Director & choreographer
Who he is
Mukhtar Mukhtar is a director and choreographer who has spent more than two decades in large-scale live performance. His background runs through Cirque du Soleil, and in February 2024 he choreographed Usher’s Super Bowl LVIII halftime show at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas — about as large as a live audience gets.
His work spans theatre, dance and film across several continents, and the thread through it is fusing traditional cultural material with contemporary staging rather than treating the two as separate registers.
What he changes about your evening
Most dinner shows are staged like a proscenium: performers in front, audience in rows, one direction to look. ALMA is not built that way, and that is a directorial decision rather than a consequence of the venue.
The theatre at Las Caletas is cut into a hillside with jungle immediately behind the stage. Mukhtar’s staging uses depth and height — performers appear at different elevations, action moves across the space rather than sitting in one frame, and the aerial work exists because there is somewhere above the stage to use. If the show feels like it is happening around you, that is the choreography exploiting the terrain instead of fighting it.
What to watch for
- Where the performers enter from. Not all of it happens on the stage floor, and not all of it happens in front of you.
- Group work versus solo work. The transitions between mass movement and single figures is where the Cirque discipline is most visible.
- How the aerial sequences use the height. The vertical space is part of the set, not a bolt-on.
Why a Cirque background matters here
Cirque du Soleil’s discipline is not spectacle for its own sake — it is the craft of sustaining a wordless narrative across a long running time with bodies, music and staging alone. That is exactly the problem ALMA has to solve. The audience at Las Caletas is international, seated outdoors, at the end of a long evening, and there is no dialogue to carry them. Everything that holds attention has to be visual and rhythmic.
The Super Bowl credit points at the same skill from the other direction: choreography built to read clearly at enormous scale, from every angle at once, with no second take. A hillside amphitheatre with the audience wrapped around it is a smaller version of the same constraint.
Staging a show in a place with no road
Every performer, instrument and piece of rigging at Las Caletas arrives by boat, and the venue is open to the sky. That rules out a great deal of what a theatre director would normally reach for, and it forces the production to lean on what the site already provides: elevation, darkness, real fire, and the jungle behind the stage as a backdrop nobody has to build.
It is worth watching for how little of the effect depends on equipment. The moments people remember tend to be bodies moving against firelight on a hillside — which is a directorial choice about what to trust, not a budget limitation.
Where his work meets Caballero’s
Choreography and production design are not separable in a show like this. Mukhtar decides how bodies move through the space; Eugenio Caballero decides what the space is. Aerial work needs somewhere to hang from, entrances need somewhere to come from, and a hillside only reads as depth if it is lit to. The parts of ALMA that feel most designed are the ones where both decisions line up.
No ticket tier sees a different show. Your tier changes which section you watch it from — see the ALMA guide for what the production is, spoiler-light.