around Las Vegas before joining Light this year. “You’re so close, you’re able to hang down, and people are reaching for you. ... It’s defnitely more of a personal connection than a stage show, where you’re always going to be removed. For me, I love that kind of [interaction].” In addition to aerialists, a second layer of performers toys with guests. Five to 20 “characters,” including Candy Girl, Bubble Girl, Crystal Lady, Flaming Lady, Lizard Girl and the Sumo, dress in costumes to refect the night’s show theme—while “animating” with patrons in the entrance line from 10-11 p.m., all to get the party started earlier (and pass the time) with a little more fun. “Our ‘room,’ as I call it, is special,” says Adrian Riggs Young, Light’s stage manager who orchestrates the club’s 40-some cast members and seamlessly fts their performance cues into the nightclub’s general operations. “The club-lighting package, the video/LED wall, great DJs—add Cirque on top of that—no other place in the world has all these elements to create such an incredible experience for all your senses.” The man responsible for these experiences? Hassan El Hajjami, Light’s artistic director and choreographer. A four-year veteran of The Beatles Love—where from 2005-09 he actually was the Walrus—the France-born El Hajjami has been an
artistic director for Cirque’s special events for the last three years. Now he’s charged with creating Light’s “tableaus”—the visual, choreographed acrobatic and dance ensembles that all sync to create the acts that take place throughout the night. “It’s not like Studio 54 where we just put out an act and that’s it,” El Hajjami says. He actually develops a storyline in which he winds in characters and aerialists as they dance, swing, hang or tumble high above the crowd, creating an atmosphere in which the crowd feels immersed. For each tableau, El Hajjami collaborates with digital content company Moment Factory, which complements his work with interactive images projected throughout the club. (Moment Factory has famously worked on Super Bowl halftime shows with acts such as Madonna, Black Eyed Peas and Beyoncé. Thanks to its innovation, you won’t have the same visual experience at Light two nights in a row.) “In the end, when you see the storyline and you have the character content, costumes, the DJ—when everything comes together and the crowd stops and just watches—it is super-cool,” El Hajjami says. “For me, for this place, I have one word: ‘Beyond,’” says Marie Grujicic-Delage, 29, a character in the show and former backstage coordinator and consultant for Cirque’s special events from 201013 and El Hajjami’s creative assistant. “I do not
know how a human being cannot be touched by an amazing performance like this.”
More Than JusT a Club Reinvent a club into whatever you want, but it still needs to sound good. Renowned lighting and sound designer John Lyons of John Lyons Systems is part of the team responsible for what you see and hear. With nightclubs under his belt on both coasts, many of which he built for and with The Light Group including the original Light, Lyons calls this latest iteration something different. “While [Light] certainly has a good amount of talent that comes through this place, we wanted to build something that spoke to the large majority of people who go to a nightclub and are kind of forgotten,” he says. “They’re not the people who are buying bottles and spraying Champagne; they’re the people who just go there and want to be entertained. The thing about Light that makes it so successful is that as a patron, if you’re not one of those professional nightclubbers, you can still go with a group of friends and have an amazing time and be completely blown away regardless of who’s playing. “If you think about it,” he adds, “it’s like taking Broadway, the circus and a boy-meets-girl [storyline]. You put those things together and you have a really potent cocktail of stimuli.”
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