emphasis on the collaborative process makes sense, as I am sure it was crucial to the production that representatives from many different groups - the Royal Albert Hall, Cirque’s performers, technical direction, directors, management, etc - worked in tandem for this monumental effort.
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