Cirque du Soleil presents Volta
the Grand Chapiteau near AT&T Park
74 Mission Rock Street, San Francisco, CA 94158
8:00 PM, Saturday, December 1, 2018

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2018 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2018 event list! ☸ On to the next event!

[8:08 PM lights down]

• Mr. Wow Show
  • Otaku Double Dutch jumprope skit
  • Cyr Wheel
  • Waz dance
  • Waz is un-hatted
• Dance of the smartphone-hypnotized clones
• Unicycle Act
• Hanging Lamp acrobatics
• Song with smartphone-clone dance
• Freaks doing trampline tricks in/on/and out of a double-sided “building” apparatus
• Laundry skit from the clown
• [8:47 PM] Strolling violin song
• [8:49 PM] Young Waz BMX tricks while “mom” plays violin
• Tumbling with Mr. Wow
• Bungee girls
• 4 buff dudes on gymnastics rings
  [set ends 9:00 PM]

[9:26 PM sparkly lights to let us know it's time to get going again]

• ? Data Miner's dance
• Ladder dance accompanied by “No one else like me” song
• Waz stalked by paparazzi (!?)
• Tumbling frames
• [9:40 PM] Baton-twirling girl doing tricks with distraction from a roller girl
• [9:44 PM] Hair suspension dance/act
• [9:49 PM] Clown guy miming “Wow” beach skit
• [9:57 PM] Circle of Dreams … some of prior performers out to promenade around the stage
• twin ?slav acrobatic swing set
• [10:04 PM] Waz dance
  [show ends 10:07 PM after all the performers come out to wave and collect additional applause]
  [10:09 PM done! We jet for the car in order to beat the crush of cars leaving the parking lot]

It's a little disappointing that the Cirque website doesn't list the Volta performers by name … I guess that as cogs in the big money-making machine, they're anonymous be design – makes them all that much easier to replace!

• Joey Arrigo: Waz, dancer, lamp acrobatics;
• Camilla Bäckman: violin, vox;
• Danila Bim: hair act;
• Paola Fraschini: Ela, the roller skater girl;
• Rosina Gil: Waz's mom;
• Benjamin Todd: drums, music director.
  
  
• Bastien Alexandre: director.* Bastien Alexandre: director;
• Anthony Gonzalez AKA M83: composer.

Not much to say: if you've seen one Cirque show…

This one was pretty short in the narrative story department … in fact, it's probably better to watch without trying to make any sense of things in that way. For the most part, the acts were very very good, but hey, that's one of the requirements, right?

I guess I'll add that I was underwhelmed with the music too. Not that it was bad, but that I didn't find it very interesting … so I put my attention elsewhere. How many songs got performed? Heck if I know!

After the fact (as I was doing this writeup!), I realized that the Cirque has posted an official summary of the show, but I'm too lazy to change things above – that's a transcription of my spur-of-the moment notes from showtime.

KQED posted a promo article claiming that the finale would be a grand X-Games style BMX act.

Lauren Hernández posted a brief at SFGATE mentioning that one of the bikers was injured (on 12/7?)

Makes me think that the house pulled a last minute switch at our show: substituting the Slav's acrobatic swing set (which was really truly excellent) for the BMX finale (since I didn't not anything about that happening). Maybe they had an accident at the early show today too?

Karen D'Souza posted a review for the Mercury news that includes a decent bunch of photos.

Shannon O'Hara posted a review of the show for the Daily Cal (go bears!)

ABC7 News posted a “behind the scenes” video tour on their website; I would have watched it, but starting off with an ad got me to hit the kill switch. Not THAT interested, thanks!

Starla Sampaco posted a similar behind-the-scenes article with GeekWire that also includes video content and a lot of nice photos. Ads? Dunno, didn't check it out before jotting this note.

Daniel Terdiman posted a review of the show with Fast Company.

Program Notes)

Big thanks to Ting for the photo gallery!

Whoa! This section is incomplete for now, sorry!

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2018 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2018 event list! ☸ On to the next event!