Qatar Living gets an exclusive scoop from Cirque du Soleil!

Cirque du Soleil is back in Doha, not preforming on stage, but teaching us the magnificent art behind what we see on stage.

Two of Cirque du Soleil’s artist held a Crossing Boundaries lectures at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar Foundation on Tuesday, October 9th and held another exclusive, invitation-only lecture on Thursday at Qatar National Library.

In both days at the two locations, Denise Tétreault, Director – Specialties, Development & Innovation and Mark DeCoste, Assistant Costume Designer at Cirque du Soleil discussed the creative processes for their costume designs. They have 4500 costumes made per year, a costume can take about six months to a year for one production. For one production, they have 16 costume designers to design for 1300 performers.

The longest time a costume took was four months; it was a complex one made to fit two people, one of whom is Antanina Satsura, a woman around 70 years old, 3-foot-2 who goes by the stage name of Mini Lili. For this particular costume, a man puts on this big belly-shaped costume meant to fit Mini Lili inside it. Denise said that they scanned Antanina to get the exact height and weight in order to design the costume you see below.

Here is a preview of the costume:

Qatar Living got an exclusive invitation to meet the artists, Denise [far left] and Mark.

Here are some of the costumes they brought on display for Qatar to see:

As you can all figure, when preforming on stage the performers sweat and it can get a little stinky, but Mark and Denise told us their little secret how to prevent the costumes from smelling like sweat. They rub alcohol all over the performers’ bodies as well as on the costumes, because that substance dries out the odors of the costumes. However, after every show, in whichever place they preform, they usually take their costumes to a local laundromat. After a while, they give their costumes, they no longer need, for productions to universities so students can learn and be inspired by the amazing costumes.

Are you now motivated to check out when and where they will be preforming in the near future? Let us know in the comments below.

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