"Post by PAI....." (See our letter to you on 8/24/04 please.)Friday, November 26, 2004
Copyright @ Las Vegas Review-Journal
Cirque Tops Itself
'Ka,' the most expensive live show in modern history, takes a new direction by telling a story
By MIKE WEATHERFORD
REVIEW-JOURNAL
Lo Ngaching performs during the pageant scene in "Ka," the new epic from Cirque du Soleil at the MGM Grand.
A turbulent storm at sea leaves "Ka's" young heroine and her nanny underwater, which is shown through a stage transformation, aerial wires and film projection.
Jorg Lemke (background, as Counselor) and Miro (as Counselor's Son) rehearse.
Jorg Lemke
Chinese Wushu artists perform in the pageant scene.
"Ka" performers are hooked into their harnesses.
Kleber Berto from Brazil rehearses in the "Ka" training room.
Photos by Jeff Scheid. (Check all the photos with LVRJ please.) [You may view them from the section of "Neon" on reviewjournal.com at November 30, 2004.]
Seen from directly overhead, two opposing groups of armor-suited warriors charge to meet in the middle. A fierce battle ensues, the warriors using staffs, swords and kung fu. Some have an almost-supernatural power to leap over their enemy.
That's how the scene unfolds in Cirque du Soleil's new "Ka." But the audience doesn't see the overhead perspective on film, or reflected in mirrors. They see it because the warriors are suspended in the air, their feet rappelling onto a near-vertical wall, upon which the image of the battlefield is projected.
Along with performing their stunt combat, the performers are squeezing control units, hidden in their fists, to move the wires that suspend them from a grid 90 feet above the stage.
In part, it's the answer to the question everyone had: How could Cirque top itself and deliver a distinct new product in its fourth show on the Strip?
The $165 million "Ka," which begins its first ticketed "preview" shows today at the MGM Grand (the formal opening is in February) marks not only a watershed for Las Vegas entertainment, but perhaps the creation of an all-new entertainment medium: the live movie; theater that uses the language of cinema.
"In movies you will see a battlefield from different angles ... We've had the opportunity to give people a live experience about battle that is completely different than what you would get in any other theater," says Lyn Heward, who oversees Cirque's creative content division.
"Ka" has the rich, textured atmosphere of grand opera, except that nothing is stagebound, not even the two stages themselves.
Scenes flow from one to another, changing perspective. When the nanny of the young protagonist falls overboard during a turbulent storm at sea, you first see the older caretaker (Teuda Bara) swept off the side of the boat that spins and bobs like a cork on the water.
Then the stage transforms to an underwater point of view, to show the nanny sinking to the bottom -- again by using aerial wires and film projection -- and the young heroine (Jennifer Haight) plunging in to rescue her.
"It does focus the way a spectator can watch an activity. When I go see `O,' I have difficulty choosing what to look at," Heward says. "But this is a little bit different. We are giving you a point of view to look at this from."
Moreover, the signature Cirque music, acrobatics and overall aesthetic have been focused into actual storytelling for the first time. "Cirque du Soleil is at the point where it wants to reinvent itself and see how it can push further," says Robert Lepage, the director hired to help Cirque turn that corner. "You have to move on to something different and you have to break something to do that."
Lepage -- perhaps best-known in the United States for staging two Peter Gabriel tours -- says he and Cirque founder Guy Laliberté wrestled with questions of, "How can this feel familiar without being redundant? How can this feel like you're walking into a different world, but still with the confidence you have in your guide, which is Cirque du Soleil?"
The long road
"If your foundations are solid, then you can build it," says "Ka" production manager Stephane Mongeau.
The first Cirque production to be storyboarded in advance came together, perhaps not coincidentally, in a relatively compressed time frame.
In June 2002, Cirque and MGM Mirage confirmed rumors that dated back to at least mid-2001: "EFX" would close at the end of that year, to be replaced by the new Cirque and, as it turned out, a theater gutted and rebuilt from the ground up.
But Lepage had come up with the basic treatment for "Ka" by the end of 2001. And Cirque had dropped a major clue to its new direction with its tribute to special effects in the 2002 Academy Awards broadcast.
"What we were trying to do at that time was say to people, `Look, you don't need the magic of film to do "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"-like movements.' You can actually do it in real life, too," Heward says.
Cirque knew it wanted to create an epic, and to present it in a suitable theater. For that it turned to Mark Fisher, production designer for the Queen musical "We Will Rock You," currently at Paris Las Vegas, as well as the U2 "PopMart" tour and the Rolling Stones' "Bridges to Babylon" stadium tour.
"He was a real sprinter for us," Mongeau says of Fisher. "He had a very quick vision of the entire big picture (and) computer-animated a rendering of the entire theater within a month. Someone like him inspires the others."
In lieu of a fixed playing area, the stage design resembles a black void, where the two main stages move in and out of position. One is the "Tommy deck," a platform that slides in and out much like a drawer. The other -- the one hosting the vertical battle -- is the "cliff deck," an 80,000-pound rectangle lifted in and out of place by a 230,000-pound gantry arm.
The old theater was gutted and construction of the new one began in July 2003. Cirque took over the 1,951-seat theater in November 2003, but missed its goal of opening last summer, chiefly because of problems with the gantry arm.
A big star of the show was the last to join the cast: fire. At first, county fire inspectors told the creators that the theater's lack of a formal proscenium -- and thus, the traditional type of fire curtain --would prohibit pyrotechnical effects. Cirque agreed, but later reopened discussions. Inspectors signed off on the pyro effects Oct. 31.
The cinematic feel of the show also introduces a new, home-theaterlike dimension to the theater: Every seat will have its own personal set of speakers.
"It is not as if sound always comes out of the seat. It is just another pair of speakers," says sound designer Jonathan Deans. In fact, there are 180 outputs of sound, compared to 60 for "EFX."
"We take a sound and shred it into multiple sections," Deans explains. "It will go out and fly around the auditorium shredded, then come back into that (original) sound. Will the audience know that is happening? No. But they will feel something different is happening."
Much of the music is recorded, but all sound effects are live. "If a fireball comes up through the stage," Deans explains, "we draw little squares on the camera image (that monitors the stage action). So when the fireball crosses through the squares, it actually triggers different sounds, and places the sounds to different speakers."
War and peace
"It simplified itself," Lepage says of the story that was code-named "Duality," and takes its name from the Egyptian concept of a spiritual double. "It's difficult to talk about simplicity in this context, but it did."
"The story was very ambitious in the beginning, and that is what simplified itself, to where you get a thread more than a story and that thread becomes your emotional guide," he explains. "It's still a Cirque du Soleil show. It's all based on numbers and pretexts to have acrobatics or martial arts. It's the way you string these things together that forms a story line."
In this case, it's the story of twins (Haight and sister Sheri) in an ancient Asian society who are separated when enemy archers kidnap one of them. Along the way, their separate journeys include a giant forest and a beach full of giant animal puppets created by Michael Curry, best known for Broadway's "The Lion King."
The biggest challenge: "How do you present conflict in a Cirque du Soleil show?" Lepage remembers. "How do you present violence in a nonviolent way? How do you make a ballet out of an attack?"
Cirque traveled the world to find swordsmen, archers and the roof-jumping Yamikazis of Paris. "You show these videos in sequence and you went, `Yikes! This is so violent,' " Lepage recalls.
Help came from Taiwanese martial arts choreographer Yung Biau Lin and his experience dating back to his childhood with the Chinese Opera, which trains youngsters in gymnastics, acrobatics and martial arts as well as performance skills such as mime and dance.
"There are many ways to use the martial arts. Fighting is one, but there are a lot of others," Biau Lin says through an interpreter.
"What I am trying to do in this show is look at the whole span of energy and play with that," he says of the rare mix of disciplines: Chinese Wushu -- an umbrella term for a variety of styles -- and Brazilian Capoeira.
For all that is new about "Ka," longtime fans of Cirque will hear the sounds of a long-lost friend. René Dupéré, who composed the soundtrack to "Mystere" and most of the Cirque shows before it, returned to the fold at Laliberté's request after a 10-year break.
"It has to be a score, like a movie score," Dupéré says. "The music has to tell what's going on, because there's nobody talking."
The most distinctive aspect of the score is a 42-voice choir, which sings "invented lyrics" by Dupéré's wife, Elise Velle, who was principal singer for the first year of "Mystere."
The choir and orchestral sounds are blended in with the live performance of a seven-piece band, which the audience doesn't see.
But, Dupéré says, in places "I had to soften (the music) a bit. It was so dramatic, I couldn't see the action. The music was too big."
It's a larger lesson the creators of the most expensive live show in modern history are trying not to forget. One key special effect is created by nothing more than the shadow of a candle.
"Human beings make the effects, and not machines," Heward says. "The technology is simply a support to the human performance."
