And the only way to do that,” says Lepage, “was to find a reason for conflict in the story. And that’s unusual for Cirque du Soleil. Not that this show is specifically about that, but you can’t create an epic saga if you don’t confront your heroes with difficulty of some kind.”

The underlying theme Lepage chose was the idea of fire: Fire has the power to destroy, and at the same time it gives life and light. “When you have the knowledge of fire, what do you do with it? Do you illuminate the world or do you destroy it? And, that’s a lot of what the show is about,” he says.

For Robert Lepage, the element of conflict lent itself very well to a martial arts treatment. “There’s something very beautiful and elegant in martial arts,” he explains. “Even if it’s only a demonstration, it’s still about two people grabbing at each other. So the big challenge is, how do you do a show that’s not violent, that’s not about violence, that is still very full of hope, beauty and peace, but at the same time deals with conflict?”

And, to make the job even more of a challenge, Lepage decided that KÀ should play with fire the way the Cirque show ‘O’ plays with water at the Bellagio, and that The KÀ Theatre should not have a stage!

Robert Lepage worked with Mark Fisher to transform MGM Grand’s existing theater into an ever-changing performance space that could, seemingly at the drop of a hat, change from an imperial palace into a snow-swept mountain top, a wondrous forest, the depths of the ocean, or even a bird’s-eye view of a battlefield suspended in mid-air.

Their solution was to create a completely empty performance area—a void. That decision pushed the design boundaries out further than Cirque has ever gone. How do you walk into a void? How do you exit a void? Set elements and décors must arrive from out of nowhere and they must disappear into nowhere, too. And, it all has to mesh seamlessly with the story and KÀ’s overwhelming lighting, visual and sound effects.