A Remote Scotch Distillery Is the Setting for Cirque du Soleil’s First Truly Immersive Experience

The Macallan Distillery, situated more than 150 miles north of Edinburgh, is no easy place to get to. It takes three hours by car, more if by train. But the scenery, this being Scotland — a lush country with more sheep than there are people — is most certainly worth the multi-hour, multi-leg expedition. Especially if your blood type, like mine, is Scotch. 

So it was with great surprise that the distillery, for its 200th anniversary, announced that it was celebrating this marquee year with a limited-run Cirque du Soleil performance in its decidedly remote estate. The logistics alone would be incomprehensibly complex, but apparently, it was a plan they’d had in the works since before the pandemic, as early as 2019. 

“We’ve been talking with Cirque du Soleil for probably five years. And The Macallan has its quality ethos and the way we make whisky is our heart and our core. But we love to be creative and we love to tell our story in different ways,” said Rachel Walter, head of operations for The Macallan. “There was a real match. But there was also this focus on nature and a sense of place and habitats and environmental renewal in a lot of their storytelling that really clicked with us. And we started to explore this idea. Wouldn’t this be a really cool, fun way to tell a story?”

And what fun indeed. 

The performance, titled Cirque du Soleil Spirit, was the company’s first fully immersive experience, set in one of the distillery’s 21,000-square-foot warehouses, a short walk from Easter Elchies House, which is The Macallan’s ancestral home. 

“At 150 guests per night, it’s an opportunity for us to create things that are different, create the proximity, show off the virtuosity of our characters,” said Marie-Hélène Delage, director of creation at Cirque du Soleil. “We’re connecting the culture of Scotland, connecting the Highlands and the history of The Macallan — not creating something that’s historical or based on folklore, but creating a new tale from the Highlands with sensory experience.”

Inside, the audience was encouraged to walk around the darkened space to explore and even paint at one of the art “labs.” Multiple acts were going on at once. Stretch out your hands and you grazed a performer, it’s that close. There was aerial silk, hair suspension, tightwire, contortion, juggling, and hoop diving. There was a recreation of the River Spey, revered for its role in whisky production. There was Flamenco dancing and bagpipes. And then, the pièce de résistance: a golden oak tree affixed with drams of The Macallan for audience members to take and enjoy. 

“With a layout in place that took into account circulation, scenery movement, and performance space, three months were spent developing the concept into a mechanically feasible solution. Fabrication took an average of two months and installation took 3 1/2 weeks,” a spokesperson from Cirque du Soleil said. “The River Spey bed is a vinyl-lined trough equipped with industrial pumps to cycle the water from one end to the other; essentially a fountain system that is assembled in place. The main challenges were configuring the modular staging system to the curved profile of the Spey, providing the structural framework to support 15 tons of water, and making the effects look like a flowing river.”

And while everything was something to marvel at — contortionists and all — the most impressive thing about such an immersive experience was its logistics. There were 20 performance artists across 10 countries. There were 15 designers and 69 backstage hands, excluding assembly and disassembly. There were 31 impossibly intricate costumes. And that’s not even taking into account how enormous amounts of building materials were brought in to build the set — or the sheer planning it required to feed everyone involved. 

In essence, it was a spectacular feat of artistry and production. While The Macallan won’t reveal details, the brand has signed a multi-year partnership with Cirque du Soleil, meaning there will be more celebrations to come.