Is there any environment tougher on a sound designer than a canvas tent? "Royal Albert Hall," quips Francois Bergeron, a sound designer and partner with Jonathan Deans in the LA-based Real Time Audio. Bergeron may not have much experience with the famed London venue, but the guy does know tents*: he has worked on the sound for every touring Cirque du Soleil show since 1991's La Nouvelle Expérience. Cirque's latest touring extravaganza is Quidam, which follows a jaded young girl from her family's living room to the fantastic worlds of circuses past and present (at least that's what I think it's about--more on that later); for this, the troupe's ninth production, Bergeron and the rest of the Cirque creative team were brought together once again to create that big top magic.

Of course, magic is easier for some to conjure up than others. Lighting designer Luc Lafortune, for instance, will always have a vibrant canvas on which to create, thanks to the wildly imaginative costumes by Dominique Lemieux and the innovative sets by Michel Crete - not to mention the breathtaking acts themselves. But the challenge is greater for a sound designer in such a venue, mostly because of the venue.

"I mean, it's a damn tent!" Bergeron says. "It's a Kevlar canvas. How the hell can you make it sound like somebody in their living room?"

Not that he hasn't figured out a way to get the sound he wants in the past. "Usually what we try to do is bounce it off the canvas," the designer explains. "Part of the feeling of Cirque is that it's always a reverberant and very dreamy kind of sound. But the sound checks there are very hard, because when it's empty it's very reverberant. But then the public comes in, and everything is absorbed, there's no reverb, no dreamlike effect. So this year, at least sound-wise, the accent was put on quality components in order to beat the acoustics."

The components in question included 15 Meyer Sound MSL-4 loud speakers; it was the first time he'd tried self-powered speakers, and overall he was pleased with the result. "The Meyers made it easier to focus on the crowd, and not bounce off the canvas. Then if we wanted reverb, we could induce a dreamy kind of environment."

Quidam's speaker system comprises five smaller systems. The PAs left and right, primarily used for music, consist of four MSL-4s, two Meyer 650-P self powered sub woofers, and one Meyer UPM-2 per side, the UPM-2s being used mostly for stage coverage. The second system, hung from the tent's cupola, comprises seven MSL-4s (one for each seating zone) and carries mostly vocals. The third system is made up of eight Meyer UPL-1s and two UPL-2s hung in the tent masts and used as delay and fills for the upper seating areas. The fourth and fifth consist of six Renkus-Heinz surround speakers and four Electro-Voice DML-2182s for sub-bass special effects.

Other new equipment on this tour included the Level Control Systems Cue Control software for surround and triggering, Garwood monitor systems (again to fight the acoustics and reverb), and the Countryman Isomax headsets, which were used on the little girl.

"The Isomax is a hypercardioid, so that gives us a little more gain before feedback," Bergeron explains. "Because she's in front of the PA constantly, we have to use that in a headset, because the theatre concept, with the MK-2 and the hairline, that just wouldn't work. That would be feedback hell automatically. It would be lovely if we could record and play everything back, but they insist on doing a live show!"

Bergeron's just kidding, of course. In fact, the designer notes, it's the musicians who usually help hold the entire production together. "There are other shows where it's okay to pre-record, but that's not the nature of Cirque. That's why the band is so great, because at half-a-second's notice they will totally change the music or change the arrangements so that the musical punch will be at the same time the artist makes a big figure or something like that."

Still, he says, such improvisation can make for some tense moments at the sound board, especially since so much on this production is done manually. Cliff Bonnell is serving as soundman for Quidam, and it's his first Cirque production; though Bergeron says he has been trying to pre-program some of the show, a lot is riding on the mixer's shoulders.

"He has to know the music by heart; he has to live it," Bergeron says. "Because if he is not in tune with the band, and the musical director suddenly says,'Okay, she's falling, let's go to A'-well, musically A means something, but sound-wise it also means something. So you have to be there to either go back a cue, jump six, or come back 12. So he has to be on it. If one band has a specific sound, then the soundman has to create that sound live, from top to bottom. But at Cirque, if there's 20 songs, there's 20 different types of ambiance. So you have to redo your mix 20 damn times, and sometimes it's really hard on the soundmen, especially with the acoustics. And this is why we're trying to automate some stuff, because it's hell."

Quidam opened in Montreal May 9; Bergeron began working on the show at the end of 95, which coincided with his work on the European tour of Saltimbanco. Of course, since there are currently four Cirque shows in production, the creative team can't always be at the headquarters in Montreal when preliminary work begins on a new show. "It's always an ongoing thing where, if I'm in London with Luc, we'll sit down and have a beer and chat a bit: 'Well, what do you want to do with Quidam?' "Well, Franco [Dragone, Cirque's director], wants to do this line, and we had a meeting in Montreal and talked about it.' So it's an ongoing process, even when it's not a predetermined creative period."

The creative team assembled in Montreal in mid-March and worked on the production non-stop for the next month and a half. As with most Cirque shows, director Franco Dragone spoke to Bergeron and the others in general terms about Quidam rather than specifics. "Benoit [Jutras, the show's composer] and Franco already had some definite ideas for sound effects that we came up with; those were driven by the story, but it was always a broad statement," Bergeron explains. "It wasn't, 'I want to have the sound of a dog.' It's always very general. Franco would talk about sounds and feelings that he wants, but would never say anything specific."

Perhaps that's why everyone--including Bergeron and the entire creative team--always seems to have a different take on what they see under the Cirque big top. "It's always funny with Cirque in that there's a group of people in a tent, it's freezing, it's February or March, and you want to go home, and then suddenly there's people looking at the show, and they come up with stories that you never thought. You read the paper and the critics come out with stories they see in it, and you're like, 'Oh, yeah, that makes sense.'"

THE BIG RIG UNDER THE BIG TOP

There's usually something to marvel at in every Cirque du Soleil production, whether it's the costumes, the lighting, or, of course, the amazing acts themselves. But for Quidam, the Montreal-based circus troupe's latest touring production, an unlikely star is getting some of the attention--the show's rigging.

Dubbed an aerial conveyor (or teleferique, as technical director Steve Dubuc often calls it), the system was designed and built by Cirque's in-house technical crew. The rigging is made of aluminum and features five rails which are constructed in seven 19' sections for a total length of 120'--basically, the entire length of the tent. Each rail houses two dollies which travel the length of the system; one brings the acrobatic equipment, performers, and props out from a backstage platform dubbed the garage, and the other raises and lowers them to the appropriate height once they arrive at their designated points, which could be somewhere over the stage or above the heads of the audience. Since the truss is curved, the system is computer controlled so that the performers or props traveling on the rail will maintain a relative position to the stage.

"As the dollies advance and gain altitude," explains Dubuc,"the artist can remain in a position relative to the flat surface of the stage. As a result, the two dollies can constantly change position; they're never moving at the same speed, so although the artist is moving at the same speed across the stage, he's always the same height above the stage."

Quidam is Cirque's ninth production in its 12-year history, but this current show marks the first time the troupe has constructed a structure of this size, complexity, and capability. The idea for the conveyor came from set designer Michel Crete, who was looking for a new way of bringing artists onstage or into their aerial positions without having a lot of cables interfering with the audience's view.

"We wanted something nice and uniform," Dubuc explains. "And way back in the conceptual stages, we said, well, perhaps we should use aerial cables. But there were certain mechanical constraints, and we said, well, we can't just have cables going across like a cable car, because it just won't work, not in a tent. So through designing and brainstorming we came up with the idea of trussing. Basically it's like lighting trussing, except that the lower member is a rail."

Crete, Dubuc and the technical crew all worked together to ensure that the designer's ideas could safely become a reality. "Of course, if you're going to build something like this, you do prelimit yourself. You have to say, well, I can have artists go 24' wide and 135' long; I can't really have anybody go outside this if I want them to perform while hanging from the the teleferique. The idea was we didn't want to see a lot of acts go in and out from different areas. We wanted everything to come out from this station or platform in the back that people launch from. We call it the garage."

Design of the teleferique began in June of last year and the final plans were drawn up by October, with actual construction beginning in November in the workshop at Cirque's Montreal headquarters. Initially, the crew built the prototype for a single rail, then put the dollies in and added a drive unit; after some modifications, it was simply a matter of expanding the rig and building five rails across, and getting the proper sized diaphragms to hold it together.

"Of course, the clock is always ticking, right, and it's September and we still haven't built anything," Dubuc recalls. "And then we said, well, this'll work, and this'll work, so then we built a prototype with one rail, and then we built a prototype with the dollies in, and then we built the prototype of a drive unit that worked fairly well. And after that it was just a matter of expanding it and making five across."

Flying acts are common in the theatre - think Peter Pan. But in this instance, it's not just personnel who are being moved, it's also props and other equipment. Add to that the unknown quantity of a constantly changing work in progress, and you've got the makings of an interesting challenge for the tech crew.

"Because of the nature of the circus, everything had to be built differently than for something like a flying ballerina," Dubuc says. "We wanted to be able to put 1,000 lbs on each dolly and have it move. So the size of the truss gets bigger, and the weight and everything else involved gets bigger. But because of the nature of the circus, and because it's a work in progress, sometimes the director will come in and say I want to change something and put 10 people in one position on the truss, and then they're kind of screwed for creativity, because you have to say, no, we can't do that. And the creativity of the circus gets limited by something we've built, because it's not like a Broadway show, where it gets built to a scenario. The scenario isn't completely put together when we build the set. So what we do is kind of satisfy all aspects while leaving as much flexibility as possible for the director and the artistic side of the circus. I mean, if they wanted to go to 3,000 lbs a point, things would get so big it would be impossible to move."

The entire structure is supported by four 44' 8"-high steel masts set up inside the tent, as well as eight anchor points outside the tent. "There's no pickup in the center," Dubuc explains. "It's picked up from either side on an angle of about 30U, and the weight is transferred through the actual rails across, and then back up the other side, and then up to the support masts, which are held in place by the exterior cables anchored to the ground. And depending on the height and length of the cables and the relative level of the masts themselves, the anchors have anywhere between 6-10,000 lbs per point." In addition, each anchor point is equipped with a dinomometer so that the weight can be constantly monitored. Before setting up in each new venue, the anchor points are tested, as is the surrounding soil.

"The whole reason behind all this ground support is, of course, because we can't fly anything off the tent," Dubuc explains. "It's a tent; there's just not much there. There are some points directly at the center that we could use, but they're not great load-bearing; you can't put 10,000 lbs on them. But we don't even need a tent to stand it up. We can actually set it up outside if we wish."

From TCI (Theatre Crafts International), "Cirque du Soleil's Quidam: Francois Bergeron's in-tent sounds." (includes related article on the show's rigging) [date unknown]

* Actually, Cirque du Soleil has given performances in London's Royal Albert Hall, so I suspect Bergeron's remark was intended more seriously than this reporter gave him credit for. [Tristan]