The White Big Top

Cavalia at Qasr Al Hosn took place beneath Cavalia’s signature White Big Top. It is 35 metres high – the height of a 10-storey building – and spans 2,440-square-metres.

Weighing 5.5 tons, the giant tent requires seven trucks for transportation and a crew of 50 people to assemble it.

The White Big Top was designed by an engineering firm in New York and manufactured in Italy. The entire process from conception to completion lasted 11 months, including the five months that it took just to produce the tent itself. Overall, sixty people were involved in the creative process.

The starting point was to create a stage that was larger than life, one that would be big enough to accommodate four-legged artists, who need 10 times more space than acrobats. Also, horses had to have enough space to display both their elegance and speed, eliminating from consideration a stage-in-the-round.

The Stage

The stage is 50 metres wide - equivalent to that of an Olympic-size swimming pool - and 20 meters deep. The stage also includes a 60 metre-wide screen on which images are projected to create a virtual background.