New York (May 16, 2011)–Cirque du Soleil’s new in-the-round show, Totem, sports Avid Venue Profile consoles at both the FOH and monitor mix positions.
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.
“My plan for the sound design was very clear in my head,” says sound designer Jacques 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.”
“Cirque productions present very complex sound design challenges,” says assistant sound designer Jean-Michel 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. 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.”
“To be honest, I never imagined the sound would be so nice,” Boucher 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.”
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