The big top is coming back to town.
For the first time since 2023, Cirque du Soleil’s iconic tent will return to to the Philadelphia Expo Center in Oaks for Luzia, a visually-stunning waking dream of Mexico.
Luzia will open May 7 and stay until June 7. Tickets for the general public will be available at www.cirquedusoleil.com/LUZIA.
In a series of grand visual surprises and breathtaking acrobatic performances, Luzia takes audiences on a surrealistic journey through a vibrant world filled with wonders, playfulness and striking artistry.
Smoothly passing from an old movie set to the ocean to a smoky dance hall or an arid desert, Luzia cleverly brings to the stage multiple places, faces and sounds of Mexico taken from both tradition and modernity.
Rich in awe-inspiring moments, Luzia enchants by incorporating rain into acrobatic and artistic scenes, a first for a Cirque du Soleil touring production.
Poetically guided by light (‘luz’ in Spanish) and rain (‘lluvia’), Luzia chronicles the encounters of a parachuted traveler with the culture, nature and mythology of a dreamlike land inhabited by a mystifying menagerie of characters.
In another Cirque du Soleil first, Luzia incorporates water into the acrobatic productions. The idea of placing a water basin under the stage floor and creating a rain curtain paid huge dividends on the acrobatic front.
The element of water enabled the creators to take the Cyr Wheel out of its usual context. Two artists perform on the apparatus on water and in the rain, which is, at first glance, unthinkable. In order to solve the adhesion issue, a bicycle tire was mounted on the wheel rim.
In Mexico, there are as many types of rain as there are clouds that produce it, from the refreshing showers of Coyoacán, an iconic neighborhood at the heart of Mexico City, to the torrential rains that sweep across Baja California, to the plentiful autumn rains, as violent as they are sudden.
In the diversified geography of Mexico, rain is part of the collective consciousness and has a narrative force all its own. The fascination of the Mexican people for the animal world is as evident in the country’s traditions and mythology as it is in its traditional arts and crafts.
This special connection with nature and animal life stems from a poetic, and even magical, vision of reality.
This is apparent in the Mesoamerican concept of the nagual, according to which the spirit of an animal lives in every human being from birth. This spirit protects and guides the individual throughout their life.