Cirque du Soleil's Totem Brings VENUE Under the Grand Chapiteau

Totem is the latest Cirque du Soleil big production-A spectacular visual and musical how that has been performing in Europe and now throughout North America. The show takes place under the trademark blue-and-yellow Grand Chapiteau, with in-the-round seating and sound. For sound designer Jacques Boucher, the arrangement offers opportunities to design massive sonic landscapes that make the most of the vast space. At the same time, it creates its own unique challenges in adapting technology to meet those artistic visions.

Totem is the first Cirque production to incorporate Avid's VENUE live sound environment, with Venue Profile Systems at both front of house and monitor positions. As assistant sound designer Jean-Michel Caron explains, the Venue systems have more than met the rigorous demands of the show's intricate sound design.

"Cirque productions present very complex sound design challenges," says Caron. "For some of the shows, large and complex matrix systems are used. For Totem, we wanted to find a new approach that would support Jacques' design with a less expensive system, and the Venue system turned out to be the solution we were after."

"My plan for the sound design was very clear in my head," says Boucher. "Typically, this type of design would call for a system with very sophisticated matrix routing. But once I began to look at the configuration of the Venue [system], I discovered it would be possible to do everything I needed to do with it-much more than we had expected."

"The Venue's ability to configure so many output busses enabled us to do a lot more than we could do with any other digital console," says Caron. "We got very creative with cue and aux busses, and ended up doing a lot of things the console was probably never designed for. But the console performed really well."

"This was the first time we'd ever worked on the Venue, and we found it very easy to get used to," adds Boucher. "Even though there are a lot of possibilities, it's easy to reach whatever function you want to reach, very quickly."

Boucher gives the Venue system high marks for sound quality as well. "To be honest, I never imagined the sound would be so nice," he says. "I was very pleased. Music is a very important element of this show, and the music sounds really good. And I guess people really like the music, because at the end of each show we're selling a lot of CDs."

"We've been really happy with the Venue's sound quality, and also with the onboard processing," says Caron. "All the effects we're using-whether it's EQ, compression, reverbs, or anything like that-are the plug-ins that are included with the console. And the Profile is really portable, which is great for a touring production."