Working Interviews: Blending Fieldwork and Technical Work on Tour with Cirque du Soleil

Abstract

For Cirque du Soleil’s touring arena show Corteo , music is a central feature of every performance and is composed and performed to align with the narrative and the acrobatic action on stage. But the music an audience hears depends on much more than the nightly performances of Corteo ’s live musicians; the touring sound technicians also play an essential role in the show’s musical presentation. In this article, I discuss a methodological approach to my ethnographic research of Corteo ’s sound technicians—a methodology that provides new insights into large-scale intermedia performance environments like Cor-teo . Th rough participant observation, public intercept interviews, and what I call “working interviews”—interviews with the sound technicians that take place during performances or other operational activities—I engage directly with the technical practices of musical production on Corteo ’s international tour. I show that by reconceptualizing participant observation and inter-viewing—two cornerstone ethnomusicological methods—working interviews can reveal what is obscured in live music settings like Corteo . I provide an example of remote communication between sound technicians during a performance and show how a working interview helped me theorize a new mode of emotional labour amongst sound technicians—one that is gendered masculine and characterized by stoicism. I begin with an overview of Cirque du Soleil ( CDS ) and Corteo , my own background as a CDS sound technician, and my fi eldwork research methods, paying particular attention to working inter-views. I then move to a detailed discussion of emotional labour, showing how I expand de fi nitions through the context of Corteo ’s sound technicians. Finally, to illustrate the value of working interviews as an ethnographic method, I provide a description of a moment during a performance of Corteo , excerpted from a working interview, that facilitated my theorization of stoic, masculine emotional labour on tour.