Getting Great Coverage Under the Big Top
The Randalls Island production runs through April 27, 2025.
Sound designer Roy Cressey
Close to 10,000 liters of heated (and recycled) water are used for each performance.
A Cirque du Soleil show is always a fun spectacle, and Luzia taps into Mexican art and music for a vibrant celebration of the country’s culture. The current version of the show, which opened March 5 within a 2,600-seat tented venue on Randalls Island in New York City, features everything from dazzling acrobatics to a parachutist diving down from great heights to juggling set to marimba music. There are human performers in elaborate animal costumes and a rich tapestry of sounds, both organic and digital.
Luzia began life in Montreal nine years ago with original sound designer Jacques Boucher, and his role has been taken over by Australian sound designer Roy Cressey. Cressey, who first began working with Cirque nearly 20 years ago, was the head of sound and audio visual for the Sydney Opera House for five years. He has been updating and fine-tuning this show which has myriad moving parts and, over time, an evolving cast.
‘Three Different Pies’
“We separate the big top into three different pies,” Cressey explains to FOH. “We try to replicate a very similar sound for each of those pies. Whereas some of the shows you get more of an upstage feel of the sound originating from there, we have a lot more localized placement of the speakers closer to the audience in those pies on Luzia.”
Those speakers are placed on the three main poles and also mounted for surround positions around the interior of the tent. As Cressey acknowledges, the big top has never been an ideal acoustic scenario, but over many years of doing the show, he and Boucher worked on iterating the designs “to get the best direct to reverberant ratio of the systems and minimize on those reflections, and the size of the audience and even what’s around the site. So if the site’s in a location that is more local to ambient sound, sometimes we have to look at that in the planning of the site. The team in Montreal will take that into consideration when they get a site, because the isolation of the tent isn’t as good as a traditional theater.”
As Cressey describes, Luzia offers a grand, communal atmosphere designed to pull people into the moment, and the challenge is to keep the audience focused on the action without any sonic distractions. At the same time, certain moments allow for the system to move the sound into a localized area. The show has over 80 speakers — including d&b audiotechnik Y, xS, and Ci series and B2 subwoofers. Delay speakers placed around and above the audience act as under balcony delays would in a traditional theater. As noted, the system is split into three pies — prompt, opposite prompt, and then downstage. Cressey and his team went with a smaller speaker system but one that is more distributed, thus they did not need to relay on a bigger and more traditional line array system.
“We went for a distributed thing,” Cressey says. “Then we’ve got some processes in there that basically reverse orientation, so that if you’re sitting on the side the plane flies in the right direction, depending on what pie you’re in.” (The sound of a plane flying overhead is heard at the start of the show.) “When you move into that 270 [degree] seating arrangement away from a pros arch, you’ve got to be a little bit careful on where sounds originating from and traveling to. We can sit in the nice producer seats or at front of house sound and be high fiving, but we’ve got to be thinking how is that for the rest of the audience. We spend a lot of time on that and use a few delay matrixing techniques to support that.”
Good, Consistent Coverage
Cressey is pleased with the d&b audiotechnik line and states that they have a really good complement of speakers that vary in different sizes. “It’s really great when you’ve got a design with size constraints, where you want the voicing of a speaker to go from something very large down to the small thing, and have a consistent approach with only the sacrifice of SPL,” he remarks. “That’s what they deliver very well.” He is also very satisfied with the good, consistent coverage that the Luzia audience receives every night.
This Cirque show is being mixed on Yamaha CL5 and CL1 consoles which are cascaded together. They are running just over 100 inputs. Cressey says that their approach is uncommon as they cascade them over AES “so any input that arrives at one console comes up and is bused to the output of the other. It’s quite versatile. Those consoles have been great and reliable, and we really program them to the nth degree of what they can do. But at the same time, we also have a BSS Blu 806 that does a lot of the traditional matrixing that we would expect to see in theater and has that delay matrix approach I was doing that does the heavy lifting and takes that away from the console.”
Processing and Effects
The show uses some outboard processing, and for effects they employ a Lexicon PCM96 Surround unit. With the show being divided into a sonic triad for coverage, more than six speakers contribute to the 5.1 surround mix. “If we draw it back to first principles, that’s what we started with,” Cressey elaborates. “We leant on the PCM 96 surround because that’s a very nice unit, being a surround algorithm that it processes it with that bus architecture in mind. That’s a real good unit that a lot of more traditional plugins are still a little bit behind on.”
Luzia features a rich palette of instrumentation — acoustic guitar, drum kit, various percussion, brass, and accordion. They use a Locomotive 14B valve compressor over both the tuba and trombone throughout the show. With the tuba being a prominent instrument, both sonically and visually, Cressey wanted it to sound as good as possible. They use Empirical Labs EL8 Distressors on vocals, trumpet, and accordion. They also use an Empirical Labs Mike-E preamp. “We go line into that and use the saturation and compression aspect for different instruments, and we often change that depending on what song we’re in,” Cressey elaborates. “We also have a Waves SuperRack running some plugins in the show outside of the console. So not crazy processing, but just enough to give us some seasoning.”
The band for Luzia features singer Majo Cornejo, the first Mexican vocalist in a Cirque du Soleil show, along with a multi-instrumentalist cast that includes six players, four of whom also perform backing vocals. The audio team run Ableton Live that has some recorded tracks to support them at specific instances. For example, when the marimba act appears on stage, there are some background synths piped in because two-thirds of the players are handling percussion duties at that point. When the drummer is onstage shaking maracas, a drum track is provided in the background.
Vocal and Instrument Mics
Cressey has two different mics for vocalists depending upon where someone is located during the show. If they are in the pit, it is the hardwired Sennheiser E635; onstage, it is a DPA 6066 or 6061. “When they’re in the pit we have the benefit of getting the proximity and the slightly better quality of a handheld microphone,” he says. “That’s another mix.” They also have old school, Elvis-style mics for some acts in the show. The performers are captured through those rather than their DPAs, and there are wireless transmitters in the base of the microphone stands. The production wanted that particular sound, and rather than equalizing the DPA or putting an effect on it to recreate that sound, they went with the real thing.
The musicians are captured via a variety of mics including Shure, Sennheiser, Neumann, Rupert Neve designs, and then RN17s on guitars. “They’re beautiful microphones,” Cressey declares of the latter. “We use Neve Design DIs on the basses and keyboards. It’s a good variety.”
Adjusting for Humidity
Water is used throughout the show, including a thin waterfall that rains down on the center of the stage during select moments, and a pool that opens up for one sequence. “Humidity makes quite a lot of difference to sound,” Cressey notes. “So it’s an interesting effect where all of a sudden you’ve got these thousands of liters of water moving around from one moment to another. It does make a difference, but at the same time the predictability of it is hard to define because it also depends on the relative humidity. It’s an operational knowledge on how to work with it over time as the team gets used to it. There are so many variables. The number of people in the big top is the big one. That’s hard to get, a metric that we could then change the sound of the detail that it needs to be as a result.”
A ‘Holistic’ Mix
The sound and the mix of a show makes a big impact on the experience. A judicious balance must be made so that each act in the show gets the proper sonic support right where it needs it without being overpowered. Cressey calls it a “holistic mix point-of-view” that requires daily interaction with the composer and musicians.
One area in which a Cirque show differs from a traditional Broadway show is the fact that sometimes an act has to be swapped out due to a performer injury or another change in plan. Sometimes the show can be altered as the day’s acts can change in type and order.
“There’s a lot of work that we do from a musical sense to make sure that those transitions flow how they make sense, but also from an orchestration point of view,” Cressey explains. “You often have times where there’ll be a backup act in the show, but that act may be 30 or 45 seconds shorter than the other [main] act. They’re there to cover, so they’re not as technically strong at performing as the lead. What we have to do is change the music, change the mix, change the sound design, to make sure that that goes together, still has impact, but doesn’t just copy and paste what the other artist had.”
He adds that Luzia’s musical director, Sébastien Laurendeau, plays a pivotal role as his playback system offers support with some tracks and sound effects throughout the show, and it sends triggers to the different departments in the show. “He’s corresponding continuously with the stage manager, whether the stage manager is taking a musical cue from him, or whether he’s receiving a cue from the stage manager,” Cressey says. “I bring it up because it gets back to that point of, again, the unique thing in a Cirque show is there is vamping that needs to happen from time to time.”
That vamping occurs when a trick doesn’t go as planned and perhaps needs to be repeated, or when there’s a change in the line-up of the show for the night. So the musical department and the sound department obviously work closely in tandem with the rest of the technical crew when such a situation arises. Cressey says that the Ableton live playback system for a Cirque is a very critical part of how the show control works with what’s onstage. They never want to have silence or any pauses.
He adds, “If there is something that needs to vamp in the show, we want to do that as eloquently musical as possible.” In other words, such vamping occurs if music needs to be extended or shortened for a sequence. This is in keeping with the live nature of the show and music, and thus the ability to manipulate pre-recorded tracks to flow with the situation.
A Delicate Balance
When asked to name the most difficult sequence in the show to design for, Cressey reflects on the fragile moments, including a section called Straps in which an acrobat performs on suspended straps decorated as vines above a pool of water that opens up in the center of the stage. He twirls and hovers above the water and interacts with a life-size jaguar puppet, invoking a mythological figure of Mexican culture.
“A solo act in a Cirque show obviously has a lot of focus on it, and it’s all very fragile,” Cressey muses. “When you’ve got one person on stage, everything can be zoomed in on that, whether that’s lighting, sound, or the performance itself. At the same time, we’ve got a beautiful orchestration in that song, and we want power, but we also want it to build. It’s quite a long song. It’s about a 7 ½ minute act, so it is super important to make sure you’ve got a sound design and a mix that builds and supports that act and also gives it the humility and the fragility that it requires at certain moments. [That way] people are connecting with the artist, and they’re not taken out of the moment by a loud sound or bright lights or whatever it may be.”
Cirque du Soleil’s Luzia
Gear
FOH
- Consoles: Yamaha CL5 and CL1 cascaded
- Pre-amps: Rupert Neve Design RMP-D8, Yamaha RIO 3224
- Speakers: d&b audiotechnik Y Series, Xs Series, Ci Series and B2 subwoofers
- Amplifiers: d&b audiotechnik D20, D80
- System Processing: BSS Blu 806
- Processing: Empirical Labs Mike e, Distressors; Locomotive Audio 14B, Waves SuperRack, Lexicon PCM 96 Surround
MON
- IEMs:Wisycom MTK 952 transmitters, MPR30-IEMS
- Wireless Mics: Sennheiser EM6000 receivers, SK6000 Transmitters; DPA 6066, 6061 and 4099 mics; Countryman B6 and B3 Mircopohnes.
- Band Mics: Sennheiser, Neumann, Rupert Neve Designs, AKG, Beyerdynamic, Lewitt, Shure
