From Alegría to Zumanity

Story by Matthew Cope

In a cavernous rehearsal space as big as an aircraft hangar, nine musicians are pumping out a tight, unusual, jazz-inflected beat. This eccentric, driving fanfare heralds the arrival of a ragtag assortment of 50 athletes, acrobats and dancers of all shapes and sizes teetering and cavorting atop outrageously high-spiked heels. They strut their exuberant stuff in a provocative parade downstage. There, they hit their marks, contort and pose, assuming their opening positions for the highly anticipated new Cirque du Soleil show, an erotic extravaganza called “Zumanity.”

Today, Cirque du Soleil is known around the planet, but it started life as the smallest show on earth.

When Cirque’s Founder Guy Laliberté left his Montreal home at the age of 14, he was toting little more than an accordion and a burning desire to see the world. His wanderlust and curiosity exposed him to all kinds of performers and audiences before he wound up performing a fire-eating act for spare change on the cobblestones in front of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

When Laliberté returned home, he hooked up with another visionary street performer from Quebec, a stilt-walker named Gilles Ste-Croix who had founded Le Club des Talons Hauts (The High Heels Club) as a meeting place for young performers in the sleepy St. Lawrence Valley artists’ haven of Baie St. Paul. In 1982, Laliberté and Ste-Croix organized a street performance festival there and have been creative partners and business associates ever since.

When the government of Quebec went looking for events to celebrate the 450th anniversary of the arrival of Jacques Cartier in the New World, Laliberté pitched them the idea of funding a street performance festival. The government bit and Cirque du Soleil was born in 1984.

In the best romantic traditions of the circus, the fledgling company was more a tight-knit family than a business venture. “Business is difficult,” says Laliberté. “But it can be approached two ways: seriously, or with an entertainment aspect—with pleasure, with fun. And we decided to try to make it fun.”

Today, with more than 2,500 employees, the family has grown and Cirque du Soleil’s culture is, inevitably, more corporate. But its creative output is every bit as fresh as it ever was in those early days, and many of the troupe’s founding members are still with the company.

Cirque’s breakthrough 1987 show “We Reinvent the Circus” burst on the scene in Montreal as an entirely new art form. No one had seen anything like it before. Laliberté and Ste-Croix had turned the whole concept of circus on its head. Where conventional companies presented a succession of unrelated acts, Cirque du Soleil integrated every component into a single spectacular entity. Eye-candy sets, astonishing costumes, haunting music, and ravishing lighting all came together to give the production a unified theme and tell a single magical story. Above all, this was the first time circus had ever emphasized beauty, fantasy and poetry—and the hometown audience couldn’t get enough of it. They opened their hearts and responded with a passion and enthusiasm that has been repeated all around the world every time Cirque du Soleil has come calling.