Cirque Du Soleil Extravaganza

I just had my first "real" weekend in months. I left Friday afternoon to Las Vegas to have fun (and not to a trade show).

I stayed at the "Aladdin" Hotel and Casino which is currently under construction, because it is being transformed to a Planet Hollywood Hotel and Casino.

I watched two Cirque Du Soleil shows, the two which were the highest on my "have to see" list.
One on Friday and the other one on Saturday. I had already a ticket for Cirque Du Soleil's "KA" at the MGM Grand for Saturday.

I decided last minute to try to get a ticket for Cirque Du Soleil's "O" at the Bellagio on Friday. You can see the "O" Trailer for the show at the official Cirque Du Soleil Website. I was lucky. I got there 1 Minute before the show started and got a ticket because somebody else did not showed up (the show was sold out). I got for $150 a premium seat in Row F (6) right in the center of the row, quite a bargain.

Next on my list are "Mystere", "Zumanity" and "Love"

If you are going to see "KA", try to get seats in the center of the venue and not towards the side, trust me on that. I was sitting at a "medium" quality seat more towards the side. I might have to watch it again from a center seat. Great show! I can highly recommend it. Here are 3 Videos from the Show. You have to watch the 2nd one: Extract from "The Slave Cage", which shows the act "Wheel of Death" which is one of the best parts of the whole show.

Most people I talked to who have seen "O" and "Le Reve" say "O" is the better one which I disagree with. I like "Le Reve" better (playing at the Wynn) . Le Reve is an in-official Cirque show by Franco Dragone, the creator of the cirque shows "O", "Mystere", "Alegria" and "Nouvelle Experience" as well as Celine Dion's "A new Day".

Yeah, I became a Cirque Fan, whcih should be obvious by now. I joined their free Cirque Du Soleil Club to get news, updates, access to special content and promotions. The Membership is absolutely free. I also got most of the shows as video now and several of the shows soundtracks on CD.

Cheers,
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Tools of the Trade

I get often asked what tools I am using for my did my ASCII and ANSI Text art.

Back to ASCII Art Academy

I used first a tool called ANSIDraw which was a piece of junk. The maximum number of lines per ASCII or ANSI the program was able to support was 23 (which is exactly 2 lines less than a page in DOS. Anything above 23 lines triggered a "pause", if "page breaks" were not disabled.) It was unable to load ANSIs which meant, that you had to get the colors right the first time or you had to load the ANSI as ASCII (without colors) and start colorizing from scratch ... argh. You can download Ansidraw at my download page like all the other Tools I am mentioning in this post and experience the pain yourself, it's only 20 KB in size.

I got over this pain fairly quick when TheDaw entered my world. This was a really advanced ANSI Editor compared to anything else that was out there. TheDraw is the Editor I am using to this date. It runs without problems under Windows.

Others preferred the very similar tool which came out a bit later than TheDraw called ACiDDraw, which was developed by the legendary ANSI Art Group ACiD (which stands for ANSi Creators In Demand).


The only feature worth mentioning which sets ACiDDraw apart from TheDraw is the fact that TheDraw is restricted to maximum 100 Lines for a single ANSI File and ACiDDraw had no limitations.

At the Moment seems the Windows Editor PabloDraw to be very popular. It allows multi user collaborations in real-time over the Internet. Multiple user can edit the same file at the same time. Crazy!

If PabloDraw is too crazy for you and the DOS Editors not manageable for you (It's tough if you are not familiar with MS DOS at all), you might want to have a look at TundraDraw for Windows. That might be the perfect alternative for you.

You should try them out, it's Fun!

Back to ASCII Art Academy

Cheers,
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Cirque Du Soleil - Delirium On Tour

I am a Cirque du Soleil Fan for a while. I admit it. I have seen most older shows on DVD and have been only to one Live Show before, " Le Reve" which is played at the Wynn Las Vegas Resort and Casino. Okay, Le Reve is not an official "Cirque" show, I know, but it was created by Dragone, who was one of the most important Show creators of Cirque du Soleil (He created "O" for example). I wrote in detail about my Le Reve experience in April.

Last week came the Cirque to Fresno with their newest show called "Delirium". I was surprised that Fresno was a stop on their Tour. I got two tickets right when they went on sale waited in anticipation for the date of show.



The show was last week and I wanted to blog about it earlier already, sorry. Well, the show was quite different than the other Cirque Shows I have seen. Delirium is making heavy use of video projection. The stage is a long and slim and only the long sides are visible to the audience. The left and right corners are big movie screens where video is played throughout the show supporting the action on the main stage. The Main stage itself had "curtains" which were also used to project video on them (when they were closed). They could adjust them to be either semi-transparent or not transparent at all.

I have never seen so much different singers in a single Cirque Show. They must have had 5 or 6 of them. Music and Video played an important role in this show. There were a lot of dancers and the acrobatic "wow effect" acts were for my taste a bit too scarce. Overall was the show very nice though. A lot of intended references to previous Cirque du Soleil shows were made.

You can see a few pictures from the show within this post, which I took with my Camera Phone.

If you would like to see more (and better) pictures, see the picture gallery at the Delirium Website.

I will be in Las Vegas again at the end of october and are going to watch the Cirque du Soleil Show "Ka" at the MGM and I also want to see "O" one day. May be next year in January, when I go to Las Vegas again. Okay, to wrap up this post, here is a Teaser Video of "Delirium". I did not enabled the "Auto Play" Option. To watch the Flash Video, right-click on it and select "Play". Enjoy.


"Delirium" Teaser Video (Flash) via YouTube