Inside the secret world of Cirque du Soleil

Lucy Powell, The London Times
Published: December 20, 2008

For one of the most instantly recognisable, globe-bestriding brands ever invented, Cirque du Soleil is a notoriously fierce defender of its privacy. The closest you'll ordinarily get to its performers is the front row of one of its shows. Crew members you won't even see. But ahead of a UK tour of Quidam, one of its best-loved shows, it issued a very rare invitation to The Times to experience a little of life à la Cirque, backstage at its Barcelona big top, and offering a tutorial in a circus skill or two.

Down by the Barcelona docks, the burly Spanish security guards aren't buying it. Manning massive iron gates, behind which Cirque's standard flaps proudly in the sea breeze above an iconic, multicoloured big top, it takes ten minutes of walkie- talkie conference, in three languages, before they will let us in.

“First experience the show,” a twinkly-eyed press officer says. “Then ask the questions.” Watching Quidam, the only question consistently springing to mind is “How?” A leering, dreadlocked man turns himself into the spokes of a giant aluminium wheel, and propels himself at lightning speed across the stage. Skipping-ropes transform from a recognisable children's game into an eyewatering blur of hemp, hands and feet. Four small Chinese girls, sprayed entirely gold, do such improbable things with the diabolo that you begin to question whether they are in fact the mechanical dolls they're trussed up as. Quidam's show-stopper is “Statue”, in which a couple slowly meld their bodies into one gravity- defying, flawlessly balanced whole. The clowns cannot be dispensed with in any Cirque show. They provide the only moments in which the audience is able to exhale.

It's a neat demonstration of the immediately identifiable form of circus (no ring, no animals) that has become such an unstoppable cultural phenomenon. Guy Laliberté, Cirque's founder and CEO, knew from his youth as a travelling street performer that there was an untapped global talent pool of these outlandishly gifted artists already in existence. And, Laliberté understood from the off, circus is wordless, and therefore pan-cultural. Precisely the same show will work from Macau to Moscow. It delivers the same endlessly seductive message, no matter what narrative puff is placed around it: that with years of training, and an astonishing degree of trust, the human body is capable of feats of jaw-dropping athletic prowess, grace and skill. The more sedentary we get, as a culture, the greater our appetite for such live demonstrations grows.

Billy Smart presumably knew that, too. But it's Cirque that has revenues of £350 million a year, and is now valued at £1 billion, with six resident shows in Las Vegas, which attract more than 10,000 people a night, every night of the year. The company has grown from a rag-tag assembly of 73 Quebecker street performers in 1984 to today's formidable, sleek corporation of 4,000 employees. And Cirque is the only entertainment company in the world to have secured the much-coveted rights to create shows from the back catalogue of the Beatles and Elvis. Backstage in Barcelona, some inklings of why and how appear. “They have the pick,” says Alessandro Sblattero, a jolly clown turned tent master, born in a trailer in Umbria 31 years ago, the fifth generation of circus performers. “The very best acts in the world want to work at Cirque.” Why? “They take care. In a normal circus, if you get sick, you had better get well again. If you marry someone not from the circus, they had better find what they can do there. They cannot afford any other way. With Cirque you can bring your wife, your kids, on tour. Cirque take care of you. They take care of everything.”

With constant logistical back-up from its international headquarters in Montreal, and an international insurance company primed to provide cast and crew with local masseuses, doctors, psychologists or dentists as required, Cirque's touring site is almost eerily well oiled.

Jamie Reilly, Quidam's tour services director, is responsible for making sure it stays that way. She explains: “I think of this as a village. There are 160 people, more or less. I'm the bank and I run the school. We have a gym and right now we're in the restaurant.” Though the cast and crew live either in five-star hotels or rented apartments, they're on site most of the time. “We're very close,” Reilly adds, “when you're touring, the people are the one thing that doesn't change in your environment.”

Everyone in this travelling village appears inordinately happy. “They know how fortunate they are,” says Roland Richard, a flamboyant 65- year-old stage manager who has been with Cirque for 14 years. “Some of the artists work too hard, but they know conditions are very hard for street performers; they want to make sure they stay here.”

But there's also something slightly strange about it. Ella Bangs is a 12-year-old American on tour with her parents and little sister, and one of three child performers in the show. “I love it here,” she says. Do you miss your friends back home? “No.” How's school here? “I get lots more attention, so I learn faster. There's two teachers for seven kids. At home it was one teacher for 31 kids.”

Is it normal, I wonder, for a 12-year-old to be able to recite her teacher-pupil ratio? But if Ella is likely to graduate from Cirque school, smiling roundly but coming across as a little peculiar, she's not alone. Every adult employee, whether artist or crew member, has been through a two-month training process at Cirque's HQ in Montreal. They emerge quoting the company mission statement “to invoke, to provoke, to evoke” at will, and unanimously agreed that Cirque's shows and its working environment are the envied acme of live entertainment companies everywhere.

They might be right. Eighty million people worldwide have experienced a Cirque show. The company has just extended its forthcoming Albert Hall run by a week, because of demand.

Protecting this unflinching commitment to the company, however, means that any hint of negativity is banned from the backstage area. You cannot mention to anyone that some English critics find Cirque shows corporate and soulless, and ask for a response. Bring it up, I'm told, and my interviews with extremely genial, intelligent artistic directors and aerialists alike will come to an untimely end. Ditto what anyone gets paid. When you do ask, the Argentinian clown or Chinese diabolo girl in question will politely tell you they are not allowed to talk about it. Neither can you bring up the ethics of luring punters into vast casino complexes in Macau or Vegas. “There's a Cirque way of doing things,” Reilly says proudly, “and then there's the way everybody else does it.”

Which brings us to the contortionism workshop. It seems a perverse choice of circus skill to impart. All Cirque know about me is that I'm English and a journalist. We're not renowned, as a tribe, for our limber athleticism. “Don't worry.” A tiny, boneless 19-year-old Antipodean, whom I last saw dressed up as a doll in a white wig, balanced upside down on the accommodating hands of a large Russian, smiles at me. “We'll warm up first,” she says, before diving into the splits. The splits, it seems, is the warm-up. “Can't you do that?” she asks, amazed. Oddly enough, no.

This former acrobat, Veronica Gravolin, remains dauntlessly encouraging, despite my persistent inability to perform such basic moves as a backflip. Watching her wrap her feet so far around her head that she could blow her nose on her own socks, I ask if she ever worries about arthritis. Gravolin is so shocked she can't answer. “Do I what? We don't talk about that stuff.” Isabelle Vaudelle is a 36-year-old French aerial contortionist, who has been with Quidam on and off since its inception in 1996. A former street performer, Vaudelle is made of sterner stuff. She's also made entirely of muscle. “In an aerial act,” she explains, “the weight of the body is really important, because you must pull your own weight up. In a balancing act, the other person takes care of the weight and you have only to push. It is different work. Someone who is able to do one is not able to do the other.” Some people, it transpires, are entirely unable to do either. With Vaudelle issuing precise commands, and her compact muscle power winching me up, I pull myself up about 2ft of red silk and flip upside down, before testing the give of the custom-made backstage flooring.

“So you see?” the sparkly press officer smilingly concludes, “these artists are like Olympic athletes.” What I'd first gleaned in conversation, I've just had confirmed in the ache of my bones. Even if you could excise all trace of anti-Cirque sentiment from your mindset, it would be impossible for any vaguely normal person to run away with this circus. If you're lucky, as I did, you'll hobble away from it. Very gingerly indeed.

Quidam, Albert Hall, London SW7, Jan 4-Feb 8, call 0844 8471591, or 0454 015010 for tickets, and then on tour across the UK starting in Liverpool (www.cirquedusoleil.com for online tickets)

© The Times 2009