Daunted, yet inspired...

I think that’s how I want to describe seeing Cirque du Soleil’s ECHO this past Friday night: daunting, yet inspiring.

This past September, when my Lovely First Wife and I and some friends toured the national parks in southern Utah, we began our trip in Vegas — not a place we’re fond of — and went to see Cirque’s O at the Bellagio. It was unbelievable in every aspect: technology, athletics, design. As we left the theatre, all four of us had the same thought: What could Cirque du Soleil do with William Blake’s Inn?

So I decided to take the family to see ECHO, basically to STEAL FROM THE BEST, i.e., see what they did in the show that might inspire — if that’s the word I’m looking for — design ideas for William Blake’s Inn.

Oh my.

That enormous cube starts as a white wall that moves forward and begins to turn. 3D videos are projected onto its surface as it turns, and the white-costumed animal characters soar over their imaginary landscape.

That cube come apart, bit by bit, until in the second act…

…we’re down to this. And then miraculously, sometimes without our even noticing it, it is reassembled. It rotates one last time, and the back is completely open with the entire cast, all in dazzling white, displayed as its contents.

As I said, it was gobsmacking. So why do I feel daunted? Two reasons, I think.

One reason is the certainty that William Blake’s Inn will not look like this, no matter what I do. We just don’t have the technology (or the funds) for anything like the cube, the projections, the glowing drone birds that fluttered over our heads at the start of the second act. (Shades of the Milky Way!)

Still, I think we’ll present rather well.

The other is that not-so-secret fear of creative people everywhere: the impostor syndrome. Could I, given the bottomless funding available to Cirque, be equally as creative? For the entire length of my career in theatre, my design ideas were all circumscribed by what I knew we could afford at the time. Sometimes that was a spur to creativity, but mostly it was a limitation.

Likewise, as I began hacking my way through composing music, I often consciously limited my writing to the forces I knew I could count on. Writing for an entire orchestra? Why bother?

But here’s the deal: ECHO was not designed/conceived by one person. There is a sizable creative team to do all that — just like the team that created our “cardboard and hot glue” production of William Blake’s Inn in 2007, and just like the team that will create our world premiere in 2025. It’s not all on me.

That’s the daunting part. What about the inspiration? I’ll save that for Wednesday.