The Creation Studio
All initial training takes place at the Creation Studio in Cirque’s Montreal headquarters. A vast facility with three acrobatic training studios and several rehearsal rooms, which is staffed by about 20 trainers who specialize in acrobatics, theatre, movement, percussion, singing, and dance. There are also physiotherapists and fitness specialists on hand to keep performers in peak condition.

According to Boris Verkhovsky, one of the biggest risks in performance is repetition: it reduces the artists’ focus and increases the chance of injuries, which is why training continues after Montreal. Go backstage in Las Vegas and you’ll find coaches, studios and equipment in constant use. The other reason? A need for growth and renewal. “Not progressing simply means dying,” he says. “And that’s the reality of acrobatics.”

Fear of Flying
To endure high-stress situations and continual adrenaline bursts, the performers use treadmills, exercise bikes and elliptical machines to keep in top shape. But physical conditioning is the easy part; the hard part is the psychological deprogramming from a lifetime in sport.

For all their confidence and formidable physical skills, athletes have to deal with psychological adjustments as they adapt to the ways of the circus. And in some cases that means overcoming their very real fear of flying, 60 feet above water or 10 feet above ground.

Performance psychologist Madeleine Hallé says that since athletes are often training to peak, the physical adjustment is not enormous. “They don’t have to adapt much physically, because they are used to training 30-35 hours a week,” she says. “We concentrate on their emotional preparation – how they think, how they control their emotions when it goes well and when things go wrong. They will do 400 shows a year instead of the three or four competitions they were accustomed to, so we sit them down and ask, ‘Is it possible to bring something from your experience to what you will have to do?’”

The hardest adjustment for most artists is expressing their feelings in performance. In the sports world, athletes are assessed by technical judges who demand conformity in performance. At Cirque, acrobatics has to invoke the imagination and the emotions.

What performers have to believe is that artistic expression needs spontaneity, imagination and creative risk-taking. The difficulty? Those qualities run counter to what they have been conditioned to deliver, in many cases, since childhood.