The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  Chantal was Chantal Côté, Soleil’s head of public relations. With the items safely delivered to the Tohu, I had slipped across the street for a tour. By any practical measure, Soleil was the biggest, most profitable, most influential circus that had ever existed. It had catapulted itself from humble beginnings as a troupe of circus radicals to become one of Canada’s biggest companies, with a four-thousand-person staff and annual revenues approaching $1 billion. In more than twenty-five years of existence, Soleil had played to over seventy million people on every continent but Antarctica, and in the process utterly changed the understanding of circus around the world. “They legitimized the circus,” Ed LeClair, the executive director of Cirkus Smirkus, an American youth circus, told me. “They got it out of the carny attitude and helped people understand it could be a beautiful art form.”

  In the early days, when Soleil was just a bunch of longhairs from Montreal, the company received a torrent of criticism for its novelty. “For many tradition-bound fans perplexed by the theatricality and outraged by its lack of animals, Cirque du Soleil is nothing more than an upstart hybrid,” Ernest Albrecht wrote in his 1995 book, The New American Circus. Today the criticism comes from the other side, from “the moderns,” especially in France, where the prevailing opinion of the company hovers between suspicion and outright scorn. Specific complaints vary. The pay, some say, is low for the work. Others claim the performers are treated like disposable cogs: worked, worn down, and then cast off in favor of younger, trimmer recruits. More generally, the company is chided for its “American” (read: commercial) approach to the craft. I heard it called a “circus factory,” a “circus machine,” and the “Hollywood circus.”

  By the time of my visit, I knew enough about both the circus and the French to take such opinions with a mound of salt. The company is hardly a sweatshop. On the road, performers travel with amenities that would have made an elite acrobat weep for joy just twenty years ago: high-end caterers and masseuses at your beck and call, comprehensive health insurance, superb hotel rooms, personalized coaches recruited from the Olympian echelons of sport and fitness. The money is good, and sometimes great. A juggler can make six figures and retire to Switzerland.

  And yet, lingering in the lobby, I found myself feeling cynical. The building, as I said, looked industrial. Everything was too perfectly polished. Waiting for Chantal, I watched a line of hale corporate types and a few acrobats swipe their badges with efficient aplomb through turnstiles at the entrance. Clearly, the company represented a vastly different model from any that had come before. But had the model betrayed its roots? Were these headquarters the base from which Soleil stalked and destroyed the poor, artful circuses of Paris and the rest of the world?

  “You must be here for the tour!”

  I looked up. Chantal, a small, pert woman in casual Friday attire, stood on the other side of the turnstiles. Her hands were open in a gesture of generosity.

  “Welcome to Cirque!” She was smiling.

  I beamed back. “It’s great to be here!”

  And away we went.

  IN THE HOLLYWOOD VERSION of the modern circus story, the birth of Soleil in 1984 is often considered the moment when the circus as an art form rushes headlong into modernity and the present boom. In fact, the shift started almost twenty years before.

  By the mid-sixties, the circus was mostly in the doldrums. In Paris, the Medrano was slipping into financial insolvency under the Bougliones. Across Europe, troupes were packing up their tents and selling their animals at auction (and, in a few egregious cases, abandoning them by the side of the road). The few shows that survived were relegated to cultural irrelevance. “The blindness of critics and the media to the art of the Circus fills me with despair,” circus writer George Speaight complained. Even the most die-hard circus lovers were skeptical. How long could the circus survive?

  Unbeknownst to these doubters, big changes were afoot. As part of the social upheaval sparked by boycotts and brick-heaving students, boundaries between high and low cultural forms were crashing down. Andy Warhol painted soup cans and pop icons. Rock and roll had won out. In the theater, directors such as Peter Brook and Joseph Chaikin staged shows in abandoned factories and warehouses, in public squares and swimming pools. In Vermont, the Bread and Puppet Theater company performed politically charged parades with human-sized puppets. In England, the Footsbarn Travelling Theatre began touring in a tent.

  Many of these artists were drawn to circus. In 1970, Peter Brook staged a circus-arts-inspired Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Royal Shakespeare Company, with fairies swooping in on trapezes and Bottom transitioning into a clown rather than an ass. Some theater companies integrated so much physicality and circus into their performances that those skills came to define their shows. The San Francisco Mime Troupe leaned on juggling and the clownish techniques of commedia dell’arte to make political criticisms.

  Soon, full “new circus” companies began to emerge, troupes interested in remaking the circus itself. There was no official first such company, but the Cirque Bonjour, founded in 1971 by Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée and Victoria Chaplin, daughter of Charlie Chaplin, is often cited as seminal. Accompanied by their pet rabbit, the duo toured France in a little tent, performing a simple, poetic mix of circus skills, puppetry, theater, and magic—“a circus of lightness,” as one critic said.* In Belgium, the Cirque du Trottoir took to the road in 1972. A year later, Christian Taguet, a young Parisian with a background in theater, acrobatics, and music, assembled a group of eclectic performers under the name Puits aux Images.

  Once the movement took hold, foreign artists observed the phenomenon while traveling in Europe and carried the flame back home. In 1975, a pair of married acrobats, Peggy Snider and Larry Pisoni, created the Pickle Family Circus in San Francisco. In Australia, the Soapbox Circus combined with the New Circus to create Circus Oz in 1977. By the late seventies, critics had come up with a name for the genre: the nouveau cirque, or “new circus.” The term is something of a misnomer. For starters, referring to the movement as “new” discounts the advances that had already been made in Russia. But the term also implies a false universality. Among the groups emerging during the period, there were of course similarities: most were small, usually fewer than a dozen people; most eschewed the use of animals, for moral as well as economic reasons. But there were vast differences, too: some performed for children, others for adults; some worked in tents, others in theaters.

  Most striking were the differences in ambition. The “new circuses” were a reaction to the codes that the circus had followed in the previous decades, but they had very different ideas about how to react. On one end of the spectrum were the “neoclassical” or “nostalgic” circuses, such as the Big Apple Circus in New York or the German Circus Roncalli, created by Bernhard Paul and André Heller in 1976. These companies attempted to develop not a circus of the future but an idealized circus of the past, classical one-ring “European-style” shows with ringmasters in red jackets and riding boots, complete with trained horses and dogs.†

  On the other end of the spectrum were the true “modern” circuses, troupes hoping to create shows that expressed the challenges and thrills of their time. One example is Archaos, the French “circus of character.” Founded as Cirque Bidon in 1975 by Paul Rouleau and Pierrot Bidon, the company began as an archly traditional outfit, with twenty-five horses and caravans that toured the villages of France and Italy. By the eighties, however, the troupe had reversed course completely and looked like something out of a dystopic future. Clowns stomped around in leather armor and corrugated metal helmets. Acrobats roared in on motorcycles and in Mack trucks. Many of their shows were politically or socially provocative. One celebrated piece was entitled Beau comme la guerre (Beautiful as War). Another, Metal Clown, told the history of Brazil, including its slave rebellion, through Capoeira dancing set to heavy metal. When Archaos played Paris, tickets sold out months in advance. In 1990, when the company squatted at Cirque d’
Hiver, their event threw the neighborhood into bedlam. It wasn’t kid stuff. (One Archaos program, with tongue firmly in cheek, advised pregnant women to sit near the exits: the show’s unpredictability could induce labor.) The company aspired to create a circus for adults—especially young, cool, urban adults—and by all accounts they succeeded spectacularly.

  As Archaos was budding in France, a group of scraggly street performers gathered across the ocean in a bar in Baie-Saint-Paul, a little town near Montreal, hatching plans for a circus of their own. Several of the performers, including Guy Caron and Guy Laliberté, had seen the burgeoning action in Europe. Their tastes fell between the new and the classical. They liked the modern troupes, but also the refined one-ring shows like Switzerland’s traditional Circus Knie. They longed to create a local company that captured the best of both worlds: the whimsy of the past coupled with the theatrical techniques of the future.

  In 1983 they got their chance. To celebrate the 450th anniversary of Jacques Cartier’s “voyage of discovery,” Quebec announced a series of cultural events across the province. The young crew approached the government with a plan. Laliberté, the spokesperson for the group, was all of twenty-three. His primary professional qualification was the ability to blow a mouthful of kerosene over a raging torch. He wore a ponytail so long it knocked against his backside when he walked. Fortunately, Montreal is known for its lovable eccentricity, and Laliberté is nothing if not persuasive. And so the government agreed to fund a thirteen-city tour to the tune of $1.7 million. The group adopted a moniker that Laliberté had devised while staring at the sun on a beach in Hawaii: Cirque du Soleil.

  The first year went well enough. According to plan, the company trouped across Canada with their classically modern show—mostly traditional acts embellished with touches of futuristic fantasy and a loose story. Audiences responded well to the combination: carried by solid reviews, the company rolled into Montreal in the black.

  But the venture wasn’t all sunshine. In preparation for another tour, Laliberté, by now the de facto business leader of the group, jetted off to Europe, where he plunked down a $10,000 down payment on a new fifteen-hundred-seat tent (twice as big as he was advised to buy), plus $2 million in contracts. To cover costs, the circus expanded its tour, adding stops in Toronto and Niagara Falls. But this time, the crowds failed to materialize, despite positive reviews. The company limped back to Montreal $750,000 in the hole.

  In the United States, where cultural ventures live and die by their ledgers, this would have ended Soleil. But the circus lived under a sheltering Francophone sky, and at a crucial juncture in Quebec history: French Canadian identity was a hot topic; a critically acclaimed local circus led by French-speakers appealed to the powers that be. Moved by the company’s plight, the provincial government refinanced the troupe and retired the debt.

  But the circus couldn’t keep relying on government largesse. What it needed was sustained commercial appeal. As luck would have it, the troupe lived across the border from the richest market in the world, the United States, still largely untapped by the circus frenzy that had seized Europe. Based on its strong reviews, Soleil finagled an invitation to the 1987 Los Angeles Arts Festival. The gig was potentially lucrative, but there were no guarantees; to appear, the company would have to spend its entire budget traveling to Los Angeles and paying for marketing. If Soleil had flopped then, it might have disappeared forever.

  As it turned out, the appearance of Soleil in Los Angeles created a sensation unprecedented in circus history, potentially rivaled only by the arrival of Barnum in New York a hundred years before. Within days, the city was abuzz with word of the strange new circus. Steve Martin, Elton John, Francis Ford Coppola, and other celebrities flocked to see it. Tickets—fifty-five thousand in total—sold out weeks in advance. “It was beyond our wildest expectations,” a musician from that first American tour told me. “It was like we were the stars.”

  Every circus needs a hook. For neoclassical circuses, the appeal lay in nostalgia and nebulous “warmth.” Modern shows like Archaos offered energy, shock, and politics. Soleil produced something else, which it learned from Hollywood: glamour. A circus, its directors realized, could be swanky and fine, with VIP rooms and valet parking. Soleil was a throwback to the extravagant circodramas of the Belle Époque, where audience members wore fur and pearls, elephants slid down waterslides, and acrobats lacking “irreproachable freshness” could be fired on the spot.

  NOBODY AT SOLEIL HEADQUARTERS looked older than forty. Everyone I saw carried a bottle of water or a clipboard. The vibe was equal parts Hollywood movie studio and Olympic qualifying trials. Passing through a narrow hallway, we emerged into one of the company’s training facilities, Studio E, a vast gymnasium at least twice as big as the Great Hall back in Paris. “Wow,” said Chantal, tipping her chin back to take in the space. “We’re a little busy today!”

  And indeed they were. High and low, the hall crackled with acrobatic action. Directly in front of us, a group of women, either tumblers or contortionists, stretched on the floor, their limber legs splayed. Above, a brood of broad-shouldered men hung from a trapeze rigging; I determined from their pythonic arms that they were catchers.

  Chantal let me admire the scene for a second and then got down to business. We talked about how the company created its one-of-a-kind shows. After its initial triumph in Los Angeles and the successful subsequent tour, the troupe found itself at a crossroads. Typically, circuses developed new shows according to one of two models. Most traditional circuses followed what you might call a piecemeal approach: each season, the producer purchased complete acts, which he cobbled together in a few weeks, adding lights, sound, and some minimal choreography. Modern troupes took a more theatrical approach. Rather than temporarily hiring performers for individual acts, a resident ensemble created its own shows from scratch, which it toured for as long as possible. When the market lost interest, or when the company grew bored, it started over, developing a new show for the same performers. This was the model of the majority of the companies in France. The emphasis was on artistry and collective experience.

  Initially, Soleil was torn about which way to go. Guy Caron, the first artistic director, wanted to follow the modern European circuses. Guy Laliberté, more business-minded, argued for a hybrid: Every season, Soleil would create an original show, and hire performers as needed. He thought profits should be reinvested in the business, allowing the company to create new shows, which could tour simultaneously with the first.

  After much discussion, Laliberté won out, and his model is in use to this day. As Chantal explained in Studio E, each new show begins as an idea of one of the company founders. With the assistance of a director, usually imported from theater or the film industry, the idea is fleshed out with themes, characters, and costumes. When the concept is complete, a few pre-existing acts are purchased and added, whole-hog. Most acts, however, are created in-house by the company’s team of directors and coaches, and taught to Soleil’s on-staff performers.

  The system isn’t totally original: the Russians did something similar at the Studio. But Soleil brought the system west and reproduced it on a massive scale. Performing in Los Angeles, the circus started pumping out shows. In 1985, it hired Franco Dragone, a former commedia actor and professor at the National Circus School in Montreal. In 1990, he directed Nouvelle Expérience, a Jules Verne–inspired fantasy. Two years later, the company premiered Saltimbanco, a darker fantasy, also directed by Dragone, starring artists from fifteen countries.

  From a business perspective, the decision to tour multiple productions at once was the best move the company ever made. Each new show solidified Soleil financially by dispersing risk through an additional revenue stream. (Archaos, by contrast, was crippled when a storm destroyed its tent in Dublin.) And because Soleil owned the rights to their material, they avoided paying hefty royalties. In the event of an injury, advanced age, or a nasty contractual dispute, one performer could be dropped for an
other. Shows could tour ad infinitum.

  As you might imagine, however, the system also provoked much disparagement. Keith Nelson, co-founder of the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, once referred to Soleil as the “Walmart of circuses.” The performers weren’t real artists, other critics complained, just painted gymnasts culled from abroad, from Russia and China. “They go to Russia and say, Hello, we’re from Cirque du Soleil! Wouldn’t it be wonderful to work for Cirque du Soleil?” Dominique Jando said in the Clown Bar. “They pay them a few hundred dollars a week, use them for a couple of years, and then toss them out.”

  Obviously, some of these complaints are misinformed. The average Soleil performer isn’t any more an automaton than any actor working in a play, or any singer in an opera. Still, observing the scene in Studio E, I wondered if some of the criticisms had merit. The energy of the hall was unlike anything I had experienced in France. The bodies were bigger; the equipment was shinier. The hum in the air was unmistakably one of efficiency. There was also something notably Slavic about the performers—the blond hair, the light eyes set behind attractive mantel cheekbones. In front of us, a group of men were huddled around a coach who spoke to them in Russian while gesticulating forcefully at a television. A Russian bar lay on the floor next to them. At the back of the group a wiry man in a blue-and-white tank top stood with his hands on his hips; RUSSIA, the shirt said.

  I asked Chantal: how did the company turn foreign gymnasts into first-rate performers?

  “You know, that’s a real issue for us,” she replied, squinting to indicate her seriousness. “A lot of the training is mental. When recruits come to us from sports, they arrive with a competitive mind-set. They try to impress each other, dueling to see who can jump the highest or be the strongest, that sort of thing. We encourage them to take a more collaborative approach, an approach more focused on the audience.”