The Chicken Coop

Leonie and I went to the Cirque do Soleil show Delerium last night. Not much to say about this one – more to see, tho as I remembered the camera this time.

It’s not a traditional Cirque show, it’s billed as a concert, not a circus show. Thats about right – fewer mind-bending acts, but more singing and production.

One thing they did exceptionally well was putting a screen infront of the stage. This means the people are a little harder to see (not much), but they projected moving images on it, and it gave the whole thing a more 3D feel than just having the screen behind. Hamish, you would have wet yourself

The pictures are somewhat grainy, as I had to use with ISO 800 or ISO 1600 to get the shutter speed high enough to not have the action be just a blur. Thats the advantage – and disadvantage – of the G9 – most cameras only go to ISO 400, but the added grain is distracting. I’m sure I could clean them up in photoshop, but I dont actually care enough – they are just for memory or on screen, not printing.

Overall, I found it really good, but I think I prefer the circus ones, as they have more story and more acts, with less singing. Varekai is playing here at the moment, but we have seen it in Auckland already, so no point.

One thing however: we didn’t know how good we had it in NZ with Cirque until this. In NZ, we can get within 10m of the stage on a medium-to-cheap ticket (usually $40-60 NZ – about £20-30). Compare that to the O2 – our tickets were around £40 each, and we were about 50m away from the stage – and about 30m up in the air. From memory, the higher-end seats, which are at stage level, were closer to £100, and the corporate boxes much more.