Cirque du Soleil: Balancing Acrobatics on Beams of Light

The Cirque du Soleil is known around the world for its amazing acrobatics, its stunning scenery, imaginative costumes, and yes, lavish lighting. Cirque du Soleil’s performance integrates music, color, and movement into one seamless performance. Therefore all facets of the performance, the lighting included, must be powerful, distinctive, and evocative of the performance’s overall story. In order to satisfy these unique needs, Cirque du Soleil lighting designers have tended to utilize large numbers moving head beam projectors and scanners in order to illustrate the performance with light. Cirque Du Soleil’s lighting designers opted for moving head beam projectors rather than followspots because the moving heads are smaller and can more adequately match the quick movements of the acrobats and the music than an ordinary followspot can.

In Cirque Du Soleil’s Show Saltimbanco, 40 scanners were used to color the stage with dynamic color and image. Cirque Du Soleil lighting designers created dramatic lighting effects by using colors that are opposite one another on the color spectrum, such as purple and green, to create stark contrasts, and more importantly, to interact with the performers’ costumes, making them more dazzling. For Cirque Du Soleil lighting designers, color blends with the narrative: each color symbolizes a certain theme or emotion and is used to signal to the audience where the story is going and even the meaning of each scene.

BulbAmerica carries many different moving heads and scanners to so you can dazzle an audience of your own. Though you may not have the incredible acrobatics of the Cirque Du Soleil at your fingertips, you can dazzle with your own breath taking lighting! Check out our scanners and moving heads today! Leave any questions or comments on our blog or Facebook, or call us at 1-877-622-0897.
By Anna Maria Piazza | 08 September, 2010 | 0 comments
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