Cirque du Success
Behind the scenes at today's hottest live entertainment act
Laliberté's life as a new-age P. T. Barnum is a long way, indeed, from his far more bohemian roots in Quebec's late-1970s counterculture. Then a long-haired, accordion-playing troubadour and fire-breather-in-training, he had just returned from a trip busking around Europe. He soon crossed paths with fellow street performer Gilles St. Croix, a lanky stilt-walker who'd become obsessed with combining circus skills and theater after performing in an oddball revue that teamed huge papier-mâché animals with stilt-walkers and musicians.
Another friend, Guy Caron, had found similar inspiration in Europe's cirque nouveau movement of the 1970s, which also scorned live animal acts in favor of acrobats, clowns, and jugglers woven together with choreography and theatrical themes. Caron, who soon founded Montreal's National Circus School, would become a key source of talent and ideas when Laliberté launched Cirque's first major production in 1984.
The decision to do without animal acts wasn't merely a creative departure; it was a practical one. Expensive and controversial, they require the care and feeding of both the animals and their star handlers. Substituting theatrical themes for such traditional three-ring fodder, Cirque lowered its overhead while creating "a whole new circus concept," notes Renée Mauborgne, a management professor, in her book Blue Ocean Strategy.
That's not to say Cirque shunned the genre's classic allures: the clowns, acrobats, and big-top tent. Indeed, Cirque's trademark blue and yellow "Grand Chapiteau" has become a branding symbol. The clowns and acrobats remain, too, "but their roles were reduced and made more elegant by the addition of artistic flair and intellectual wonder," writes Mauborgne. By doing that, "it appealed to a whole new group of customers: adults and corporate clients prepared to pay a price several times as great as traditional circuses."
In fact, Cirque's big break came in a place full of such patrons: Las Vegas, where in 1993 gambling mogul Steve Wynn bankrolled Cirque's first permanent production, an exotic exploration of the origins of life called Mystère, at his Treasure Island casino. Audiences showed up in droves, and Wynn, who had hesitated to even open the mold-breaking show, signed Laliberté and his troupe to do an even more outlandish production, O, an aquatic spectacle that sent synchronized swimmers and divers plunging into a pool-cum-stage.
Circus maximus. Today, Cirque is a Las Vegas fixture, attracting 1 in every 10 visitors to the city. And thanks, in part, to its proprietors' deep pockets, Laliberté and his troupe-including Caron and St. Croix as director of creation and vice president of creation, respectively-have expanded on the circus-as-theater theme, adding ribald cabarets and a martial arts spectacle as they build Cirque into a big-top version of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.
Not unlike the confectioner's foreboding address, Cirque's Montreal headquarters is a paradoxically nondescript building made of corrugated steel and set beside a former city dump. But open the doors to one of its cavernous, 75-foot-high acrobatic studios and you may see Brazilian street performers learning to bounce on brass beds outfitted with trampolines instead of mattresses, South Africans stomping out the latest gumboot dance moves, or Ukrainian trapeze artists trying to best one another at the triple somersault.
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