Cirque du Soleil:
A New Kind of Circus
Entertainment
Press
Sarah Caldwell |
April 16, 2015
Cirque du Soleil is a
Canadian success story. It is the largest circus in the producer in the world.
They put on hundreds of shows a year, all around the world. They have permanent
shows every night in Las Vegas, New York City and Florida, and they tour the
world staging their circus shows in tents, theatres, and arenas. In Las Vegas
alone their shows play to an average 9000 people every night. On any given evening,
somewhere around the world, 18 different Cirque du Soleil shows are being
staged. About 5000 people work for the company, onstage, backstage, and in the
head offices. About 2000 of the company's employees are circus performers!
What makes Cirque du
Soleil so special? The shows are an amazing, the acrobatics, tightrope walking,
trapeze, trampoline, tumbling, dance, climbing, fire breathing and diving acts
are unquestionably awe-inspiring, but there is another aspect to Cirque du
Soleil that makes it stand apart from other circuses.
They don't use any
animals.
No animals are kept in
cages. No animals are forced to perform tricks in front of an audience, and no
lions, tigers, monkeys, elephants, or dolphins are forced onto train cars and
shuttled from city to city in order to perform.
All of Cirque du
Soleil's incredible feats are performed by humans. People train for years to
develop the strength, balance, coordination, and grace to be able to perform on
a Cirque du Soleil stage. Anyone seeing a Cirque du Soleil clown standing
upside down on only one hand, climbing a rope without using feet, diving from a
great height into a tiny pool of water, or climbing on top of a rigid, elegant
human pyramid would swear that they actors are super-human. But they're not.
Their simply people who had a dream, wanted to perform, and trained every
single day.
Cirque du Soleil was founded
in 1984 by a Montreal street performer named Guy Laliberté. Laliberté was a
clown. He would juggle, ride a unicycle, and balance things on his head, all
while making crowds of people on the streets of Montreal laugh. Sometimes the
people watching would drop a coin or two into his hat as payment. Just a coin
or two. Laliberté was not making a lot of money. Over time, Laliberté began
attracting the attention of other performers and they got together to produce a
show that would happen indoors, on stage, and audiences would pay to come
watch. It was an immediate hit. Word spread around Quebec of this new kind of
circus that was fresh, funny, clean, lively, and animal-free. The circus felt
modern, it felt happy. It made other traditional circuses seem dry, stale, and
stuck in the past. While old circuses where trying the same old tricks with animals,
Cirque du Soleil was inventing something new. No longer would audiences sit in
the stands and laugh uncomfortably as monkeys did tricks, wondering all the
while how those monkeys were being treated backstage. Cirque du Soleil was pure
joy, pure happiness.
In the years that followed
Cirque du Soleil grew. They moved out of theaters and got their own big top
tent. The would tour Canada, setting up their massive tent and attracting huge
crowds. Soon they were performing in the US, and after that, the world. Over
time, they hired more and more performers, created a clown school to train
athletes, and built more an more shows so that the circus could travel to different
places around at the same time.
The success of Cirque
du Soleil is so massive the attendance at traditional circuses has fallen
drastically. Barnum and Bailey's circus, which has been touring the US for over
a hundred years, was forced to announce that they would no longer be using
elephants in their shows anymore. The audience just didn't want to see miserable
animals forced to do trick. The public love of Cirque du Soleil has brought
pressure on any show that uses animals - Sea World, Marine Land, Zoos - to
explain why they need to keep animals locked up in pools and cages to put on a
show.
Cirque du Soleil has
proved that animals aren't necessary.
Cirque du Soleil was in
the news recently. It's being sold. Laliberté has run it long enough. The sale
price is 1.5 billion dollars. Of that, Laliberté, the clown and street
performer who used to work for pocket change, will keep over a billion.
Now that's a success
story.
