Chattanooga Times Free Press - ChattanoogaNow
Cirque du Soleil’s ‘Ovo’ almost ready to hatch
After seven years of watching the acrobats in the big-top version of Cirque du Soleil’s production of “Ovo,” artistic director Marjon Van Grunsven was still in awe of what the performers were able to do show after show, but she was ready to take on a new challenge. Many in the show felt the same way.
“I did feel that way at the end of last year,” she says. “I felt like we’d done everything we could achieve in a big top.”
As they’ve done since the early ’80s when the production began, the artistic team behind the groundbreaking circus decided to go big by moving the show into the world of arenas. It would mean more people, more space, more opportunities for bigger stunts and way more challenges, including how to maintain the closeness between the performance and the audience.
“Our show is very family-oriented and intimate, and we want it to feel that way,” Van Grunsven says.
“In a big top, it creates that automatically, so we had to realize some of what we do will disappear in an arena. We had to figure out how to make it work, and we rearranged the show a little bit.”
Van Grunsven has been with Cirque for a decade ••• and worked on three shows. Every day is a new challenge, with the artistic team constantly asking the engineers if a new stunt or piece of acrobatic magic is possible.
But even Willy Wonka got bored coming up with new candies, and so it is with Cirque.
“We did six and a half years in the big top,” she says. “We’d come up with ideas and go to the engineers and they might say, ‘We can’t do that,’ so we’d put it on the back burner for an arena. I think we are now exhausting about 80 percent of those ideas. By the end of this year, it will have stabilized.
One thing they didn’t mess with was the storyline. “Ovo,” which is Portuguese for “egg,” is still all about insects. It’s a beautiful world — full of color and diversity and movement — but it is disrupted when a mysterious egg appears and an odd, quirky insect and a ladybug find themselves attracted to each other.
Van Grunsven was born in the Netherlands and spent the early part of her career in New York as a dance teacher, cho- reographer and producer. She also worked in South Korea and Paris. Cirque is like nothing else she has ever done because of the unlimited possibilities for combining storytelling, dance, acrobatics and music, she says.
She admits that sometimes the creative team does sit back and ask themselves, “How are we going to put this together? But, at Cirque, we have a quite brilliant team, and it is quite incredible to see how it comes together. Sometimes the engineers say, ‘No, that is not possible,’ but then they come back the next day and say, ‘OK, you can do that.’”