Cirque du Soleil - Day 32

I don't even know what to say about Cirque du Soleil.  It's been about a month since I saw the show with my friend Gabrielle, and I still can't comprehend half of what happened.  The only explanation we've been able to think of is that the Cirque du Soleil company wrote God a letter and asked him to suspend the laws of nature for a couple hours every day so that they could practice and perform their show.  Because really, there's no way the tricks they did followed the laws of physics.  We weren't allowed to take pictures during the show, but I took a few on the way to the stadium and snuck a few inside before the show started.

The show was on 29 April (Day 32 of my stay here, if anyone's still keeping track) in the Olympic Stadium in Olympiazentrum.  I've never been out there before, but it was a pretty cool place:

I'm not sure what this building is, but it looked interesting:

Along the way, we passed BMW Welt - a BMW factory or museum or showroom or something else cool - because yes, BMW has its headquarters in Munich: 

There's a nice park out in the area too.  Gabrielle says she's been out there a couple other times to relax or do homework:

 

This was part of the main Olympic Center, but I'm not sure exactly what kind of building it was.  Either way, it looked cool:

 

We finally made it to the stadium to find that the show would take place inside these tents, which were set up in the middle of the Olympic Stadium.  I'm not going to lie, I was pretty excited at the fact that the circus actually took place in a circus tent :)

  We bought the cheap student tickets, but the stage was set up so that everyone had a good view of what was going on.  These are some of the pictures I got before one of the employees told me to put my camera away:

 

Varekai was the name of the show.  The premise was that a young man falls from the sky into a new world at the summit of a volcano.  The new world - Varekai - is full of extraordinary magical creatures and the story follows the young man as he explores Varekei and interacts with the creatures there.  There were also more traditional "circus-y" parts to the show, such as a singing act, a magician act, and a juggling act.  The singer and the magician were both ridiculous - the singer had to run around the stage because the spot light never stayed on him, and the magician's assistant was hilarious - but my favorite was the juggler.  He started out juggling the normal things like clubs and balls, but then he switch to juggling little mini balls with his mouth, kind of like when you see someone spit a loogie into the air and then catch it, except he did it with four or five balls.  He was my favorite, outside of the main story.

We were sitting off to the side of the stage, so we didn't have a straight view of the set, but we could see just about everything:

At different points throughout the performance, a few of the performers dropped onto the stage from the platform that you can see lit up in the center of this picture, including when the main character opened the show by parachuting into the new world Varekai:

 These poles were used throughout the performance as part of the background, through which the different performers appeared on stage.  The performers also climbed the poles and swung around between them:

That's all that I was able to get of the actual set, but I bought a program as a souvenir and took some pictures of the pictures in the program:

This is the main character, parachuting into Varekai and doing his acrobatics around this net.  He spent probably about ten minutes swinging around, wrapping himself in the net, unwrapping himself, and doing all sorts of flips and tricks:


This was one of the other main characters.  She was some sort of contortionist, and Gabrielle and I decided she must have zero solid bones in her body - she bent herself into a pretzel, twisted so she was halfway upside down, and did all sorts of other things that really shouldn't be humanly possible:

These were some of the mystical creatures in Varekei and did all sorts of flips.  Half of the time, one of them was flying through the air:

I don't know what kinds of parents let their kids join the circus, but these boys' parents knew what they were doing.  They had a juggling and tumbling routine:

These guys were crazy - all four of them were doing flips and trick off of one trapeze, and half the time they were either climbing all over each other or hanging on to the trapeze by one hand - or doing both at the same time:

This picture didn't turn out so well but this act was so cool that I had to post it:

The guy on the bottom would flip the guy on the top around on his feet, kind of like a seal flips a ball on his nose.  They just kept going and going, to the point where the guy flipping through the air was moving so fast that he kind of looked like a human wheel. At one point, the flipping guy stood on top of the bottom guy's feet and tried to flip from there and land on his feet again...he missed, but got right back up and started flipping again.  That was the only mistake I saw in the entire show, and I was so impressed with how he started again right away that it really didn't matter.

Finally, at the end of the story, the two main characters get married:

I wish I had a picture of the wedding feast, which was the grand finale.  I can explain it much better when I can use my hands to illustrate, but clearly, that's a little difficult on a blog, so I'll do my best.  They brought out these two huge swings, and at first I thought they were just going to walk around on them, maybe go upside down, maybe do a couple of flips off of them, but instead, they went absolutely crazy.  Two or three people were on each swing at a time and would take turns flinging themselves off the swing to land either in a giant canopy that was in the background or on another guy's hands, who was waiting on a platform to catch them.  Then, the two swings turned towards each other, and the performers started jumping off one swing, flipping like crazy in the air, and landing on the other swing after passing someone else going through the air in the opposite direction.  At this point in the show, Gabrielle and I were both going mental, convinced that someone would miss the swing, but everything went perfectly and we were just left completely mind-blown.

Gabrielle and me after the show - I'm surprised our chins weren't on the floor:

So yea, that was Cirque du Soleil.  I'm so glad I was able to go see it, and that Gabrielle was able to come with me - I was originally going to go on my own, but it's always so much more fun to have a friend with you when your mind is blown.