Sonic Vegas: Live Virtuality and the Cirque du Soleil

Since its inception in 1984, Cirque du Soleil has achieved increasing global renown for its circus-theater hybrids. These elaborate and innovative musical productions fuse multimedia technology with live, circus-based acts and loose themes or narratives. The company's many independent shows, touring and residential, have been influential across the contemporary performing arts, and have catapulted it to its current status as one of the most popular entertainment enterprises in the world. But despite the company's cultural and artistic significance, it has attracted little scholarly attention, and none at all from the musicological community.;This dissertation aims to address that lack by examining the role of music in a particularly complex and significant subset of Cirque du Soleil's output: its permanent Las Vegas shows. Cirque's Vegas shows offer little in the way of traditional texts for musical analysis: official audio and video recordings are inconsistent in the degree to which they represent the material used during live performance; the few commercially released musical scores are greatly simplified; and, most importantly, the shows change greatly in form and content over the years, a process all but hidden to company outsiders. In order to open up this entertainment genre to musicological research, my dissertation therefore uses a performance-centered methodology, based on direct observations of Cirque's Vegas shows as audience member and backstage guest (during performances and rehearsals); personal interviews with the shows' musicians and directors; and analyses of the shows' more "fixed" traces (CD recordings, "Making of" DVDs, souvenir programs, and so on) in relation to their performances. Through this methodology, my dissertation situates Cirque du Soleil's resident Las Vegas shows within the culture of the Vegas Strip as well as circus and theater history more broadly, and demonstrates the ways in which Cirque's Vegas productions utilize interactive, part live and part technologically mediated musical soundtracks to structure and give meaning to their visual spectacle. By seeing how music is used toward such ends, we are able to reconceptualize music's role in multimedia genres more generally, and to understand more deeply how music can be used to negotiate the relationship between the physical and the virtual in multimedia theater.;The introduction to this dissertation gives an overview of the scholarly discourses into which it enters, lays out the fundamental methodological issues of the project, and outlines my basic argument. Chapter one, "Cirque du Soleil in Circus History," positions Cirque du Soleil in relation to a variety of circus traditions, with a particular focus on circus music. Chapter two, "Live Virtuality in Site and Show," develops a general theory about the virtualization of live, physically grounded experience in Las Vegas and in its Cirque du Soleil shows. Chapter three, "Live-Virtual Tourism I: Absorption and Immersion," addresses the techniques by which sound is used to immerse, and consequently to absorb, the live spectator of a Vegas Cirque show into the production's diegetic realm. Chapter four, "Live-Virtual Tourism II: Aesthetics of Distance," focuses further by examining the musical content of the shows in detail. This chapter comprises an analysis of the musical aesthetics of several of Cirque du Soleil's Las Vegas shows, suggesting that each one attempts virtually to transport the live audience member to a place or time distant from the here and now. Chapter five, "Live Virtuality as Process: Performing Perfection Live," focuses on the process behind the effects, illustrating the musical methods by which Cirque's Vegas shows are able to achieve a sense of live-but-perfect performance. The epilogue brings us to the present, using the broader issues examined throughout this dissertation to help us understand the reception of Cirque's most recent shows and to apprehend the company's position in the world of popular entertainment and musical multimedia today.;In analyzing Cirque's use of music in its live-virtual productions, this dissertation presents a new perspective on the relationship between the live and the mediatized in contemporary musical multimedia. My study demonstrates that in this age of rapidly increasing digitization, liveness in performance is being pushed into new, unprecedented, and even covert roles, but nevertheless continues to lie at the heart of much technologically mediated performance. Ultimately, Cirque du Soleil, an extremely important and complex entertainment genre, invites scholars to rethink the meaning of liveness in a world whose values are shaped increasingly by digital media.