🤸‍♀️Cirque du Soleil’s ‘Drawn to Life’ at Disney Springs blends Disney animation and jaw-dropping acrobatics in Orlando

ORLANDO, Fla. – When night settles over Disney Springs, the stage inside Cirque du Soleil’s theater becomes a sketchbook brought to life.

“Drawn to Life,” an exclusive collaboration between Cirque du Soleil and Disney, drops audiences into a story centered on Julie, a young girl who loses her father, an animator, and discovers he left behind an unfinished animation.

“It is a story of a young lady who loses her father at a young age,” said Kelly Straczynski, the show’s artistic director. “It’s passing the legacy of his animation and getting her to continue the unfinished book that he was creating.”

Straczynski said the production aims to do more than impress viewers with strength and spectacle. It is designed to make them feel something.

“What makes that even stronger is to be able to combine that with storytelling,” she said. “If you don’t emotionally move me on a journey, I just think you look incredible.”

That emotional pull, Straczynski said, can land differently depending on who is watching, children soaking in the visuals and older audience members connecting the story to their own memories.

The show’s performers bring that journey to life without relying on a traditional script, instead leaning on physical storytelling, dance and acrobatics. That approach requires artists with elite technique and an ability to connect.

“We hire professionals at the top of their fields,” said Andre, who performs the role of the mother and also serves as an artist coach. “We are looking for professionals with strong foundation, amazing technique, but we also do look for a mindset to be creatively risky, be able and willing to play, and connect directly with the audience.”

For aerial hoop artists Liz Fraley and Susan Scova, the work is both technical and emotional, a performance that can’t be faked once you’re suspended above the stage.

“It’s transferring movement and dance in the air using an apparatus,” Fraley said.

Scova described it as “something physical and also emotional altogether.”

“You really have to feel it in your body. If you don’t feel it, you get lost,” Scova said.

The audience often sees only minutes of an act, but the artists say those moments are built on years of training, repetition and safety checks.

What viewers don’t see is the backstage machinery that makes the transitions seamless. David Wallace, technical director for “Drawn to Life” and a Cirque veteran of 28 years, said the theater was originally built for Cirque’s “La Nouba,” and retrofitting it for a different show came with challenges.

“One of the biggest challenges we had technically was to make all of the scenic elements work in the space that we had,” Wallace said.

Wallace pointed to scenic pieces that rise from below the stage, then disappear to keep the floor flat for the next scene. Some elements function as tributes to Disney history, including a piece inspired by Mary Blair, a pioneering artist whose bold, modernist color palette helped shape mid century Disney design.

“It is an ode to Mary Blair, one of the first female Imagineers with the Walt Disney Company,” Wallace said, noting Blair’s signature use of “bold colors” and “a lot of primaries.”

Even with careful planning, Wallace said, live theater demands flexibility. If a performer is injured or an act has to be skipped at the last second, teams must quickly re cue the show.

“What happens backstage is it looks like complete chaos, but it’s absolutely organized,” he said.

For guests in the seats, the result is a production that blends Disney nostalgia with Cirque intensity, a show built to be revisited.

“There is so much happening all at once,” Straczynski said. “You can come back and you’ll see a different show.”

You can purchase tickets to see Cirque du Soleil’s Drawn to Life at Disney Springs here.