BIG TOP IS UP AS CIRQUE RETURNS
Cirque du Soleil is promising a more intimate show at Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities, which debuts next week at Stampede Park.
Get ready for a different kind of Cirque du Soleil experience.
That would be Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities, the latest Cirque show to roll into town. It doesn’t open until April 9, but Tuesday afternoon, a select gathering of media types were on hand to watch the big top raised, on a perfectly beautiful spring afternoon.
The big top, a blue and gold striped beauty that seats 2,700, looks exactly like the big tops that staged previous Cirque shows, but Kurios company manager Yannick Spierkel says what makes Kurios unique is that it all unfolds on a stage designed to bring the show’s artists closer to the audience, so that they can enjoy a more intimate Cirque experience.
“The stage is much smaller than the other shows that you may have seen,” says Spierkel, “but the reason that Michel Laprise, the director of the show, wanted this to be lower is to make sure that the artists get much more connected with the people who are in the front of the stage.”
Rather than clowns and performers emerging through trap doors, audiences get the opportunity to connect with a dynamic array of characters with names like Mr. Microcosmo, Nico the Accordion Man, Mini Lili and a quirky robot named The Kurios.
It’s all set in a turn of the ( 19th) century world, a much more lo- fi, hands- on world than the one we now inhabit.
The show’s producers call it the retro- future — a tribute to imagination and curiosity.
“It creates a really dynamic ( atmosphere)," says Spierkel. “This show is really a happy show that people come out of in a good spirit.”
The show also features something called the Acro Net, which sounds like a bounce house on an epic scale.
“It’s literally a net, "says Spierkel, “that ... covers the entire stage. We have performers bouncing up to the top of the big top, so it’s very amazing.”
All of it promises to help sweep audiences back in time, Spierkel says, to an era that produced the first great technological revolution.
“It was a period of time when everything was possible,” he says. “All the imagination, all the discoveries were happening, and I think you get that flair during the show.”