In 1984, Guy Laliberté and Gilles Ste-Croix were fearless and had nothing to lose. The former had just returned from traveling around Europe with his accordion on his back. The latter had transformed ladders into stilts, the better to pick apples, before founding Les échassiers de la Baie and the Club des talons hauts. After meeting at the Balcon vert, the youth hostel of the time in Baie-Saint-Paul, they created an event that would become a hit: the Fête foraine.
1984. It’s the year of the 350e anniversary of the arrival of Jacques Cartier in Canada, and the Grand Tour of the funfair parades through a dozen cities. Immediately afterward, Guy Laliberté, who had just been refused by the Minister of Culture at the time, Clément Richard, contacted Premier René Lévesque directly in the hope of securing financial support. He sold him the idea of a truly Quebec circus. This assistance then allowed the team to buy a new, larger and more profitable big top, recalls in an interview Gilles Ste-Croix, who co-launched the adventure with Guy Laliberté.
Cirque du Soleil, whose name came to Laliberté while he was watching a sunset in Hawaii, was born.
This was the beginning of a dazzling adventure that would propel the new circus to the four corners of the planet. In the United States, while Barnum had claimed to offer “the greatest show on Earth”, Cirque du Soleil wanted to be aerial and universal. It offered a polished and unified aesthetic, a unique signature that combined sets and costumes to music created especially for the occasion. “We did circus with humans, with acrobats, with clowns, and because of that we managed to marry art forms. Sometimes it became dance, it became theater, but it was always with an acrobatic skeleton”, says Gilles Ste-Croix.
In 1987, Cirque du Soleil launched The circus reinventeda show that will be a hit in Los Angeles and almost everywhere in Europe… except in France.
The fact is that the new circus has already existed for a while in France. In particular because two circus schools opened there simultaneously in the 1970s, says Pascal Jacob, French circus historian and vice-president of the Festival mondial du cirque de demain. Fueled by these schools, the new circus offers everyone the chance to do circus, whereas until then this tradition had been passed down from generation to generation in a closed environment, often within the same family. In Quebec, Guy Caron co-founded the National Circus School with acrobat Pierre Leclerc; the former later became artistic director of Cirque du Soleil.
Everyone can now dream of being in the circus, with talent, commitment and the necessary effort. And to recruit the best, Cirque du Soleil works hard to provide the best possible working conditions for its employees. “Cirque du Soleil is an acrobatic skeleton onto which emotions are grafted,” continues Gilles Ste-Croix. “So it was necessary to find these extraordinary artists all over the world. And I went looking for them — in schools, in sports associations, even in circuses.”
“The thing we did, which differentiated us enormously from other traditional circuses, is that we provided interesting working conditions. We said to ourselves: people will be housed, they will be fed and will not have to pay for their costumes. It will not be like in Europe, where people arrive with their caravan where they are housed, fed and have to provide the costume for their performance,” he continues.
Know-how and business sense
Even today, Cirque du Soleil has a major influence on the economic health of the circus world. “It employs a lot of artists who then do other things,” explains Mathilde Perahia, director of training and professional development for the Quebec organization En piste. “There are some who go to Cirque du Soleil for five years, then come back here and start their own company. They are able to make a living because they have made money, so they can take a few risks.”
Commercial, Cirque du Soleil? Certainly — and since its beginnings — notes Louis Patrick Leroux, rector of Saint-Paul University and researcher specializing in contemporary circus. In terms of content, Cirque du Soleil will draw inspiration from the European experience by attracting in particular the Belgian Franco Dragone, who will sign the staging of the organization’s first big successes. But in terms of business, it is typically North American. “So, we will look for a new European practice and a fairly formidable North American commercial know-how,” notes Mr. Leroux.
And this “rather formidable North American commercial know-how”, is it not in Las Vegas, the American capital of pleasure, which asks for nothing other than constant entertainment, that it can take off? Guy Laliberté will go all out there.
In 1994, billionaire Steve Wynn, owner of hotels in Las Vegas, was first seduced by the proposal of Cirque du Soleil to mount the show Mysterywhich is aimed at a family audience. When he attends rehearsals, Steve Wynn is horrified: the show reminds him of Wagner’s operas, which he hates. But Cirque du Soleil insists. Today, 30 years later, Mystery is still playing in the Nevada metropolis.
Later, it was also Steve Wynn who would welcome Ohthe Cirque du Soleil aquatic show, in another hotel in “the city of sin.” There is something scandalous, Mr. Leroux notes, about delivering such a performance in an air-conditioned room in the middle of the desert. But Oh remains a sublime experience, “of an operatic scale, in a sports complex,” he notes. The success is total; the business model, fabulous.
Symbiosis in Sin City
In Las Vegas, “the venues are built and paid for by the casinos. The shows are essentially ordered by the casino, and then there is a sharing of revenue. This is extremely important. It is a new business model that works extremely well,” Louis Patrick Leroux points out.
Cirque du Soleil will go as far as presenting seven shows simultaneously in Las Vegas. This week, the show LOVE, which pulled off the masterstroke of reuniting the Beatles, has also bowed out because the hotel-casino where it had been presented since 2006 will be demolished.
These permanent shows remain cash cows for Cirque du Soleil, which can — in theory, at least — finance new creations, continue tours under the big top and absorb the deficits of shows that do less well thanks to their takings.
The city of Las Vegas still revolves around Cirque du Soleil, says Charles Batson of the American research group Circus and its Others. In fact, in the United States, the word “circus” (pronounced in English) is now used to refer to this new circus, he notes. This form succeeds the ” circus “, which is more reminiscent of the Barnum circus, with its bearded ladies, strongmen and animals. Even new contemporary American circus companies claim the word “circus” as their name — Circus Mechanics, for example, notes Mr. Batson.
Post-2015
Formerly the majority shareholder of Cirque du Soleil, Guy Laliberté sold the majority of his shares to private Chinese and American investors in 2015.
At the end of 2019, Cirque du Soleil invested 90 million dollars in the show RUNwhich features stuntmen. Shunned by critics, the production would cease to be presented after four months. Then, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the closure of theaters around the world. It was then discovered that Cirque du Soleil was running on its box office revenues alone. The company nearly went bankrupt and laid off 95% of its staff before being bought out by its creditors.
In fall 2021, a new permanent show, Drawn to Life, begins at Walt Disney World in Florida. Carefully but surely, Cirque du Soleil is resuming its activities. Already a legend, will the phoenix rise from its ashes?