Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

The white tent at Disney Springs was the first permanent building Cirque du Soleil ever owned, and it has housed only two shows in nearly three decades. The freestanding theater on the West Side of Disney Springs at 1486 Buena Vista Drive, Lake Buena Vista, opened on 23 December 1998 with La Nouba, a Franco Dragone-directed production created exclusively for Walt Disney World. The 1,671-seat showroom - designed by Cirque's Michel Crete with Sceno Plus, Walt Disney Imagineering and New York's Rockwell Group - translated the company's big-top origins into permanent architecture, its white peaks and tensioned fabric forms unmistakable across the lakefront. It was Cirque du Soleil's third resident show ever, after Mystere and O in Las Vegas. La Nouba - from the French faire la nouba, to live it up - ran ten shows a week with an international cast of 67 for nineteen years, becoming one of Florida's longest-running theatrical productions before its final performance on 31 December 2017. Its successor was announced as a first-of-its-kind collaboration between Cirque du Soleil, Walt Disney Animation Studios and Walt Disney Imagineering: Drawn to Life, the company's 50th production, which premiered on 18 November 2021 after a pandemic delay, timed with Walt Disney World's 50th anniversary. Drawn to Life tells the story of Julie, a young girl who discovers an unfinished animation left by her Disney-animator father, and completes it through acrobatic imagination - a love letter to hand-drawn animation researched in the Disney archives and animation research library, honouring artists like Mary Blair, Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas. An international cast of 62 performs five nights a week, blending Cirque's aerial and acrobatic vocabulary with animation projected and reinterpreted live, scored to reimagined Disney music. Surrounded by the shopping and dining district's restaurants and a short hop from the theme parks, the theater remains the Orlando area's premier resident show - the place where the world's biggest circus company and the world's biggest animation studio share a stage.