Late last week Sam emailed me asking if I wanted to go to “Cavalia” with her. I had seen the billboards around town:
I assumed it was some sort of horse show. I knew that Sam liked horses, although until this weekend I didn’t know just how much. She likes them a lot.
After she asked me I googled it and found out it was a cirque du soleil show featuring horses. I said I would go (I’ve never seen a cirque show, but secretly always wanted to see Love, the Beatles themed one).
Saturday was unusually cold in Southern California. The show was in Burbank, which is one of the coldest parts of the valley. The location was next to the bridge that leads to the Burbank mall. Like some crazy movie set, there, in an old parking lot, a bunch of white spires pulled huge tents up into the night sky. Here is Sam standing in front of the entrance to the main tent:
Inside the main circus tent half of the space was devoted to rapidly ascending bleachers and the other half a very deep and very wide stage. There were no photographs allowed, but Sam snapped this on her phone after the show was over:
Apparently Sam’s impression of the show and mine were complete opposites. She would have preferred a show with 100% horses every minute, and I would have preferred a show with 0% horses and 100% acrobatics/tricks. I was lost a lot of the time. There was an extraordinary amount of time devoted to just watching large groups of horses milling about or running around in circles. The horses were also made to do a lot of “tricks” like walking in various formations. Watching horses walk backwards in a row wasn’t impressive to me after seeing a human being do a back flip on top of a rolling 5 foot high ball – but then I’m not the target audience here, this was a show for horse lovers. The ticket prices were no less expensive than a regular cirque show (Sam found discounted tickets for under $100 each, but still quite expensive in my book), but there were 49 horses in the show, so if seeing horses was the goal, the audience got their money’s worth.
I liked that the music was performed by a live band, which was made visible at times behind the stage, if only to prove they really were playing live. The show also employed a lot of lighting and atmospheric effects like projecting images on falling water, snow machines, etc.
Because the show involved so many animals there were a few times where miscues happened. For instance, after an acrobat flipped on top of the rolling ball he stopped and waited for a horse to come out. The horse came out to him but the horse and the man just waited for a good five minutes. The man would slowly roll himself on the ball around, tap on the horses neck and wait for something. Eventually the horse walked off the stage and he waved goodbye. I wonder what was supposed to happen, perhaps a flip off of the ball onto the horse?
It was definitely a unique experience.
