PART 2 IN A SERIES
Timothy Hastings has been on tour to Prince George before, but he never thought his current show would ever end up there.
Hastings is a carpenter for the Cirque du Soleil show Dralion that opens at CN Centre on New Year's Eve. He is one of the technical trades workers that sets up and maintains the sets and props. It's a job he's evolved into from his childhood in Kelowna, always there at the theatre to help out his sister Claire as she danced around the province. When she was with Ballet Kelowna, Hastings was on the backstage crew and had a good friend in the cast, Prince George's Cai Glover. Glover was excited to take him home to meet his parents and see the P.G. neighbourhood he grew up in when the troupe came to Prince George.
Coincidentally, Glover's sister Eira, also a dancer, went on to work with Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas while Hastings joined the Cirque crew for the global tour of Dralion. Now he is coming back to familiar territory.
You'll actually be able to see Hastings during the performance, a rare appearance for backstage specialists. It's his arm holding up a shovel and a saw for all to see, at two prominent moments in the show.
"For me, this is the best job in the world," Hastings said, not only as a member of the team but as a constant audience member.
"You can easily allow yourself to forget the extreme physical capabilities of these people, and the quality of the Cirque production," he said. "When you see people jump through hoops and make it look so easy, or hold up bamboo poles with just their thumbs, you don't think about how amazingly hard that is. The physical fitness of these performers is daunting to work with sometimes. And after the show they are constantly working out, always stretching, and they eat everything in sight."
Hastings is not the only one on the worldwide Dralion team who could find Prince George on a map without an index. Marisa Vest is from Vernon. She said she was an example of how B.C. interior towns are perfectly capable of producing theatre industry professionals. She got the bug from teachers Dave Brotsky and Monty Hughes at W.L. Seaton Secondary School. She joined in some productions by Powerhouse Theatre, the community drama group. Her parents, seeing the love she was developing for the world of theatrics, got her a season's subscription to Western Canada Theatre Company in Kamloops.
"That was just what I needed at that time in my life," Vest said. She took the University of Victoria theatre program and upon completion, moved to Toronto "because that's where all the big work was. "
She was a specialist in the off-stage side of theatre. She already knew, from seeing the show Alegria as a teenager, that it was Cirque du Soleil she wanted to work for, but before you play in the NHL you have to develop on the farm team. She got on with the lauded Shaw Festival and after some work experiences in the performance industry, she got the nerve up to apply to Cirque de Soleil. She was not immediately hired but put on a watch-list and about a year later received a call from the Montreal-based company with an offer. She is now the co-general stage manager for Dralion.
In her position, she is part of the calling of the moment-to-moment cues during each performance, part of the ongoing training and technical aspects of the Dralion juggernaut, ensuring the technology works to the needs of the performers, and that all are operating safely in their jobs.
"Few people on earth can do what these performers can do, and it is a privilege to work with them," Vest said. "Sometimes you're having a casual conversation with someone upside down, and you forget that this isn't normal for most people, to be chatting with someone who has their leg wrapped around their head."
She is on the road around the globe most of the year. She sees her family little, sleeps in her own home little, but thrives on the work and the tour community it provides.
"The arena show scenario really appeals to me (Cirque also has a number of stationary shows, especially in Las Vegas)," she said. "I get to explore a bunch of different places, work in different venues all the time, and I've now been to 30 countries. You just don't get many other opportunities like this to work on a big show and be so long on the road."
Dralion is nearing its end. The 15-year-old show is closing for good in a few weeks. Prince George is one of its last stopovers. After that, said Vest, she has no set job. She wanted to take a short break to decompress from the life to which she has become accustomed, then hopes Cirque will hire her on for some other show so she can continue with the acro-arts company.
"I love it as much now as the day I started," she said. "And it is such an adventure. There are parts that are challenging, but the positive outweighs all of that by far."
With Kamloops and Prince George both on the final leg of the Dralion tour, she is excited and a little amazed that she gets to work with Cirque so relatively close to where she grew up. Her work has been always at far-flung corners of the globe, and with a strange stew of cultures and languages in her workplace. There are 19 countries represented on the Dralion cast and crew.
"It makes for some unique relationships, which I really like."
