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Mixing amazing acrobatics and clashing music and performance styles, Cirque du Soleil has reinvented the circus. And North America loves the dazzling assault on the eyes and mind.
By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 3, 2002
MONTREAL -- As a girl growing up in rural Quebec, Isabelle Chasse loved to climb trees. "I never got scared of heights, never got vertigo," she said. "A lot of kids are into climbing trees, but I was really passionate about it."
Chasse's childhood passion turned into a career. Today, at 26, she makes her living high in the air, as an aerial contortionist with Cirque du Soleil, the innovative circus troupe from Montreal. She has a dazzling solo number in Quidam, the touring production that opens Thursday under the Cirque big top in the parking lot of Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg.
Performing without a safety line or net, Chasse is hoisted by a pair of bright red banners into the upper reaches of the massive tent, where she twists her slender, incredibly flexible body into seemingly impossible, graceful shapes.
Chasse has spent half her life with Cirque, which plucked her and three friends from a Montreal circus school to form a contortionist act. The foursome toured the world in various shows for seven years, going to high school classes with a tutor by day, performing at night and on weekends.
After seven years, the others chose to leave, but Chasse stayed to pursue her dream, which was to be the aerialist she is today. She has seen Cirque grow from a relatively small operation, with one or two productions at a time, into an entertainment juggernaut. The company has three permanent productions in Las Vegas and Walt Disney World's Downtown Disney near Orlando, and five touring shows.
So popular and ubiquitous has Cirque become that it was featured in this year's Academy Awards ceremony.
It is an improbable success story that Chasse thinks stems from Cirque's roots in Quebec, a Francophone province in an English- and Spanish-speaking continent. That separateness gives Quebec and Montreal not just a rich multiculturalism but also a drive to prove itself to the rest of the world.
"I think because we're different than our surroundings, it gives us more freedom to be different in our dreams, in our goals, in our aspirations," Chasse said. "Maybe we have a step ahead because of that."
One of Cirque's early shows was called Le Cirque Reinvente, or We Reinvent the Circus, and that says it all.
People who haven't been to a circus in years will recognize the daredevil acts, clowns and vagabond spirit of the troupe, but they are also in for a delightful surprise. Cirque has indeed transformed the old-style circus, with its seedy trappings and dubious treatment of animals, into a dazzling form of new-age theater.
There isn't a lion, elephant or any other beast to be found in its productions, which feature a dizzying array of athlete-actors, from musclemen to jump-ropers, trapeze artists to synchronized swimmers, airborne ballerinas to little girls doing amazing things with the Chinese yo-yo known as diabolo.
It's a circus for people who think they hate circuses.
In a Cirque show, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The combination of acrobats, theatrical characters and clowns, trancelike electronic music by a band and vocalists (often singing nonsense lyrics), eye-popping costume and set design, and lighting can deliver a potent emotional experience.
Today, as Cirque du Soleil (French for "Circus of the Sun") approaches the 20th anniversary of its founding, it has come a long way from its origins in Baie-Saint-Paul, Quebec. That's where a band of stilt walkers, jugglers and other street performers first mounted a circus as part of a festival in 1984 to mark the 450th anniversary of explorer Jacques Cartier's journey up the St. Lawrence River to discover Canada.
They went on to fashion a genre of entertainment that has drawn its share of copycat circuses, including several from Quebec, but Cirque is unmatched in its ability to fill the big top with a surrealistic blend of acrobatics and art.
"We're great believers in hybrids," said Lyn Heward, chief operating officer of Cirque's creative content division. "We really like this notion of fusion, of people who are able to work together to create that creative clash that is born of bringing diverse styles to the table."
Heward, a former head of the Quebec gymnastics federation who has been with Cirque for 10 years, points to a show called Dralion, which features Chinese acrobats diving through hoops to an African dance beat.
"You've got Chinese boys performing an African act for an American audience," she said. "There's the hybrid, the clash, and it works."
In its early days, Cirque was perhaps more of an acquired taste, as it worked through its aesthetic clash between acrobatics and modern dance, world music and disco, commedia dell'arte clowning and an intellectual approach to the circus.
A turning point came when We Reinvent the Circus was the company's first production in the United States. It was the surprise hit of the 1987 Los Angeles Festival, making the French-Canadians the toast of Hollywood and leading to extensive touring, first in California and then the rest of the country.
Cirque has become a big business under the leadership of founding member and owner Guy Laliberte, listed in program books as "guide." Not for nothing is former fire-eater Laliberte ranked as one of Canada's richest citizens. Cirque productions will draw an audience of almost 7-million this year. The privately held company, with 2,400 employees, including more than 500 performers, has annual revenue of $325-million.
Eight shows are currently running, including Quidam, Alegria, Dralion and Varekai on tour in North America and Saltimbanco, now in Spain, all performed under the trademark yellow and blue Grand Chapiteau, a climate-controlled venue seating 2,600. The other three shows are permanent installations: "O" and Mystere in Las Vegas hotels and La Nouba in a theater built specially for it in Downtown Disney near Orlando.
The productions vary widely in tone and intention.
"They aren't carbon copies of each other," said Mario D'Amico, marketing vice president for Cirque. "It's almost like the progression of an artist: Picasso's early period versus Picasso's late period are two different worlds. That's very much the way this company looks at its business."
Quidam is a young-girl-coming-of-age fable in the tradition of The Nutcracker or Alice in Wonderland. When work began on it, director Franco Dragone and his creative team were fresh from a Cirque retreat held to assess the company's accomplishments and goals on its 10th anniversary. They were inspired to break new ground with the next show and develop a more theatrical style.
"Quidam was where we set out to break down the barriers that seem to exist between circus acts that are strung together in a show," Heward said. "It's where this notion of getting a continuous -- I won't call it a story line -- a continuous theme or series of themes that thread through the production was born. We were going beyond simply performing acrobatic acts into the next step, which was taking acrobats from being acrobats into acrobats becoming artists."
Acrobatics and derring-do are still at the heart of Quidam, a Latin word pronounced key-dam and meant to suggest an anonymous passerby. It has a human-pyramid number called Banquine that Heward and other Cirque officials regard as a classic. The loosely structured narrative touches on a number of themes, including urban alienation at the turn of the millennium, symbolized by a headless figure that carries an umbrella.
"Quidam is one of our most multilayered shows," Heward said.
La Nouba, on the other hand, is almost the stylistic opposite of Quidam. It's a riotous, jaw-dropping display of high-flying athleticism, for the most part, taking full advantage of state-of-the-art stage technology in the Disney theater.
"I would say they are equally theatrical, but Quidam is the more emotional experience," Heward said. "People tend to see themselves in one element or another of Quidam more than they do in La Nouba. What I love about La Nouba is that it's about human kinetic energy."
Then there's the Las Vegas production of "O," still the hottest ticket in town (at $90 and $110) four years after its premiere. The title refers to H2O or the pronunciation of the French word for water. It's a $100-million technological marvel devoted to the concept of infinity that is performed in, on and above 1.5-million gallons of water in the Bellagio hotel.
"You can't compare 'O' with anything else, it's so good," said Serge Roy, artistic director of Quidam and an original Cirque member. "It raises the artistic bar very high. After I have been to 'O,' I just want to be left alone for a while to think about what I've seen."
Cirque has two more permanent productions planned for Las Vegas over the next few years, in partnership with MGM Mirage, but the company remains as committed as ever to taking its shows on the road.
"A touring show does not allow you to go as heavily into the technological experience as with a resident show like La Nouba," Heward said. "We see technology as a tool, but we don't see it as an end in itself. The big top is the environment where we have to work the most carefully in order to be able to express ourselves well, because we don't have the fallback of elevators going up and down 20 feet and all that kind of stuff. It's a more intimate experience. Everything fits within 50 yards."
Cirque's U.S. touring has expanded dramatically to play not just Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and other major metropolitan areas the company has visited regularly since the late 1980s but also many new markets. In 2002, it debuted in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, N.C., and the Tampa Bay area.
The company doesn't give out attendance figures, but the big top is frequently sold out late in a run, when good word-of-mouth has gotten around a community.
"Our average occupancy levels go from 80 to 95 percent," D'Amico said. "Anything below 80 percent we see as a failure. Broadway would be very happy to have 70-plus percent occupancy. We're a little bit more hard on ourselves."
Cirque officials are encouraged by ticket sales for Quidam at the Trop. Already, the company has announced that Dralion, featuring a 37-member troupe of Chinese acrobats, will play the bay area next year.
All this activity is generated from Cirque headquarters, about a 20 minute drive north of downtown Montreal and built on land that was once a landfill. With its sporty architecture, all glass and aluminum and exposed ventilation shafts, the rectangular structure stands in stark contrast to its drab surroundings, the semi-industrial St-Michel neighborhood. It has the look and feel of a high-tech manufacturing operation, not unlike the campus of a Silicon Valley computer company.
In a down-home touch, gardens in the Cirque complex don't contain the usual ornamental shrubbery and flowers. Instead, they are planted with leeks, cabbage, beans, squash and other vegetables, to be prepared for meals in the company cafeterias or given to employees and residents of the neighborhood.
Only some circus-themed artwork on the grounds -- a pair of giant bronze clown shoes, steel figures perched on a stack of chairs -- suggests what goes on inside.
"We take acrobats and try to transform them from their sport background and start their voyage in the artistic domain," said Bernard Petiot, the former gymnastics coach in charge of training at the Montreal headquarters.
Many acts come to Cirque intact from other circuses around the world, such as the 15-member Slavic group that does Banquine, but increasingly, the company is cultivating its own performers.
In October, some 60 athletes were at the headquarters, completing a four-month training program in two vast hangarlike studios full of trapeze swings, twirling hoops, trampolines, climbing ropes, teeter boards and tumbling mats. In one studio, the 60-foot ceiling -- the same height as the big top -- is covered with a catwalk and theatrical and acrobatic rigging.
About two-thirds of the athletes were from Russia, the Ukraine and other Eastern European countries, prime Cirque recruiting territory because of their state-run sport schools.
"In general, those people from the Eastern bloc have very sound technique which allows us to have performers with good basics and a large repertoire from which we can adapt to our world as a circus," Petiot said.
None was guaranteed a job, but if they demonstrated potential, the odds were pretty good they might end up as a replacement in the cast of one of the shows. Cirque has no trouble attracting talented athletes, including Olympic medalists.
"We offer professional continuity that is new in sports like diving, synchronized swimming, gymnastics and trampoline," Petiot said. "If you've been doing your sport for 12 years in international competition, why not extend it another five or six years and make a living out of it?"
In a black-box studio, five limber young men rehearsed a number that called for them to form a sort of mobster chorus line, donning dark glasses and trench coats to a Eurotrash beat, as well as throwing each other high into the air and coming down to balance on a wood beam called the Russian Bar. Their acrobatics were more persuasive than their acting.
"You can count on them if they're doing, say, a triple somersault, that it will be really, really good," Petiot said. "But we have to work hard to have them relax and be more open artistically. In the sport environment, they're the best, but when they come here, they're totally incompetent in the artistic area, and that frustrates them a lot."
It's also difficult for some top-level athletes to become part of a team effort.
"You're not the star of the show. The show is the star," Petiot said. "As an individual, you kind of disappear within the group, but sport people don't want to disappear. They want to be on the podium, standing there with the gold medal. So it's tough on the ego."
Cirque makes virtually all its costumes, props, sets and other stage equipment from scratch at the Montreal headquarters, a $60-million facility that employs 1,000.
The costume shop, with rows of sewing machines, is a large, sun-filled space meticulously organized to meet the demands of shows constantly in need of fresh, form-fitting Lycra unitards and other costumes.
"O," performed in chlorinated water that eats up fabric, orders new costumes every three weeks or so.
The operation is very much a reflection of chic Montreal, with impeccably bilingual staffers shifting from French to English and back at the drop of vowel. That French-Canadian panache is pivotal to Cirque's success.
"There's a certain intensity in Quebecois' way of living," said Heward, who is of English stock herself. "The studio, I would say, is a reflection of that intensity, and also the belief that we can do everything ourselves; that's very Quebecois. We can make our own costumes. We can make our own souvenir programs. We can do our own marketing. We can do all our own casting and training."
Heward, who plans years in advance for productions, sees her main task as bringing new directors and designers into the Cirque fold.
"We don't accept show proposals," she said. "We prefer to make a creative team and let them come up with the vague inklings or premonitions that will make a show. We don't start with a script. Everything we have on the table right now started off as a blank page with a team of creators who wanted to work together. If we want to work with someone, we just call them up and say, 'Hey, do you want to join us on a journey for two years?' "
Stage and film director Julie Taymor, whose imaginative use of puppetry and masks made The Lion King such a landmark on Broadway, is the sort of person Cirque seeks out to head a creative team. Heward said the company approached Taymor, but her schedule was full.
In the latest show, Varekai, the vivid costumes were dreamed up by Eiko Ishioka, whose designs were a highlight of a Jennifer Lopez movie, The Cell. Robert LePage, a Montreal playwright/director and collaborator with rock star Peter Gabriel, has signed on to direct Cirque's new show at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
Cirque is also thinking about venturing into the hospitality business, with a prototype hotel/spa planned in Montreal. The hotel/spa would have a circus theme, with perhaps room service from a mime, a clown at the front desk and a tightrope walker in the lobby.
D'Amico, the marketing executive, says that the idea comes from founder Laliberte's desire to extend Cirque's brand beyond its performances.
"When you come to our show, especially in the big top, we control the environment 100 percent. As soon as you walk onto that site, you're in a magical world. What we learned from our Vegas model is that when people step into our theater, they're ours all the way through the show until they step out of our theater. Then they're in someone else's world; they're in the casino world; they're in somebody else's restaurant.
"Guy thought, 'I'd really like to control the environment of our patrons beyond just the show. Perhaps we can do this by designing a hotel where we are the creative directors.'
"It's at the conceptual level at this point."
Could success spoil Cirque du Soleil? Heward is determined to keep standards high. That, in her mind, means resisting the temptation to impose a formula on the director and designers hired to create a show, a process that takes up to two years.
"We now have this great studio, a casting department, a training program and all the rest, but they're only there as tools, not to dictate the creation process," she said. "That's one of the hard things for those of us who work here all the time, to live with the ambiguity of a new creative process by a new team of designers."
For Petiot, the challenge is to find new and interesting ways for acrobats to fly. "We want to keep them in the air longer, doing more acrobatic stuff up there and not necessarily landing back on the floor," he said. "We want the audience to feel that it's magic, that it's not possible."
D'Amico, who joined the company three years ago, doesn't see any cracks developing in the Cirque mystique. "There's a purity in this company," he said. "The core motivation for putting out a show is not necessarily with the public in mind. The motivation lies with the creators."
The marketer points to a book titled Emotional Branding on his office shelf. "The Cirque brand is all about emotion. There is absolutely nothing rational about this brand. It is purely an emotional brand. People that are really touched by this brand are touched in a very, very profound way that becomes difficult to explain."
Still, at least one Cirque veteran looks back with something like yearning on the time before lavish Vegas shows and huge international tours. Roy, the Quidam artistic director and original troupe member, frets about the bigger-is-better syndrome.
"For me, it's been interesting to see the growth," he said. "In the beginning, we were the left wingers, the kids, the underdogs. Now we're this corporate thing. Is it comfortable for me? Not all the time. I have a good salary, a good life. Everybody is benefiting from the growth. But I would not mind if we decided to do something so different, in terms of deciding to do a show that costs, let's say, $1-million. That would be a very small budget, but I think it would kick our ass trying to be very, very creative."
Cirque du Soleil's Quidam opens Thursday and runs through Dec. 8 under the big top in the parking lot of Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg. Tickets: $45-$65 adults, discounts available for children, students and seniors. Regular box office hours on the Trop site are noon to 10 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday. The box office is open noon to 6 p.m. today and Tuesday. Tickets may also be purchased online at www.cirquedusoleil.com or by calling the Admission Network toll-free at 1-800-678-5440.