The Bus Project: Technologies, Spectators and Locational Practices‪.‬

In Canada's foremost national English language newspaper we find the following description of Cirque du Soleil's production KA at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas: "Imagine a Broadway stage that can rise, fall, float, become completely vertical, or tilt, often at alarming, gravity-defying angles, and you'll have some idea of what [director Robert] Lepage has conceived" (Posner). Commenting on this marriage of super-technology and the performing body, Lepage states, "the 19th century conception of the proscenium stage was based on a vertical world-with God above, man in the middle and the devils below the trap doors. [...] But the new world is horizontal, as much as vertical. [...] So it should be possible to have a theatre where everything is possible, where there is no floor, no ceiling, no gravity" (qtd. in Posner). Certainly in Cirque du Soleil's mega-million dollar production, technology is foregrounded: "all the theatre's innards lie exposed--[w]inches, cables, conduits" (Posner). However, with all the technological trappings that purport to redefine audience perception in entirely new ways, the emphasis on spectacle and its conventions remains unaltered. What this explosion in entertainment technology, exemplified by KA, fails to address is its relationship to the spectating body and how techno-inter activity poses questions that address the specificities of the spectator in the twenty-first century.