Cirque noir

They call it “the lion’s den.”

A long-standing tradition at Cirque du Soleil, it takes place during the final stages of rehearsal each time the Montreal-based company launches a new show. Veterans of previous Cirque productions are invited to watch a run-through and offer bilingual support and criticism, in English and French.

One day last month at the MGM Grand Hotel, Canadian stage director Robert Lepage was about to be thrown to the lions for the first time. “It’s a very, very cruel thing,” observed the Quebec City native -- sounding, despite his words, less fearful than eager.

The new Cirque show is the $165-million “Ka” -- rumors peg the budget even higher -- which began ticketed preview performances Nov. 26 in advance of its official opening in early February.

The “lions” were the creators and performers of Las Vegas’ other permanent Cirque shows, “Mystere,” “O” and “Zumanity,” all playing at other mega-casino-resorts on the Strip.

And the lamb was Lepage, 47, soft-featured and soft-spoken, a veteran of the esoteric world of experimental theater and film -- now at the helm as writer-director of the most expensive and technically elaborate Cirque production to date.

He described himself as a bit mystified by life inside a climate-and-culture-controlled Vegas resort -- “It’s like a test to see how colonies will work on the moon, on Mars” -- but energized by the creative prospects.

“To me, it is more exciting than what I see on Broadway. That is the same old recipe,” he said. “Here, there is an honesty about what goes on. It is like the Italian Renaissance -- a bunch of very, very rich people competing to have the most interesting artists build something for them. And why not?”

That attitude seems a perfect fit with the Cirque du Soleil operation, which grew out of a band of street performers roaming the streets of a small town near Quebec City into a worldwide entertainment enterprise with 3,000 employees, including more than 600 artists, and with five touring shows besides the four permanent shows in Las Vegas and another permanent show at Walt Disney World in Florida.

Cirque also recently announced a Las Vegas production based on Beatles music, to replace the Siegfried & Roy show at the Mirage hotel and casino in 2006.

Lepage has been associated with large commercial entertainments before, as designer of elaborate rock shows for Peter Gabriel -- including 2002’s “Growing Up Live” tour, which put Gabriel inside a giant, clear plastic ball that the musician maneuvered around the stage. That show also included an otherworldly pod that descended from the ceiling and morphed from a hot air balloon into a womb into a man-eating plant.

Still, the director, trained at the Academy of Dramatic Art of Quebec and a former director of Canada’s National Arts Centre’s French theater wing, is more likely to be mentioned in the company of innovative theater artists such as Robert Wilson and Laurie Anderson than among the legends of rock ‘n’ roll.

His multidisciplinary production company, Ex Machina, has produced an eight-hour stage production about Hiroshima, “The Seven Streams of the River Ota,” as well as “Elsinore,” a one-man reworking of “Hamlet” that Lepage directed. His movies include 1995’s “Le Confessional” and, in 2000, “Possible Worlds,” starring Tilda Swinton and Tom McCamus, about a murder in which the victim’s brain has been mysteriously removed.

Lepage also created another one-man show, “Far Side of the Moon,” about the sibling rivalry of two Quebec brothers -- the younger obsessed with the U.S.-Soviet space race -- struggling to sort out their feelings in the wake of their mother’s death. Originally performed by Lepage, “Far Side of the Moon” was part of UCLA Live’s Solo Festival in 2002, with another actor playing the dual role.

The not-quite-autobiographical story has since been made into a movie, with Lepage directing and portraying both brothers, who he said represent two sides of his personality: “There is a side of me that is really a big loser, a big liberal pessimist, and there is another side of me that is also very vain.” The film has been selected as Canada’s entry into the best foreign language film competition at this year’s Academy Awards.

Lepage said that “Far Side of the Moon” represents the fusion of two solo shows he had wanted to do: one based on astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s autobiographical book “Men From Earth” and the other about his mother’s death.

“One day, in an alley, I came across this extraordinary thing, it was like the door to a washing machine, like an old industrial round door, and it looked like something from NASA. And it of course reminded me of my youth, when I was fascinated by the space program, and the time that the washing machine broke and for the first time I went to the laundromat with my mother. I felt like I was at Mission Control.

“Often in my work, there was an object or an image or an icon that is a portal, literally, into the subject matter,” he mused. The washing machine door “prompted me to take these two ideas and make them dialogue, make them speak together.”

Finding talent outside the tent

Lepage is not the only Cirque newcomer involved in “Ka.” British architect Mark Fisher, known for his rock concert designs for bands including Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones, masterminded the theater and set design. Jacques Heim, founder of Los Angeles’ hyper-gymnastic dance company Diavolo, serves as choreographer. “Exoskeletons” transform performers into exotic creatures at the hands of designer Michael Curry, a frequent collaborator with director Julie Taymor who received a 1998 Drama Desk Award for outstanding puppet design for his work with her on “The Lion King.”

Still, it is Lepage who will be most responsible for the success or failure of “Ka” -- because he wrote the story.

Though previous “Cirque” shows have been created around general themes, “Ka” is the first to feature a narrative. Not a script, exactly, because there is no dialogue apart from the standard Cirque gibberish -- but, like “Far Side of the Moon,” “Ka” tells the tale of two brothers, and it features a cast of specific characters in conflict instead of Cirque’s usual benign and fanciful abstract world.

Although the “Ka” story has the obligatory Vegas happy ending -- resorts want their patrons gambling, not crying -- there is conflict, battle and peril. And in look and concept, the show is darker than Cirque’s previous outings, with a multilevel, industrial-looking set that has been compared to the labyrinth of the “Matrix” films.

“Ka” doesn’t represent the first time Cirque has used fire as a design element -- and Cirque officials are determined that it not be labeled the “fire show,” the way “O” has become known as the “water show.” But there are more flames -- and fireworks -- than usual. It’s also not the first time Cirque has showcased martial arts movement, but here that becomes central. Choreographed by Yung Biau Lin, the movement represents a fusion of wushu, kung fu, the acrobatics of Chinese opera and the Brazilian martial art of capoeira.

About $130 million of the whopping budget went toward the construction of a new 1,951-seat theater. Built in the space vacated by MGM’s previous long-running show, “EFX,” the venue features massive movable platforms suspended above what the creative team calls the “void” or the “abyss” -- a 30-foot-deep black hole that tends to belch fireballs and smoke and into which most of the performers inevitably tumble as the main platform, called the “sand cliff deck,” shifts from horizontal to vertical.

As acrobatic performer Alvin Tam observed, “It’s not about climbing skills. What you have to learn is a lot of falling skills. There is no floor, and it’s always moving. It’s like trying to brush your teeth with your left hand.”

Flying without a net

“Ka” is an Egyptian word meaning “spiritual double,” but Lepage said that creators of the show also chose the title because the names of many martial arts forms, including capoeira and karate, begin with that sound. (The title most likely carries no reference to ka-ching, the traditional sound of coins disappearing forever into the kind of casino slot machines visible through the glass walls of the “Ka” theater lobby. But tickets do go for $99 and $150.)

Lepage is the first to acknowledge that Cirque is taking big risks by introducing a story line, a touch of darkness and a new director all at once.

In the early stages of the show’s development, Guy Caron -- Cirque’s first artistic director, now serving as director of creation for “Ka” -- proposed bringing more martial arts action into the production. “I said, ‘You have to be very conscious that if you bring in martial arts, this duality means confrontation,’ ” Lepage said. “There is a male quality that circus shows don’t usually have.

“Circus shows are usually very feminine, very sensuous, a delicate poetic world, like ‘O’ with the theme of water,” he continued. “When you bring in the theme of fire and martial arts, and then you bring machinery in, from the moment you get into these predatory instincts, it’s a bit darker and more kind of masculine.”

Although some Cirque officials are determinedly applying the word “cinematic” to “Ka,” Lepage disagrees.

“It’s anti-cinema. You won’t have any close-ups, any feelings of the protagonists,” he said. “The story can only be told in very broad strokes. What is that language?”

UCLA Live’s executive director, David Sefton, who brought “Far Side of the Moon” to the Westwood campus, believes Lepage is the perfect choice to find the right idiom.

“It’s an inspired choice -- this is the most interesting thing that Cirque du Soleil has done since they were of a scale to go to Vegas,” Sefton said. “It was clear for Cirque that they had to find somewhere else to go -- I think they’d be the first to admit this. They had kind of exhausted the possibilities of the straight spectacle show they were doing.”

Actress Swinton, after being directed by Lepage in “Possible Worlds,” calls the director “one of the most centered and joyous creators there is. I think the Robert Lepage-Cirque du Soleil combo boggles the mind in all the right ways,” she said via e-mail from New Zealand, where she is at work on the film “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” “He is endlessly creative and curious, a true searcher and true clown.”

The Cirque du Soleil creative team is fond of saying that “Ka” is about duality, and Lepage said his French Canadian background makes him particularly in sync with the concept.

“In this very English-speaking world and cultural industry, when you come from a small French community north of North America, you want to be part of the world,” he observed. “We’re not satisfied with having only France as a market possibility.

“Quebec wants to brag about who it is, its view of the world and all that, and its way of doing that is to develop performing arts forms that are more visual, more physical, more musical,” he said. “I think Quebec artists have been very clever in finding ways to translate what they do into other vocabularies.”