Preview: Cirque du Soleil - OVO at Newcastle Arena

Cirque du Soleil tours the UK in 2018, with their spectacular new show OVO!

Cirque du Soleil - OVO!

Newcastle Metro Radio Arena

Wednesday 29/8/18 – Sunday 2/9/18

Written and directed by Deborah Colker

A colourful carnival of crazy crickets, amazing ants and flexible fleas, OVO uncovers the natural world at our feet. Rush headlong into an ecosystem teeming with life, where insects work, eat, crawl, flutter, play, fight and love.

Crawling with fun, OVO is a non-stop riot of energy and movement featuring many of Cirque du Soleil’s mind-blowing signature acts including a stunning 14m high flying trapeze act – the biggest of its kind!

About OVO

OVO is a headlong rush into a colourful ecosystem teeming with life, where insects work, eat, crawl, flutter, play, fight and look for love in a non-stop riot of energy and movement. The insects’ home is a world of biodiversity and beauty filled with noisy action and moments of quiet emotion. When a mysterious egg appears in their midst, the insects are awestruck and intensely curious about this iconic object that represents the enigma and cycles of their lives. It’s love at first sight when a gawky, quirky insect arrives in this bustling community and a fabulous ladybug catches his eye—and the feeling is mutual.  OVO is overflowing with contrasts. The hidden, secret world at our feet is revealed as tender and torrid, noisy and quiet, peaceful and chaotic. And as the sun rises on a bright new day the vibrant cycle of insect life begins anew.

Name

The name OVO means “egg” in Portuguese. This timeless symbol of the life cycle and birth of numerous insects represents the underlying thread of the show. Graphically,  OVO hides an insect in its name: The two “Os” represent  the eyes while the letter “V” forms the nose.

Costumes

Complicity with the world of insects

Liz Vandal, the costume designer for OVO has a special affinity for the world of the insects. “I’ve always had passion for them,” she says. “When I was just a kid I put rocks down around the yard near the fruit trees and I lifted them regularly to watch the insects who had taken up residence underneath them. I petted caterpillars and let butterflies into the house. So when I learned that OVO was inspired by insects, I immediately knew that I was in a perfect position to pay tribute to this majestic world with my costumes.” Liz has a signature style inspired by futuristic superheroes and by suits of armour from all eras. These two sources inform her designs for the OVO costumes. Flattering lines and an elongated, corseted look are a nod to the world of super heroes while the segmented shells on many of the garments alternate between hard and soft, much like the armour and the bodies of knights in the Renaissance.

Evocation rather than imitation

Liz’s first challenge was to imagine a way to evoke insects without copying their actual anatomy. “The solution was to connect with the feeling of being face to face with a spider, a cockroach or a butterfly,” she explains. “Then I made detailed drawings of designs that interpreted their morphology. For example, the dragonfly’s wings are evoked by pants made of veined lace, and the mosquito’s stinger by a ‘Mohawk’ of fine red stems. The idea of the shell also became a metaphor, since the word ‘insect’ refers to ‘sections’. This revelation consolidated my approach.” 

Organic/Synthetic

Liz drew on the wealth of experience and know-how of Cirque’s costume shop to put it all together. “Together we developed techniques of pleating fabrics to provide three-dimensional muscle, volumes and shells,” she says. “The result is a sort of organic origami. The most obvious example of that is the crickets’ costumes. The team also explored the textures of wings and shells using the sublimation technique to poeticize them and give them an evocative texture.” In a play of colors and patterns, Liz implemented variations on a theme by incorporating thin lines on the ants and crickets, and pleated abstract transparent outfits for the dragonflies. She also used materials to suggest insects’ shells, and lacy fabrics for the wings and soft sections of their bodies. To enable certain characters such as the mosquito to move, she placed sections of shell within other sections, which open and close to reveal the soft body inside.

Crickets – symbols of the colony

Ten crickets are the key insects in the show. At times, they have detachable legs that break away from their bodies, which the impression that there is an insect invasion going on. “I have a particular soft spot for these characters,” she says, “because their costumes are so sexy, graphic and vibrant.” The Foreigner is a character who lands in the middle of OVO. He is a fly in vintage suit who only reveals his true nature when he falls for The Ladybug. After his transformation, he wears a costume of bristling spines. His lanky, angular form contrasts with the roundness of The Ladybug.

Sources of inspiration

Liz Vandal took her inspiration from many sources, including certain fashion designers such as Pierre Cardin, who focused on graphic lines and geometric shapes. She was also inspired by the slashed sleeves of Renaissance garments. Liz and her team in the costume shop have exploited the permanent pleating technique developed by Japanese designer Issey Miyake, which gives a certain rigidity to material and creates an organic effect. “We pushed this technique even further,” she says, “by printing on colored materials, sublimation and eroding the fabric not only to stiffen it, but also to give it a metallic sheen.”

SOME HIGHLIGHTS

•    Most characters have two versions of their costumes: the first, more lightweight and functional, for their acrobatic performance, and the second, more richly detailed and heavier, for their life in the community.

•  The initial cricket costumes required 75 hours of work each because of their complexity and the need to give them rigidity while maintaining the flexibility and expandability of the material.

Music

To create the musical score for OVO, Berna Ceppas combined the sounds of bossa nova and samba with funk and electro music. And, as you might expect from a Brazilian – there is a lot of percussion in the score. Berna Ceppas sampled actual insect sounds to combine with

 the music directly from the keyboard. He also assigned instruments and individual themes to specific characters. The 7-piece band includes a bandleader/drummer, bass and double bass player, percussionist, violinist, wind instruments player, keyboard player, guitarist, plus one singer. In almost all of Cirque du Soleil shows, the music is performed live. And, unlike musicals, the music needs to adapt to what is going on stage and not the other way around. To do so, the band leader, the musicians, the singers and the sound staff are in constant communication via headsets and microphones.
OVO will keep the whole family buzzing!

SOME FACTS

•  A completely new stage and acrobatic structure have been fabricated for OVO arena tour. A good portion of the original design had to be adapted for that matter.

•  The Wall measures 64 ft wide by 30 ft tall and is a giant projection surface that will be used all across the show.

•  In the remount process, from the Big tent to the arena, new acts have been added to the Ovo show with a small adaptation to the original story line. 

•  The Egg, which is inflatable, measures 28 ft wide by 22 ft tall.

•  The acrobatic structure is at 45’ from the ground and weigh over 22,000 Lbs.

•  The stage floor is made of 225 panels.

Tickets available from our affiliate Ticketmaster UK: http://bit.ly/OVOatNCLarena