With the KURIOS’ sprawling blue and yellow striped big top at the OC Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa, the Amplify team got a glimpse into the crazy, steampunk-ified performance and caught up with Company Manager Yannick Spierkel to talk about what’s going on behind the scenes.
Q. Can you give us an idea of the magnitude of how big this tent is?
The theater here has 2,600 seats. Even permanent venues in many cities don’t have that many seats. So we are very proud to be able to build this. It takes a day to build everything here. So it goes very fast. Yeah, and [once the tent is built] then the stage comes in. With the main company for the entire tour, we are traveling with 65 trucks that carry 2,000 tons of equipment. So we have not only equipment for the show itself, but all the concessions, the sales, and the box office. The back-up side, our shops, our kitchen, all this travels by trucks from point A to point B. We have our own food and beverage and merch counters, and a VIP area also. We are supported by around 160 people from the local staff here in Orange County that comes and helps us.
Q. When people come to this show, there’s this archway they’ll walk through, giving them a kind of visual experience. Can you tell me a little more about this?
The arch is marking the entrance way for everybody to get to. It’s part of something that we wanted to enhance the experience of the customer. In our case, we’re using this as a metaphor, and we are getting people to our world. When they leave, yes, they are coming out of it. This show is very, very uplifting. Some other shows may be dark for some people, but this one is very, very joyful. People come out with enthusiasm.
Q. What are some of the VIP offerings you have?
There are two things that can happen. In the VIP, you still have a very good experience. You are well-treated here. It’s Spectrum Catering that is doing the catering for us. Another offering is that I will personally host those people for longer evenings. They arrive before the show, and I bring them behind the scenes, backstage. They watch the show, they get the VIP experience, and then at the end of the night they meet with some artists, and we bring them backstage. That’s a new product that we’ve offered for the past year, which is very popular because it is quite limited. We sell 20 seats per week on that. That’s only on Friday nights. This costs between $400-$500.
Q. This show started in Montreal in 2014 and Kurios is the 35th production of Cirque. How did you make this show different?
Well, it was very important, at least for the director, Michel Laprise, to create a new momentum. We wanted this show to connect with the audience. The stage is much lower than any previous show. More than one million people have already seen the show in 18 months. While other shows left people to try to understand the story line, this is a little bit more specific. It’s humans on stage in a specific time period.
Q. I always noticed that with Cirque shows; There is not necessarily a traditional story arc. Does this have more of a beginning-to-end type narrative?
Obviously, we still leave people to their own imagination, but Michel Laprise, wrote more than 30 pages when he wrote the script. When we arrive in the city, our four masts that hold up the big top are antennas to reach out to a parallel world. There’s a scientist and he is trying to connect with that parallel world. The end of 1800s, early 1900s, it was a period of time where a lot of discoveries were made. Electricity was part of all this at that time period. So, that’s why the masts will help the scientist on stage to connect with that parallel world.
Q. Cirque du Soleil has been around for a long time – is this a symbolic production for the creator Guy [Laliberté] up in Montreal?
It is always exciting when a new show starts. Whether a show in Las Vegas, or a show on the road, it creates an energy at our production studios in Montreal that is incomparable. Thousands of people were there, behind the show, making sure that everything is needed for the day of opening in Montreal. There is always struggle, we always try to reinvent ourselves, and do something new. In this show, we have in one of the act, it’s called the Acro Net, and there’s a net that is stretched on four masts on which six performers are jumping in the air, up and down, but it’s only by their own propulsion that one is going up. So it’s not a trampoline. It’s only a net, and it’s all physics that make it go up and down. That’s totally new. One other thing that Guy strongly supported when we created this show is have more poetic moments. We still have all of the high acrobatic events during our shows, but there are moments that will be more poetic in which we bring people with hand puppetry on stage. These are moments that people are not used to, for Cirque du Soleil, but it mixed very well with this show.
Q. How long has this show been on the road for? These shows tour for years, right?
Absolutely. We are taking the show somewhere between 10 and 15 years around the world. We are in our 2nd year right now, and we expect to be in North America at least until the end of 2017, and then we will move on to other continents.
Q. Will you always be in the big top?
No. The show will be only in big top for at least ten years or twelve years. Then the last few years, we’ll see if it goes in arenas.
{ SOURCE: Amplify | http://goo.gl/egpqFv }
