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If you've never seen Cirque du Soleil, and you live in Austin, for the next three weeks or so you have a chance to do so.

I've known of them since catching a PPV of "Quidam" about 5y ago. I was fortunate to catch "Allegria" in Austin - way cool.

I found this in today's Statesman's XLLent:

"Sounding both foreign and familiar, the libretto that laces every Cirque shows sounds like every language in the world and also like absolutely no language in the world. Unlike the limited phonetics of, say, jazz scat singing, or even simple fa-la-la-ing, Cirque-speak incorporates a myriad of linguistic sounds: deep gutterals, singy-songy dipthongs, rolled r's. It's a rich enough palette of sounds that it gives the impression that it is a real language.

"But it's not.

...

"Corradi confirms what no one else from Cirque has been able to tell me: That, indeed, there is a written libretto that singers must memorize and yes, it's in a Cirque-specific gibberish. But she declines to speak or sing a phrase or two. To be fair, Corradi tells me that "Alegria," which came through Austin two years ago, includes some words in Spanish, Italian and French ("alegria" is Spanish for happiness), but the rest of the show is sung in Cirque-speak."