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Proves a Little Circus Can Make the Big Time


By Michael Small, Doug Lindeman


Paragraph 1

Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! Step right
up to
____
Cirque du Soleil, the greatest...well, one
of
____
the greatest shows
on
____
earth. You'll thrill
to
____
the sight
of
____
a single circus ring that has never been marked
with
____
the hoofprint
of
____
a wild beast. You won't see packs of pachyderms
of
____
stand
on
____
their heads, but you will gape
in
____
awe
at
____
the multiple talents
of
____
performers who play clowns and then transform themselves
into
____
acrobats, trapeze artists and jugglers. You won't see an alligator tamer wrestle
with
____
the jaws
of
____
death, but you'll swoon as two tango dancers culminate their romance with an amazing hand-balancing act. And you'll gasp as a tightrope walker Jeté across the wire
while
____
playing a haunting theme on the oboe.

Paragraph 2

The 4-year-old troupe has captured the imagination
of
____
audiences across North America
by
replacing circus pomp with up-close, often beautiful surprises and some unusual thrills.
In
____
a comparatively tiny 1,754-seat tent, Cirque doesn't need a pack of exotic aerialists when a lone trapeze artist can stop heartbeats by swooping just a few feet
above
____
the heads of spectators, without a net. So successful was the troupe's scheduled three-week run
at
____
the Los Angeles Festival last September-attended
by
____
such stars as Joan Rivers, Dustin Hoffman and David Bowie-that it returned
for
____
four months, and Columbia pictures bought film rights
to
____
the little big top's story. The show finally closed so Cirque could begin a four-week run
in
____
San Francisco on April 8.

Paragraph 3

"Because you're so close," said one satisfied customer, Sandy Gillis, 31, "you can see their facial expressions, beads of sweat and their muscles tensing up. It's more fun to watch than a bunch of spangly headdresses and froufrou costumes." Troupe member Debra Brown sees other reasons for the show's success: "usually a circus has spectacle but no heart, or intellect but no risk. What's exciting about this one is that it has a balance."

paragraph 4

As far back as the 1890s, Barnum and Bailey set a bigger-is-better standard for circuses with shows that included 1,200 players, 338 horses and 20 elephants. But the past two decades have brought a revival of the simpler one-ring circus popularized by British Sgt. Maj. Philip Astley in 1768. While New York's Big Apple Circus (People, Jan. 11) and San Francisco's pickle Circus perform traditional stunts
in
one ring, Cirque du Soleil takes advantage of the single ring's intimacy to merge acrobatics
with
____
refined acting. "I'd rather feed three artists than one elephant," says founder and director Guy Laliberté 28, who hired 27 players ranging
in
____
ages from 7 to 36. Their performance follows a vague story line about a group of frumpily dressed, awkward people who are transformed by a magical queen
into
circus stars for a couple of hours
before
they revert to their lesser selves again. --> Dreamlike purple and gold lighting sets the mood as a five-piece band plays a romantic score on synthesizers and woodwinds. Brown, 33, a former coach for the Canadian Olympic gymnastics team, carefully plans every move in the ring. "When you think of dance, you think of people on two feet," she says, "but my choreography explores four feet because of the way acrobats use their hands."

Laliberté

Paragraph 5

Laliberté a college dropout whose mother is a pianist and whose father is a vice president
of
____
an aluminum company, was once just another itinerant musician fire-breather stilt-walker. He honed his skills
in
____
Baie Saint Paul, an artists colony 55 miles northeast of Quebec City where street performers congregate each summer.
while
____
there, he co-founded the High-Heeled Club, an acting troupe that performed
on
____
stilts.
After
____
organizing a 1981 street-performers festival, Laliberté decided to recruit friends for a "hot-blooded French-Canadian circus." At first he couldn't find backers. "I had hair

right down my back

, and we were all on unemployment," he recalls. "And there I was asking bankers for millions of dollars. All the business community was laughing at me." Finally, government grants helped Laliberté pay for most of a year's expenses. A 1984 tour of Quebec province received good enough notices for Cirque to play across Canada.

Paragraph 6

With
____
today's high ticket sales, Cirque du Soleil requires very little government aid to pay the bills. In 1986 the troupe used some of its earnings to renovate an old Montreal fire station
into
____
workshops for set design and special effects. Now Laliberté can afford to recruit additional players, who undergo up to two months of rigorous training. "We make actors more agile and acrobats more theatrical," he says. Their improvement continues on the job. One gymnast who flips to the top of a three-man human ladder has grown so sure of foot that he's stopped using
guy wires

Paragraph 7

The whole circus is similarly unbound. Not willing to compromise Cirque's freedom, Laliberté usually books shows just 10 days
in
(?)
advance so that the troupe can always strike the tent and move on like Gypsies. He doesn't worry
about
____
where the road will lead them. "I came
up
____
with our name," he says, "when I was looking in a dictionary of symbols and saw 'soleil, sun.' It means youth, power, freshness. Everything was there. I just knew at that moment that we would be a success."
Cirque du Soleil

By Michael Small, with Doug Lindeman in Los Angeles


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