The Montreal Gazette on CRYSTAL

Just how different is Crystal from other Cirque du Soleil shows? Well, even some of the technicians have to wear skates on the latest Cirque creation, which is set to play the Bell Centre in Montreal from Dec. 20 to 31.

It is the Cirque’s first ice show, and that has added a whole new dimension to the job description of everyone working on this production, from the technicians to the performers to the costume designers. Some Quebec journalists were given a tour Thursday behind the scenes of Crystal at the Sears Centre in the Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates, just hours before its première at this 11,000-seat rink 40 kilometres outside of the Windy City.

The show has been playing secondary markets in the U.S. before its première in Quebec in December. The tour began in Lafayette, La. in early October and has touched down in San Antonio, Tex.; Little Rock, Ark.; St. Charles, Mo.; and Minneapolis, Minn.

There is no stage for Crystal. The stage is quite literally the ice surface, with the show taking up 170 feet of the 200-foot NHL-size ice surface. The Cirque also makes much use of video footage with the ice surface as a giant screen. There are 160 moving lights in the show, and they hang 75,000 pounds of equipment from the rafters.

“The ice surface is basically a canvas for us to use the entire time,” said Mike Naumann, Crystal’s production manager. “It’s like at the Bell Centre — at the beginning of the hockey games, you see that. So it’s the same concept here. We have a lot of new technology.”

So the lights will track the artists, following them, and this is incorporated into the video.

“So they’re able to skate during the show and it traces (images) on to the ice,” Naumann said. “At the very end of the show, they write ‘The End’ on the ice. So there’s several times in the show that you’ll see a trail behind the artist in the video.”

And they have already run into some big-time ice issues.

“Lafayette was challenging because it was an older venue,” Naumann said.

In Minneapolis, the ice floor at the Target Centre was not working, so at the last minute they had to hire an outside company to install a temporary ice floor.

The high concept behind Crystal is that it melds the classic Cirque acrobatic circus arts with skating finesse, and the 40 performers are almost evenly split between professional skaters and acrobats. But many of the circus performers, including acrobats and jugglers, had to learn to skate for the show.

So you have Cirque standards like trapeze, aerial straps and hand to hand mixed and matched with speedskating, hockey and skaters zooming over on-ice ramps.

“The ice makes it enormously different (from other Cirque shows),” said Shana Carroll, who directs the show in tandem with Sébastien Soldevila.

“There was a learning curve involved in terms of using it to its potential, just with the speed and the sudden breaking. The ice itself is like a huge character. Also working on the ice. Anything I knew about directing or choreographing in a studio, it’s just a whole new ball game. I had to put on my crampons and inch my way out there (on to the ice). It took me a while to realize that the ice rink is basically just a big playground. Everyone just gets up and starts skating around.

“But I think it was so stimulating for the cast. With half acrobats and half skaters, that exchange was so stimulating and it really gave us this positive atmosphere and it was contagious.”

{ SOURCE: Brendan Kelly, Montreal Gazette | https://goo.gl/Kw8HCZ }