CityLife

Main event: Cirque Du Soleil

The cane balancer

In 2009, as it celebrated its 25th anniversary, Cirque Du Soleil, which brings its spectacular Varekai show to the city on February 25, totted up the number of people who’d been to one of their shows. Give or take a few, it came to 90m people!

Earlier this very week they added Viva Elvis, a new show based around Elvis Presley, to their roster of permanent shows in Las Vegas, which also includes Love, based around The Beatles catalogue.

They currently have 19 shows touring at big top arenas and permanent shows taking place around the world or in Vegas.

Pretty heady stuff for a ‘scruffy, former avant-garde commune’ founded by former street accordionist, stilt walker and fire-breather Guy Laliberté and fellow Montreal street performer Daniel Gauthier.

By the time publicity-shy Laliberté was 16, he had decided to pursue a career in the performing arts after producing several high school events.

After graduating, he began playing accordion and harmonica with a folk music group called La Gueule Du Loup, who introduced him to the art of street performance, a skill that, many would argue, remains central to the enormous success of Cirque.

After leaving college, Laliberté toured Europe as a folk musician and busker and had learned the art of fire breathing – probably not a skill many CEOs of a company worth millions can boast! – by the time he returned home to Quebec in 1979.

A job at a power plant ended after only three days due to a labour strike, but with his unemployment insurance to fall back on, he decided not to look for another job. Instead, he joined the stilt-walking troupe Les Échassiers de Baie-Saint-Paul and organized a touring summer fair around Quebec with the help of soon-to-be business partner Daniel Gauthier.

Strangely, the event was barred from its host town shortly thereafter because of complaints by local citizens.

Magnificent

Nonetheless, Laliberté managed and produced the fair over the next couple of years, nurturing it into a moderate financial success until 1983 when the government of Quebec gave him a $1.5m grant to host a production the following year as part of Quebec’s 450th anniversary celebration of the French explorer Jacques Cartier’s discovery of Canada.

Laliberté named his creation Le Grand Tour du Cirque du Soleil, which turned out to be a critical and commercial success, continuing to perform exclusively for Canadian audiences until 1987 when Laliberté risked everything and took his ‘dramatic mix of circus arts and street entertainment’ to the Los Angeles Arts Festival.

It cost the production’s entire cash reserve to make the move and, had it not been successful, he would not even have had the money to move the troupe back home to Québec.

But the gamble paid off and Cirque expanded rapidly through the Nineties and onwards, going from one show to approximately 4,000 employees from over 40 countries producing 19 shows in over 271 cities on every continent except Africa and Antarctica, with an annual revenue in the hundreds of millions. The multiple permanent Las Vegas shows alone play to more than 9,000 people a night.

But the most important thing to know about Cirque is that they’re successful because people love their shows, which are dreamily magnificent, lavish and thrilling.

Each show is a synthesis of circus styles from around the world, with its own central theme and storyline drawing the audience into the performance through continuous live music, with performers rather than stagehands changing the props.

When Varekai, the show they’re bringing to their Grand Chapiteau at the Trafford Centre from Thursday, was premiered in 2002, it was their first touring show in three years.

Laliberté brought in fresh talent to direct this new show, a theatre director named Dominic Champagne, who found himself working with a fresh group of performers who had never worked for him before and, unlike the intuitive approach to writing earlier Cirque productions, scripted the show from start to finish.

Like many of the other productions, though, it’s based on mythology.

'Special'

Taking its title from the Romany word for ‘wherever’, the story picks up where the Greek myth of Icarus leaves off, telling the story of what happened to Icarus after he melts his wings from flying too close to the sun and fell from the sky.

Rather than drowning in the sea below him, in Varekai Icarus lands inside a lush forest at the base of a volcano, where the creatures teach him how to fly again.

The show, says Champagne, is an ‘acrobatic tribute to the nomadic soul’.

Despite the state of the economy, Laliberté continues making ‘optimistic plans’ to expand Cirque du Soleil.

“We’ve gone through three recessions in Cirque history, and they were all growth periods for us,” he observes.

“We constantly readdress the issue of our shows being too ‘corporate’. Every show must be one of a kind. And we must have fun.”

Chantal Blanchard, media relations manager for the big top shows at Cirque Du Soleil, says Varekai can rival any show offered by the company: “I think it’s one of the very best ones in Cirque Du Soleil.

“They are all special, but particularly this one is very special,” she says.

Performances to thrill the audience include a triple trapezium with four dancing ladies, aerial ballet and acrobatics performed on straps and Slippery Service, described as a slip-and-slide dance.

“A lot is going to be happening. There’s a premise to the show that you can follow, or not, it depends on what your frame of mind is,” Blanchard adds.

Success

“There are a lot of beautiful acts in the show; there’s an aerial act and daredevil acts like Russian Swings, and there’s a juggler that juggles footballs and ping-pongs in his mouth. There’s a lot of energy and a lot of colour.”

It’s perhaps an impossible task to pick out a highlight of the high-octane show, and Blanchard says it depends upon who is watching. “I think there are quite a few. It depends on your age and even your gender.

“There’s actually something for everybody. There’s a beautiful lady who does the hand balancing on canes, she comes down from the sky and she’s all glitzy and sparkly, and I know the little girls love it. And the gentleman love it too because she is a beautiful woman.”

With Cirque Du Soleil employing close to 1,200 performers, the challenge is immense to find its amazing talent.

Varekai itself has people from 20 different countries, with its talent scouted from all over the world at competitions including gymnastics, cheerleading and synchronised swimming.

Its success is undeniable, but it’s the creativity behind it that Blanchard credits to the worldwide phenomena.

The only limitation, she says, is the technical aspect of the venue then it’s down to “the total, total fate and creation and the ‘just let’s try it’,” attitude.

She adds: “The owner of our company, Guy Laliberte, says that impossible is just a word.

“So the bar is set pretty high when you have that.”

Cirque Du Soleil Varekai is at The Trafford Centre from February 25 until March 21, 2010. Tickets start at £41. For more information visit cirquedusoleil.com.