I would say circus people operate at the edge of society; they are marginal people,” says Sylvie Galarneau, artistic director of Cirque du Soleil. “There are people who work for us who I don’t think could function anywhere else. You know, they are lovely people if you treat them the right way, but most normal people don’t know what that way is, so you have to be careful.” Which is timely advice, homesteaders, because next month the circus is coming to town.
And just in time, too. In an era when protozoan celebrity culture has debased the arts beyond belief, when Big Brother contestants can release albums and Martine McCutcheon can star at the National Theatre, when 29-year-old Robbie Williams’s autobiography tops the bestseller list and computers make our feature films, it’s difficult to find anything cultural to believe in. But circus — just the word circus — still holds magic, still offers that glow of risk and fear.
It’s no coincidence that circus people have been regarded with as much suspicion as delight when they have arrived in settled communities. They are the voluntary vagabonds, the wilfully homeless in the world of the deeply rooted. In the old days, they wandered the dusty roads in possession of almost supernatural skills and cast a glamour that seemed to lure the impressionable like an addictive drug. People ran away to join the circus as they ran away to sea or eloped with an illicit lover. People have never run away to become accountants. Except John Major.
Of course, this circus is slightly different. Cirque du Soleil is no raggle-taggle band of gypsies-o. It is a multimillion-dollar global circus empire, with eight shows running at the moment. Varekai, Quidam, Alegria and Saltimbanco are touring America and Japan, O and Mystère are based in Las Vegas, and La Nouba is at Walt Disney World, in Florida. Now Dralion arrives in London on January 8 for an extended run. Given that each show costs roughly £5.7m to develop and tour — well, you do the maths. The company has a roster of more than 500 artists working on these shows, with a support staff of 2,000. It has entertained more than 40m people since its foundation, and its brand-new Montreal HQ cost upwards of £28m to build.
It’s all a far cry from 1984, when Cirque was just a bunch of street entertainers hustled together by the troupe’s founder, Guy Laliberté, to perform at a festival celebrating the discovery of Canada. They’ve been absorbed into the mainstream, just as the edgy street performance of the Urban Warriors became the global bestseller Stomp and Glastonbury now sports corporate tents. Of course it’s a triumph, but has something been lost? Should circus ever be successful or should it remain an outlaw art form?
Soleil’s global headquarters is on a huge industrial estate at the edge of Montreal. It’s a sharp modern building, all brushed concrete and angular corridors. It houses two vast studios, each one larger than a big top, where shows are devised and new performers rehearsed. It has physio rooms, costume departments, canteens and car parks.
It’s there I meet Galarneau, who is anxious to assuage my fears. “We have never forgotten our roots,” she assures me. “In fact, the new show, Dralion, is part of our recognition of that. When Guy started Cirque, he was inspired by Chinese circus, which is why Cirque never uses animals in its shows. It was the Chinese acrobats who prompted our creation — now, with Dralion, we are working with an entire Chinese circus.”
Dralion is certainly impressive. The Chinese acrobats come from the Flag Circus, near Beijing, which is to China what Cirque is to a traditional western big top. Just as Cirque was the first western circus to refuse to work with animals, the Flag has created new arts within China’s rigid 3,000-year-old circus tradition. Most of these find their way into Dralion — acrobats dancing on light bulbs, women performing men’s routines — and produce genuine gasps of astonishment from audiences who expect these kinds of stunts to be computer-generated.
The first of those new routines, the ballet on lights, is appearing outside China for the first time in Dralion. Seven women on pointes perform a ballet on light bulbs — just as it says on the tin. The dancing is so graceful that for a large part of the performance, you forget the insane fact that these are women pirouetting on light bulbs.
In fact, most of the show is like that, the beauty of the performance disguising the difficulty of the skills. Themed around Chinese concepts — the Dralion is a version of that half-dragon, half-lion affair that dances through the streets on Chinese New Year — the show toys with ideas of elements and harmony that contribute to a vague ecological bent. The colours are primal and the music throbs with suitable synthesized weirdness, like Jean Michel Jarre on powerful mind-bending drugs.
Dralion also features, Brit-spotters, that local-girl-made-good, Colette Morrow, performing an aerial pas de deux. She flies high above the stage, binding herself in a long band of blue cloth, in the kind of Chinese trapeze act made famous in Ocean’s Eleven and those BBC1 idents. Colette began life as a dancer, but was trained as an acrobat for the circus show at the Millennium Dome. Her aerial writhing with a Russian artiste, Igor Arefiev, drips with passion and beauty, proving that Peter Mandelson’s millions didn’t go entirely to waste.
The highlight of the show for me, however, was the juggler. Now, don’t get me wrong: juggling usually makes me ill. Watching idiots with an evening class in circus skills tossing plastic clubs in amateurish fashion, dropping them every couple of minutes and then hassling you for money seems one of the more pointless ways of spending those precious minutes before death. But Victor Klee, Dralion’s Ukrainian juggler, is different. This is juggling that defies superlatives — juggling so skilful that simpler cultures would have assumed the man had sold his soul for such mastery and burnt him at the stake.
The balls flow over him, up and around his back, his neck, his arms and his legs, like swarming beetles. He seems to be able to slow them down as they fly through the air and to use every muscle — even his stomach muscles — to control them. He made me realise that juggling is poetic and beautiful, if it is done properly. He made me realise how magical a circus can be.
He also helps save Cirque’s soul. Klee, Morrow later tells me, is a dark obsessive, practising endlessly and staying up deep into the night to try new twists or create bizarre additions to his routine. It is constantly changing and evolving, not least because less skilful turns do their utmost to steal his moves, and he needs to stay one step ahead. It’s just this kind of driven, myopic nomad that Galarneau was describing, the kind of man who has trouble functioning in everyday society and who can exist only in the world of the circus. So, despite the Vegas residency, despite the corporate HQ, despite the billion-dollar turnover, Cirque du Soleil is still able to provide Viktor Klee with the only space that makes him happy, the only place he can exist — the ring and the big top. At heart, then, Cirque is still that dysfunctional troupe of weirdos you need to make a circus.
Cirque du Soleil’s Dralion opens at the Albert Hall, SW7, on Jan 8
www.cirquedusoleil.com
Run away and join the Cirque
- Most of the plays and concerts featured, can be booked through The Sunday Times Box Office Service on 0870 160 1212
