As if a bamboo forest, Russian swings, a falling angel and a dancing firefly aren’t enough to round out the more than 50 performers and 150-person tour staff on Cirque du Soliel’s Varekai, add lighting rigs, dollies, 10 high-definition cameras, a mobile HD unit and an 80-person film crew to the mix and you’ve got a real circus.

Cirque du Soleil Images, the multimedia arm of the Quebec performing arts institution, has taken on the ambitious task of shooting for DVD and broadcast its fourth Cirque du Soliel production, Cirque du Soleil Presents Varekai, exec produced by VP multimedia Vincent Gagne with producer Martin Bolduc, and coproduced with U.K.-based Serpent Films. It is the first time since 1991 that a Cirque show has been filmed live in Canada.

The crew, shooting in Toronto Aug. 31 to Sept. 3, recorded four full live performances from 32 different angles with 10 HD cameras carefully positioned throughout the big tent, as well as two days of inserts, producing more than 80 hours of footage to be digitized and later broadcast on CBC, Radio-Canada and Bravo! in the U.S.

The big tent, usually packed full of dedicated Cirque fans, stands empty on a Tuesday afternoon as the film crew, whose mission it is to extend Cirque’s reach beyond its live audience into film and television, is privileged to a private performance.

Precariously thin netting suspends the protagonist of Cirque’s newest touring show high above the stage in the tiptop of the big tent erected on the grounds of Toronto’s Ontario Place. Below, a lone cameraman shooting close-up inserts stands directly under the performer as he suddenly drops to just inches above the stage in his net cocoon.

The performance is part dance, part drama and all astonishing artistic and athletic talent. Varekai, which means ‘wherever’ in Romany Gypsy language, tells the story of a man who loses his wings and falls into a magical world at the mouth of a volcano.

The challenge for director and editor Nick Morris, who sits inside the mobile HD unit viewing images on 10 LCD screens as the cameras record the evening’s performance, is making the film distinct but faithful to the magic of the live performance. He says he is careful not to assume everything will look good on film just because it is such a remarkable show to watch live.

‘The most excruciating challenge is everyone already thinks this show is fantastic,’ says Morris, who also directed the Emmy Award-winning Cirque du Soleil Presents Alegria. ‘You don’t want anyone to say the DVD didn’t quite capture the live show.’

Because the performers make their acts look so easy, Morris takes extreme close-ups that are intended to convey to viewers the incredible strength and skill of the performers. For example, a woman’s hand gripping the triple trapeze, the muscles in her hands and forearms strained to the limit, white-tipped fingers gripping the trapeze, as she holds herself and a co-performer 15 feet above the stage.

‘I don’t think there’s a place in the tent where we haven’t had a camera. [But] for Cirque du Soleil, the audience always comes first,’ says Morris, explaining how this project differs from live music performances he has filmed in the past, where the placement of cameras took precedence over the audience’s view.

When Morris met with Bolduc, DOP Barry Dodd, Serpent producer Rocky Oldhan and TV lighting designer Mike Sutcliffe, to view Varekai’s debut in Montreal and develop a strategy for the filming last June, one of the first things they had to do was submit plans for where cameras would be positioned, reserving blocks of seats so as not to obstruct the views of any audience members months later in Toronto.

Dodd’s task as DOP is to capture the fantastical live performance without missing a beat, while at the same time adding new magic and depth. ‘The atmosphere and the ambience created at Cirque du Soliel are magical. We have to create magic like they do,’ says Dodd, who has shot four of Cirque’s performance specials, including Cirique du Soleil Presents Quidam. ‘There are clever touches of brilliance all over the place and the hardest part is to transpose that energy and magic on the small screen.’

This is the first show Dodd has done on HD, and he says it requires more thought. Because HD absorbs so much light, Dodd subtly filters the back of the lens to make the pictures softer and more filmic. But this makes focus more difficult, he says. ‘HD is an exact art.’

Dodd and his crew are not the only film unit on set. Producer Fiona O’Mahoney’s four-person crew is backstage shooting a documentary to be included as part of the DVD, which features each of the 54 performers, focusing on 10 to 12 of them more in-depth, giving the viewer a sense of how performers, from 13 different countries, ended up in the circus.

The 90-minute performance art special, budgeted at $2.3 million, will be delivered to broadcasters in December. The DVD and video, distributed by Columbia TriStar, should be released in early 2003.

Cirque series preems on Global

Meantime, Cirque du Soleil The Fire Within, a 13 half-hour documentary series that premiered on the Global Television Network Sept. 15, is a unique behind-the-scenes chronicle of the creation of Varekai.

Shooting began in June 2001 as hopeful artists arrived in Montreal for auditions, and continued through to the end of Varekai’s Montreal run in July 2002.

Cirque du Soleil The Fire Within is the first time the Cirque has allowed a camera crew to film detailed preparations for a new show.

The production team shot more than 1,000 hours of original footage using two camera crews on location in Montreal, New York, Dallas, London, Paris and Sofia, Bulgaria.

Each episode took nine weeks to edit, says Galafilm president Arnie Gelbart, who exec produced with Gagne and Marie Cote of Creations Musca, a subsidiary of Cirque du Soleil Images.

Producers are Gelbart and Bolduc. Lewis Cohen is the series’ director, with additional directing by Bachir Bensaddek. Valerie Beaugrand-Champagne is the series’ creative producer and story editor. The North American broadcasters are Global, French-language arts specialty channel ARTV (Cirque du Soleil sans filet) and Bravo! USA.

Gelbart says ‘the observational’ series keys on the human element of drama, comedy, love and loss, work and play. Tension mounts as production demands deepen and the show gets closer to opening night in April 2002.

The show’s behind-the-scenes look also includes session profiles of technicians, administrative staff in the Cirque’s casting and marketing departments, choreographers and head coach Boris Verkhovsky, live show creators Dominic Champagne and Andrew Watson and Guy Laliberte, president and CEO and founder of Cirque du Soleil, who is also Varekai’s creative guide.

‘It’s really interesting to work with people who want to do new stuff all the time. I’m glad they like what we do because we brought some originality to it and it could have been somewhat more pedestrian,’ says Gelbart.

Cirque du Soleil The Fire Within is budgeted at $3.2 million, with support from the Canadian Television Fund Licence Fee Program. Granada International out of London has world rights. Both Bravo! USA and Granada are among Cirque du Soleil’s established international media partners.

With files from Leo Rice-Barker.

-www.cirquedusoleil.com

-www.galafilm.com