The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  I asked her for an example.

  “Oh, there are all sorts of little ways,” she replied. “We’re very conscious of environment, for example. Like this …” She reached up behind us and tugged at a black curtain hanging over the doorway. “This was a recent addition.”

  I reached up and stroked the curtain. It was velvet.

  “It’s a curtain,” I said.

  Chantal nodded. “That’s right. It communicates they’ve entered a theatrical environment.”

  I felt my eyes move between the curtain and the hall of burly gymnasts.

  “Of course, that’s just an example,” Chantal added quickly.

  “Okay.”

  “Most of our work is centered on helping them develop the tools necessary to connect to an audience—their voices, their sense of rhythm, how they use their eyes. In a performance, the goal is communication as an instrument; we teach them how to reach off the stage and really grab somebody.”

  It wasn’t hard to imagine the French response: Bof! You can teach a bear to dance but it is still, hélas, just a bear! Where is the art? La créativité? But I opted not to press Chantal on the issue. It was beside the point. Soleil was trying to make performers, not artists.

  The Russians in front of us were on the move. The little fellow in the RUSSIA tank top led the charge. Behind him, his beefy compatriots marched in pairs. One of the men held a Russian bar, a flexible balance beam, like a spear. From somewhere in the ceiling, a line of classical music, vaguely Wagnerian, drifted into the space.

  “But of course it’s not entirely up to us,” Chantal remarked, apparently oblivious to the gathering action. “The performers have to take creative responsibility for themselves, and we try to leave room for that.”

  I watched the Russians. The little one had stepped onto the bar, which the bigger men were hoisting onto their shoulders.

  “Dancers, for example, can become dance captains. At that point they are in charge of an entire team and can suggest changes in the choreography.”

  The little Russian started to bounce, low at first, then higher, landing on the bar each time.

  “Or take Viktor Kee, the juggler. He was a relentless artist, always tweaking his routine. And we encouraged that! Whenever he proposed changes, we said, Sure, go ahead.”

  The Russian was really going at it now, rocketing himself skyward. He flew ten, maybe twenty feet in the air, his tank top rippling.

  “Of course, it’s in our best interest to help our performers stay interested. If you’re willing to grow, we’ll help you. But, let’s also be honest, the circus is a job. And like any job …”

  Now the little Russian had launched into the meat of his routine, a series of impossibly difficult flips and twists. His lean body sliced the air. Each time he landed, the big men bent at the knees to receive him, then launched him skyward again.

  I had never witnessed anything like it. In the circus smorgasbord, the Russian bar is a standard entrée. But in height, difficulty, and execution, the little Russian was an order of magnitude better than anybody else I’d seen. His form was flawless: his body was perfectly arched, his toes were tightly pointed. With each trick, I felt my eyes widen and my breath shorten.

  Soleil is a throwback to the Belle Époque in more ways than one. In addition to glamour, what Soleil offers is what the circus has always offered: refined demonstrations of human mastery, exquisite bodies engaged in beautiful achievement, what French writer and dramatist Théophile Gautier called “an opera for the eye.” For decades the circus had lost sight of this appeal, had buried it in cliché. Building on the legacy of Soviet circus, itself inspired by ballet, Soleil resurrected virtuosity and proved that people still responded strongly to it. And if they went to Russia or China to find performers to do this—well, that’s because the Russians and Chinese did it best.

  BACK IN THE HALLWAY, our tour picked up speed. In the makeup room, where another Slavic beauty was marking black spears on her forehead, Chantal informed me about Soleil’s official policy regarding facial design: performers get step-by-step instructions and precise visual patterns to follow; the pre-show prep can take upward of ninety minutes. From there it was on to the costume shop, where Chantal told me that, on any given night, the company employs more than forty-five hundred costumes. Every costume is made at headquarters by a team of more than four hundred lace-makers, milliners, and wigmakers. No other circus troupe comes close to Soleil in terms of size and production capacity. With forty members, including performers, cooks, musicians, administrative staff, and children, Les Arts Sauts is considered a sizable company in France. Soleil’s costume shop alone is ten times larger.

  Chantal stopped in front of a glass display case in the hallway. “Here,” she said chipperly, “you’ll appreciate this.” On the shelves of the case were a curly black wig, a pinstriped jail uniform, and a pair of blue suede shoes. “It’s the Elvis team,” Chantal said.

  Ah yes, Las Vegas. Hollywood had made the company famous, but Vegas made them ludicrously, bombastically rich.

  Soleil’s relationship with the city dates from 1993. After almost a decade of touring, the company announced that a new show, Mystère, would premiere in Sin City. That Soleil would play Las Vegas wasn’t unusual. Jugglers and acrobats had long been featured in casino variety shows. In 1968, Jay Sarno, creator of Caesar’s Palace, opened Circus Circus, a popular hotel and casino, featuring indoor circus acts and carnival games. (Writing in 1980, at the pit of the circus doldrums, Speaight observed in A History of the Circus, “It is an eloquent indictment of our civilization that this beautiful display of choreographed skill has found it most profitable to appear as a kind of aerial sideshow at Las Vegas, coaxing a passing glance from the gamblers on the floor below.”) What was startling, however, was Soleil’s plan: not only would the show premiere in Vegas, it would never leave. As part of a ten-year deal with Steve Wynn, the casino magnate remaking the city, the company would install Mystère as a “resident show” in a custom-renovated theater at the Treasure Island hotel. It would be, in essence, a stable circus, like the Medrano in Paris or the circuses dotting Russia, except the acts wouldn’t change.

  “They said we were crazy,” noted Chantal, referring to the circus community. The show, which was directed by Dragone, was darker and moodier than any of the previous shows. On seeing the first dress rehearsals, Wynn was apparently irate. “You guys have made a German opera here,” he told Laliberté. (Dragone took it as a compliment.)

  The skeptics failed to take into account the city’s burgeoning transition from Mafia-run casino den to America’s Shangri-la. Every week, millions of visitors flocked to the city from all over the world with money to burn. What better show to attract these tourists than a circus, the universal spectacle? Put another way, Vegas was for Soleil as New York was for Barnum. It was the opposite of the touring tented circus. Instead of traveling to the people, Soleil would let the crowds come to them.

  And they did. From the premiere on December 25, 1993, Mystère did gangbusters business. The first season, the show played to 98 percent capacity. Today, the show continues to run after more than eight thousand performances, a Vegas record.

  Quickly, the company moved to duplicate the “resident” model. In 1998, it installed La Nouba, from the French faire la nouba (“to live it up”), at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando. The same year, in another throwback to the glory days of the Belle Époque, they returned to Las Vegas with their first water circus, O, again directed by Dragone, now officially the company’s muse.

  By 2009, the circus was operating ten resident shows, more than they were touring, including seven in Las Vegas. Some, like Zed, the Tokyo-based show directed by film director François Girard, were pure circuses. Others, like Viva Elvis, the spectacle commemorated in the hallway display, are better described as “acrobatic theater,” physical and visual phantasmagorias set to music. Collectively, they earn the lion’s share of the company’s profits, and the numbers are st
aggering. Sixty percent of Soleil’s revenue comes from Vegas. The company’s nightly takings there are greater than all of Broadway’s nightly income combined. At one point, Soleil was netting over $1 million a night in Vegas alone.

  Most of the circuses in France are essentially theater troupes, and sometimes “artistic circuses,” nonprofit enterprises. But just as there are “art films” and commercial films, circuses exist in different registers. Soleil is a “commercial circus”—it is a business, or, as Chantal put it near the end of our tour, “an entertainment company.” Like all businesses, it has the goal of making money, and it is transparent in its aim. Critics, especially in Europe, condemn Soleil for this approach. “It became this unstoppable commercial entity,” said Chris Lashua, the director of Cirque Mechanics, an American modern circus company. “People started treating it like it was a job instead of a creative endeavor.” And it’s true there have been sacrifices. To justify the enormous costs of its productions, the Soleil shows have to be accessible to what the French call “le grand public.” They can’t be too challenging or disturbing, lest they risk alienating the public. “Cirque doesn’t have a choice,” Roger Le Roux, the director of the French Cirque-Théâtre d’Elbeuf, said. “It has to sell!”

  Yet none of this diminishes Soleil’s importance to the art or the legacy the company will leave. After all, the circus has always been a business, dating back to the merchants on the fairgrounds. Sometimes business worked against artistry; sometimes it worked in art’s favor. Soleil’s grow-or-die mentality is responsible for its influence, which has been huge and, thus far, for the good. In Europe, proactive governments enabled the new circus movement. The French state established the National School and subsidized experimental companies, as did governments in Belgium, England, Sweden, and a dozen other countries. Going forward, not all countries will have the ability or the will to support the circus like that. If the circus hopes to spread, it will have to pay its own way, fueled as much by entrepreneurs as by artists. Soleil proved that the circus is a viable economic enterprise.

  What’s curious for now is that Soleil is the only modern circus to achieve such financial success. Partly this is cultural. In Europe, there is a suspicion of commerce, especially among artists, and especially among circus artists, who often see themselves as countercultural. “There’s a perception among a lot of the companies that money is dirty, is vulgar,” Le Roux told me. Certain troupes avoid marketing themselves properly so as not to be perceived as shallow. In a few cases, troupes rejected growth altogether. According to several sources, Les Arts Sauts was approached by an important producer during their American tour. “He wanted us to stay a year,” Laurence told me. He would leave the company creative control, but reproduce the existing show into multiple companies, to tour simultaneously. But Les Arts Sauts refused. “We told him to fuck off” was how Frank, the catcher, put it. “We’re not going to sell out to the Anglo-Saxon system.”

  The creators of Soleil had a different attitude. Being Québecois, Chantal said, they were in a way able to straddle the divide between Europe and America. “They had the artistic sense of being Francophone, and North American marketing skills. That turned out to be a winning formula.”

  This confluence of values is epitomized in Laliberté. In skill and spirit, he is a circus genius of the oldest, rarest sort. Like Barnum, Laliberté was a born entrepreneur who skipped college to work the streets of Europe, stilt-walking and breathing fire.‡ Like Barnum, he has a mania for marketing and reputation: when the company first opened in Los Angeles, Laliberté insisted on spending an obscene amount of money plastering posters across the city. And his life, too, is one of Barnumesque proportions. As 95 percent shareholder of the company, he has a net worth, according to Forbes magazine, of approximately $2.5 billion, making him the eleventh-richest person in Canada and 459th-richest person in the world. He has houses in Montreal, Cancún, Moscow, and the French Riviera, which he circulates between by private jet. His bonhomie is legendary. Rumors abound of wild bacchanals populated by corporate scions, supermodels, Arab princes, Russian oligarchs, and the stars of sport and entertainment—parties that purportedly culminate in the host’s blowing fire over the crowd. Bono, the lead singer of the rock band U2, once called Laliberté the “most alive” person he had ever met.

  “Guy doesn’t live on this planet,” Pascal said. We were discussing Laliberté outside the company’s headquarters. Pascal’s words were ironic: as we spoke, Laliberté was in Moscow, training to become Canada’s first space tourist, a privilege for which he had paid $35 million.

  I brought up Barnum, how similar the two titans seemed. Pascal chuckled. Yes, he said, they had a lot in common. But in terms of circus history they don’t compare—and it’s Barnum who doesn’t measure up.

  Barnum & Bailey, he explained, came to England for the first time in 1889, then returned to Europe just eight years later to tour Austria, Germany, Belgium, France, and Italy. But the troupe never played South America or Australia. Nor did Ringling. In this context, Laliberté’s achievements were all the more impressive. In his early fifties, the Canadian has already installed himself at the top of the art’s pantheon.

  “There’s only one person who compares,” Pascal said. By the sparkle in his eye, I could tell he was talking about Astley.

  “Astley built nineteen circuses across Europe.” He smiled wryly. “Guess how many shows Cirque will have next year?”

  I didn’t need to guess. It was nineteen.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I met Pascal in the large, sunlit lobby of the Tohu. Even more than Soleil’s “resident” theaters, the Tohu is symbolic of the circus’s return. A throwback to the hard circuses of yore, the building was round, with seventeen hundred seats wrapped around a single ring, and built exclusively for traveling circus shows, almost all of which are modern. Pascal’s exhibit was housed in a curved passageway under the seats, also known as the vomitoires. (The word comes from the Roman Colosseum, the passages of which “vomited” the spectators out into the streets.) By the time I arrived, Sophie and a trio of assistants in white cotton gloves were already hard at work, unwrapping items from their bubble cocoons and mounting them in glass cases set into the hallway’s interior wall.

  As Pascal chatted with them, I roamed around, mooning over each item, taking pictures and notes, basking in the details. The exhibition was organized chronologically. Walking the length of it, I had the sense of traversing time. The highbrow splendor of the nineteenth century was represented by a poster of Footit and Chocolat at the Nouveau Cirque. From the Soviet period, there was a rubber doll of the famous clown Yuri Nikulin, who was awarded the title of People’s Artist of USSR in 1973. Behind me, the voices of Pascal and the young women formed a sweet circus chorus.

  “The Japanese juggler?”

  “Over here.”

  “What about the Fratellini plate?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You might check near Madame Saqui.”

  At the end of the exhibit, I came to a section labeled “Modern Era.” The section began with a poster for Cirque du Soleil’s Nouvelle Expérience and told the story of the spread of the modern circus through the nineties and into the new millennium. Soleil was an important part of the tale, but it wasn’t the only game in town. A legion of other companies and artists had spread the gospel of the modern circus to heretofore unconquered lands. During the nineties, Pierrot Bidon, one of Archaos’s founders, left France for Brazil, where he established Circo da Madrugada; he later went to Guinea, in West Africa, and created Circus Baobab, often considered the first modern circus on that continent. Around the turn of the millennium, jugglers began appearing on the streets of Buenos Aires, performing for change at stoplights, and during my year at France’s National School, a group of students visited from Escuela Circo Para Todos, a circus school in Santiago de Cali, Colombia. “A few years ago, people in our little town had never even heard of circuses before,” a tall, dreadlocked juggler told me.
“If they did, it was something kind of dirty, low-class.” But one day a group of French performers had shown up and started offering circus classes. “It wasn’t like the circus we knew,” the juggler said. “It was cooler, more interesting.” The Colombian students had come to France to take a workshop, to bring even more of the modern circus spirit back home. “Next year some of us hope to create a company of our own.”

  In Australia, new troupes continued to form through the nineties, including Bizircus, a collective of acrobats and artists based near Perth. In 2001, the government helped create the National Institute of Circus Arts (NICA), a full-time university circus training school in Melbourne that offers a three-year bachelor’s degree. Today the Australian circus scene is one of the most dynamic and vibrant in the world and, according to Pascal, the most innovative after France. The country has more than thirty-five circus companies. Circa, one of the most renowned troupes, has toured internationally, including to New York and London. The Guardian called its shows “knee-tremblingly sexy, beautiful and moving.”

  Several factors made these places fertile ground. In countries where governments provided funds for circus companies and schools, the circus thrived. In the best cases, the government established a professional training program, which generated a steady stream of elite performers who served as models for young people. Canada, Belgium, and Australia, for example, all have national schools—and strong circus.

  It also helps if an impassioned individual decides to make the spread of the circus his life project, especially in countries where cultural funding is poor. In Croatia, for example, Ivan Kralj, a journalist turned circophile, paid for Zagreb’s first contemporary circus festival out of pocket. In Prague, I watched local impresario Ondrej Cihlar perform in a contemporary circus festival that he helped found. At his apartment afterward, I flipped through a book he had written about the art while he described his vision for a contemporary circus institute (the Institut Nového Cirkusu). “It was slow at first,” Cihlar said, rolling up his sleeves, “but people are starting to come around.”