WHAT HE DOES
Writes the software that makes scenery—and sometimes actors—fly across the stages of Cirque du Soleil and other theatrical productions.
where he does It
Las Vegas and at client sites around the world
Travels the globe creating magic for performers and audiences; meets the directors and sometimes the stars of today’s hottest shows.
Phillip Toussaint is crouched inside a hot, dark crawl space, looking down at a giant statue of Elvis Presley. This must be Las Vegas. Peering through a grate at the stage 10 stories below would make just about anyone a bit acrophobic, but Toussaint doesn’t feel "all shook up"—he’s intimately familiar with the motor control cabinets, motorized trolleys, and other gear that surround him and that move the scenery for the Cirque du Soleil production Viva Elvis.
Toussaint points to his favorite collection of nine whirring winches. They lift a 27 000-kilogram hunk of scenery that incorporates seven trampolines; the crew calls it the Got a Lot. Toussaint wrote the code that controls the Got a Lot’s precise travels along a laser-guided path. He’s an automation engineer with Stage Technologies, a maker of hardware and software for automating spectacular set changes and gravity-defying flying effects for concerts, opera houses, and theater companies all over the world. Automation is essential to theatrical performances today for creating effects that would be impossible to produce manually. It’s Toussaint’s job to write the computer programs that, along with sophisticated hardware, guide the movement of stage machinery, scenery, and acrobatic performers, making sure each follows the same path every time.
The opening ceremony of the 2011 Pan American Games, in Mexico, which Toussaint worked on, was a typically intricate project. A projector displayed moving images directly onto the performers as they flew suspended on wires. Toussaint wrote the code that synchronized the projection system with the performers. Using "stuff you learn in high school physics," he says, he calculated the positions of the winches and the cable lengths to engineer the airborne movements of the performers in three dimensions over the stage.
Toussaint, a self-professed computer nerd, always knew he wanted to be a programmer. In high school, he enrolled in a class on theater lighting to fulfill an arts requirement and became excited by the technical challenges of theater. At the University of Arizona, he majored in computer engineering and minored in theater arts.