Cirque du Soleil’s high-flying ‘Ka’ continues to change to stay fresh

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When Spencer Novich auditioned for Cirque du Soleil, he had to call home to double-check one questionnaire point with his mom: Are you afraid of heights?

"No, you’re fine," she assured him.

Good thing. Before long, he was in the cast of "Ka," taking part in a nightly battle that suspends him on wires, dangling him over a near-vertical deck nearly 120 feet in the air.

"I just started getting up on the wall and doing it," Novich says. "In everyday life you’re not going to be up there with that perspective. But you get used to it."

But not too used to it. As the biggest show on the Strip notched its seventh anniversary in November, Cirque du Soleil’s epic continues to undergo tweaks and changes to keep it fresh.

"The idea is if you keep this show being a work piece, it’s fun for everybody," says artistic director Marie-Hélène Gagnon. "Everybody has an opinion (and) not coming in, clocking in, doing the thing you do and then going home, which would be a killer for anybody who likes to work the stage."

The creative team recently overhauled that climactic battle scene, a dazzler in which the show’s opposing forces go at it on the wall, letting the audience watch as if from overhead.

Audiences aren’t really expected to notice that the fighting is more realistic, with a few more characters involved. But both efforts reflect the twin goals of the creators: adding more action and clarifying the story in the only Cirque production that tells one.

"There is a story in the show. The idea of all these little tweakings are to serve it better," Gagnon says.

The MGM Grand epic was Cirque’s fourth resident show on the Strip, and still stands as the pinnacle of a seemingly unstoppable Las Vegas in the mid-2000s. It was still possible then to spend upward of $165 million on a production that would rewrite the rules for what could be done on a live stage.

"Ka" was Cirque’s grand opera (without the singing), and it hired Robert Lepage, a director skilled in opera, to pull it off. (Of late he’s been restaging Wagner’s "Ring" cycle for the Metropolitan Opera).

The three Las Vegas Cirques that followed ("Love," "Believe" and "Viva Elvis") focused more on specific themes than spectacle, leaving "Ka" unchallenged in the sheer grandeur of sinking ships, flying machines and the giant Wheel of Death.

But it’s not based on familiar source material, so the separate adventures of a twin brother and sister, separated by an early attack on their people, could be difficult to follow from distant rows. In late 2007, an aerial adagio between the sister and a Tarzan-like character, officially known as Firefly Boy, replaced some acrobatics that took place on the ground, adding love interest to the story.

The action, particularly in that climactic battle, "was more of a choreographed dance," says Joe Cameron, the acrobatic coach who restaged the battle. "We’re working on our fight scenes to make them more realistic and more technical."

"When they created the show in the first place they had to get it done, and there were all the acts in the show they had to rehearse, and I guess they didn’t really have a whole lot of time to perfect their skill on the wall," he notes. "Over the seven years they’ve gotten better and better."

With some performers logging hundreds of shows on that wall, Cameron says it was time to say, "Let’s see what you got. They were able to do so much more than they were able to do seven years ago."

The battle also adds characters and rearranges them to fit the story. "What I wanted is to have the twins who had lost their kingdom lead the battle that would get them back there," Gagnon says.

After "Ka" takes a vacation in the second half of January, creators will begin reworking other sequences, such as the battle on a ship tossed at sea.

It’s part of a larger marketing effort to distinguish each Cirque title from the other, and to position "Ka" as "this epic adventure," Novich notes. "That seems like something people have this base interest in. To see something like that onstage is an incredible feat."

One such marketing move took the battle scene to the opening night of Comic-Con in San Diego last summer, staging it on the vertical wall of Petco Park baseball stadium.

Comic geeks in the audience couldn’t be any more delighted than Pierre-Luc Sylvain, who plays Firefly Boy.

"I became an acrobat because I’m a big Spider-Man fan. I wanted to be Spider-Man," he says. "So when I have a chance to be vertical on a wall and just fly around, that’s a dream come true for me."

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.