Cirque du Soleil is no stranger to London, and is even planning a new 622-seat custom theatre in the former Saville Theatre in the West End in a couple of years.
Live Design looked into the details of what it takes to host a Cirque residence in a venue which is decidedly not custom designed for the Canadian entertainment giant.
For Cirque du Soleil’s Gerard “Ges” Edwards-Webb, supervising Corteo at London’s Royal Albert Hall earlier this year was a kind of homecoming. He was a freelance technician working on mostly rock ‘n’ roll shows in the UK in the 90s when he first worked at the Royal Albert Hall 28 years ago, eventually becoming the technical show manager for the venue from 2000 to 2005. His association with Cirque du Soleil goes back almost as long, and it is where he first met his wife, on the touring show Dralion. In a career that has spanned several continents (Europe, America, Japan and Australia) Edwards-Webb has worked as a rigger, sound engineer, project manager, and technical director for, among others, Cirque, Franco Dragone, and TAIT Towers.
After the pandemic shut down touring, which Edwards-Webb calls “a huge game of musical chairs where everything stopped in the wrong place--we had to reconvene nine touring shows, get the artists, equipment, all the infrastructure and logistics reorganized to launch again in 16 months. It was a jigsaw puzzle,” Cirque came back to the Royal Albert Hall with Luzia in 2022.
Corteo, which is Italian for cortege, meant a certain amount of adaptation for the iconic, circular, venue including a central stage which divided the Royal Albert Hall with audiences on either side. This brings them further into the show, as each side is visible to each other and to the performers.
It was also a very heavy show—Cirque has said that the weight of three elephants is suspended from the roof and there is more weight on the deck from the rig and curtains 12.5 meters above the ground. Various scenic elements roll on and off stage and fly above it, including a bed, and many performers.
Edwards-Webb says, “Putting Corteo into the Royal Albert Hall had been discussed for years. From an artistic standpoint, Cirque knew it would look fantastic in there, but the problem was that the original big top version, which was launched in 2005, was so big and so heavy. Because when you are touring in tents, the sets aren't designed to go in and out very quickly. They're designed to be sustainable for long periods on the road and in residence. Also, when you are touring a show in a big top, you build the show and the tent together, so to speak, and the whole setup period for a big top is typically eight days, not eight hours as we do in an arena tour.”
However, in 2018, Cirque decided to rebuild Corteo into an arena-touring format. At the time, Edwards-Webb was working for Tait, and so was the senior project manager reconstructing the show. In 2021, they discussed the possibility of Corteo fitting in to the Hall, rather than a big top show out at Battersea Power Station, a regular Cirque location.
Edwards-Webb says, “There wasn't a huge appetite for it at the time, as there was general disbelief within the company that it could happen. Then in 2023, we put Kurios in the Royal Albert Hall. Because of the width of that show, we had to lift up the stage so that the wings would clear the stalls, but that meant there was a five-foot wall of stage in front of the first few rows. So then we decided to lift up the entire audience as well.” He adds, “Seemed like the a sensible thing to do, right?”
The company was able to use the exhibition floor that the Royal Albert Hall already owned. It is typically used for dinners and tennis exhibition matches. Rather than filling in the arena to the existing walls, the floor levels out the arena leaving four rows at the top of the stalls and a much greater length for the room.
Edwards-Webb says, “While I was sitting in the stalls during the Kurios load in, watching the guys put the show in, it occurred to me that the new floor length might be enough to make Corteo fit.
Design Images
Click To Expand - Spreader Grids Above Show
Click To Expland - Floor Reinforcement
Click To Expand - General Rig Layout
Click To Expand - VIP Seating Layout
Click To Expand - Non VIP Seating Layout
Once we'd finished that project, I came back to Montreal and we did some preliminary studies and drafting and committed to making it happen, although the wing space that we have available for that show at each end of the traverse set is very small compared to what we normally have.”
The show splits the hall in half but, Edwards-Webb says, “It doesn’t detract from the grandeur of the auditorium. When you put a show in that hall, it's very hard to make it look bad because it's such a beautiful building.”
To do it, the company had to lose a lot of seats and at the Royal Albert Hall there are seat owners who had to be negotiated with, but eventually they were able to change the entire seating plan to make it work.
The unique setting brought the audience very close to the action, and to each other. Edwards-Webb says that because each side could see the other, at the beginning of the show many people assumed it was a mirror before realizing the truth. But that mirrored reaction not only boosted emotions but helped the two sides work together as a team, in particular during one aerial scene where "Valentina" was suspended below several large helium-filled balloons. She was boosted into the air by audience members pushing on her feet, enabling her to float from one side of the stage to the other and up close to the higher balconies.
Construction of the Hall started in the 1860s and Queen Victoria herself opened the venue in 1871. Its storied past has included events around royalty, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, and even the composer Richard Wagner, who conducted his own work there. The historic nature of the venue means it is ill-advised to start drilling new holes and changing the architecture. Edwards-Webb says, “I think it is the heaviest thing that anyone had put in the Hall, with roughly 67 tons suspended from the grid [three elephants!] and about 45 tons of distributed floor load.”
In a big top, there are six principle points at which you can connect to the tent with a coupler in the middle: four masts and two side poles that are around the outside wall of the tent.
Edwards-Webb says, “Usually when they put a big top show in the Royal Albert Hall, we use a system called a pseudo capo, or a replica of the cap in the tent, which we hang in free space in the hall at exactly the same elevation as it would be in the tent. Then we hang truss for our lighting, sound, rigging, et cetera. However, we didn't have any side poles and everything is much further away. So if you are using traditional circus-style rigging in a circus show, then you have to basically recreate all the anchors in the building, extend the cables, and recalculate all the loads. It's it's quite a complicated process.
The advantage to a show like Corteo, which had been redesigned for an arena format, is that unlike Alegría which was in the year before, and had maybe 200 separate connections to the building in terms of acrobatic rigging positions, Corteo had six. We hung the show out of the roof with production rigging.
That's relatively simple, but then the acrobatic and dynamic forces within the show are resolved within the set and you can’t drill into concrete and put in special anchors for that. In many arenas where we have repeat visits, we do have anchors that are installed for some of the primary guiding positions. But unlike a regular theater or rock and roll show, the dynamic forces tend to move everything so you can't just free hang everything out of the roof. With Corteo, the main challenge was the self-weight and weight distribution across the venue."
A taste of some of the stresses on the rig.
The Hall also has “mushrooms”—large acoustic baffles hanging from the ceiling which you can’t attach anything to and are generally in the way but you can route rigging through those points.
In this particular case, we used three different subgrids: north, center and south. From there, we designed the grid effectively as an interface between the points coming from the roof and then a subgrid with points coming down in other places to actually pick up the show,” he adds.
Set Up
“When we build the rig, we actually apply more loads to the roof and then relax the load by ground support from two towers inside the wings. They are sitting on the floor but captured inside the rig as it slips down around the towers so they can’t fall over and some of the load from the roof is back on the floor.”
But of course, in a historic building, it is not that simple.
He continues, “That is great if you have a nice, big concrete slab, but the Hall has a heritage suspended wooden floor sitting on brick piers and another floor on top of that, so you have to distribute the loads back into the building. We worked with the Hall’s heritage engineers, Coby and Associates, to do that.”
Changes for the artists were also required for the Hall. In a big top, dressing rooms and prep areas etc are typically behind the main tent, but not in this building, so travel times and cues were adjusted and blocking backstage was dictated by the building.
Edwards-Webb estimates that it takes a year’s work of engineering studies and drawing for each show that goes into that building and for this particular show there were 24, 13.5-meter trucks of equipment with an additional 20 trucks of additional gear to facilitate the integration into the building.
For an extraordinary theatrical event, it was well worth the effort.