THE BALLOON MAN

A piece of Cirque du Soleil
James Cameron-produced movie brings seven Vegas shows to the cinema

 

“Cirque has been interested for quite a while in the notion of creating a film, something for the big screen,” says Jacques Méthé, executive producer of Worlds Away.
 Photograph by: Photo: Mark Fellman
from:  montrealgazette.com
By Jay Stone, Postmedia News
November 29, 2012 
LAS VEGAS — If you walk through the clatter and lights of the slot machines and blackjack tables of the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino, you come to the Kà theatre where — 10 times a week — two Mexican circus performers, Sabu and Francisco Alegria, make audiences feel like their stomachs are falling through the floor.

The Alegria brothers are the stars of the Wheel of Death, one of the show-stopping numbers in Kà, which is one of seven shows that Cirque du Soleil puts on in Las Vegas. Some of them, like Viva Elvis or The Beatles Love, are rock ’n’ roll acrobatic extravaganzas. Others, like Kà, are fantasies with elements of hair-raising athletics.

The Wheel of Death is an old circus act updated for Cirque: two giant hamster wheels that swing on a pivot, rising some 15 metres above Kà’s unique floating stage. The Alegrías walk around the wheels, which in turn spin on the pivot, taking this or that Alegria so high that you get woozy watching them, especially when they climb onto the outside of the wheels and start running and then skipping rope.

And now that feeling, the dizzy sensation of second-hand vertigo, is coming to a motion picture theatre near you.

The film is called Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away, a dreamy compilation of all seven of the Cirque shows, filmed with the Fusion 3D system that James Cameron — one of the movie’s producers — developed and used in Avatar.
Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/movie-guide/piece+Cirque+Soleil/7627566/story.html#ixzz2DhxftDcI