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We recently attended the opening night of Cirque du Soleil’s newest production OVO at Liverpool Echo Arena read on to see what we thought.

NB: We were guests of OVO at Liverpool Echo Arena but all views and opinions are my own.

OVO has now embarked on a huge UK Arena Tour which started that night in Liverpool on 16th August 2018 and continues until 7 October 2018.

Tickets are on sale now via the Cirque du Soleil website or at www.livenation.co.uk. A full list of dates and venues is on the website.

Cirque du Soleil is something I have always wanted to see, it’s been on my husband’s wish list for a bit longer, so we were pretty excited to take the girls to see this the newest show.  I’d heard rave reviews of sensational acrobatics, combined with glorious sets and pyrotechnics and wonderful stories that draw you in.  For me OVO contained some of that but not all.

OVO, means “egg” in Portuguese, and as you arrive into the arena that’s all that is on stage. A very large egg. As the show gets closer to starting you wish you’d been in the seats on the arena floor as the insects come out to toy with the audience sitting in those seats and you wish you could be part of that, particularly with the kids.

They tease and they laugh and they twitter and you get a sense of what’s to come. The atmosphere in the arena was one of expectation and tension as we waited.

As the lights went down the ‘love story’ began.  However when I say story it really felt like individual performances. The OVO website describes OVO as representing a “colourful ecosystem teeming with life, where insects work, eat, crawl, flutter, play, fight and look for love in a non-stop riot of energy and movement” and I couldn’t agree more – it did; but I felt the lack of story was what was missing from OVO, nothing specific to tie all the individual performances together.

The individual performances were however hypnotic as the skill that the individual gymnasts had was breathtaking.

We LOVED the all female troop of ant tumblers who tossed giant kiwi fruit (and each other) in the air, it was an incredible opening to the show.

The giant spider Jiangming Qui ended up upside down balancing his forehead on a unicycle and pedalling with his arms.

The incredibly strong spiders who flung their females through the air caused my kids to gasp so loudly I thought they would be heard on stage.

Overall I just thought the in-between bits went on a little too long and didn’t manage to keep the kids attention (or in fairness mine). I appreciate time is needed in-between acts to give everyone, and the set time to re-boot but for me (and those around us who kept leaving to get drinks/go to the toilet/shuffle about – it felt a tad too long.

That being said the kids are still, nearly two weeks on, talking about the show and quite how they could do such things with their legs and their bodies. Practice I keep telling them, a significant amount of practice and perseverance which is a valuable lesson for anyone.

Why not PIN this post about Cirque du Soleil Ovo