Widely regarded as Cirque du Soleil’s most iconic touring production, Alegría iwas recently staged at London’s Royal Albert Hall as Alegria: In a New Light, before moving on to the Big Top at the L’Hospitalet de Llobregat in Barcelona. For this latest tour, its music has been re-arranged and modernised, and with different instrumentation.
Alegria is also Cirque du Soleil’s most streamed and purchased album of all time – a tribute that is down to Cirque du Soleil Head of Sound, Francois Lanteigne.
Premiered in 1994, and performed more than 5,000 times in 250 cities around the world, has been wowing audiences as the Cirque’s ‘most iconic production’. It tells of a power struggle to take the throne of a once-glorious kingdom that has lost its king, through the use ofexquisite costume, beautifully crafted set pieces and a Grammy-nominated soundtrack.
‘Britannia Row has been providing our sound at the Royal Albert Hall since I came to the venue in 2003 with Dralion, when I was blown away by their turnkey solution,’ Lanteign says. ‘Mixing a Cirque du Soleil show is not a traditional gig; there is a live tableau in front of you, it’s almost like a movie, and you’re mixing the soundtrack live.
‘This can change from a group of 18 acrobats performing stunts with powerful music, to a single character enacting a quiet, sad passage with only an accordion playing. Creating those moments with desired intention while keeping the audience engaged can be a tricky task but doing over 300 shows a year allows you to develop the ability to read a crowd.
‘The title song is the last thing people hear at the end of the show, and when you walk out, the melody stays with you,’ he adds. ‘We must deliver that to the audience in the best way possible.’
Lanteigne has mixed mixed 250 shows in this venue alone, taking the time to sit in different seats and assess the experience. ‘Prediction software is accurate, but listening away from the mixing position is crucial to improving the system design,’ he notes. ‘The sound design has been improved. The technology behind us now is very different to what it was in 1994 when this show started, so we have taken a different approach while keeping the soul of the original concept as a guideline.
‘Britannia Row always has the latest technology, so when we start designing the show on the speaker mapping software, we don’t worry about product availability,’ he says of building the sound reinforcement rig; main hangs of L-Acoustics Kara II loudspeakers, KS21 Subwoofers, A15 wide angle speakers and X8 passive coaxial enclosures.
‘The audience here sits at almost 270º around the stage which makes it harder to achieve a consistent image,’ he says. ‘The design we realised for this venue was to bring six line array hangs close to the centre, above the stage and high enough to be out of sight or acrobatic lines. The low frequencies are tricky to manage for upper levels, so our solution is to run subwoofers from a single location directly in the centre, 20m above the stage. We deal with the floor and stall seats with another sub package, centred underneath the stage, and the results are excellent.’
Lanteigne concludes noting that as Cirque du Soleil productions are built with and known for attention to detail, Britannia Row is an ideal audio partner: ‘Britannia Row apply the same standard to everything they do,’ he says. ‘From the first design drafts to scheduling, cabling details, system installation and fine-tuning until it’s show time, they leave no detail behind.’
