![Cirque du Soleil headed for Newcastle Entertainment Centre Cirque du Soleil headed for Newcastle Entertainment Centre](/images/transform/v1/resize/frm/silverstone-feed-data/eb274a82-7453-4cdd-80b5-10aa65535e0e.jpg/w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Its name translates to ‘‘circus of the sun’’ but Cirque du Soleil is busying itself with world domination in the entertainment arena.
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In the early 1980s, Guy Laliberte made a hand-to-mouth living as a street performer playing an accordion, stilt-walking and breathing fire in the streets of a small town in Canada’s Quebec province.
Today, 51-year-old Laliberte is the head of Cirque du Soleil, a Montreal-headquartered entertainment group with 5000 employees worldwide that will have 22 resident and touring circus shows in performance by year’s end. His personal worth was put at $2.5billion by Forbes business magazine in March.
From its beginnings in 1984, Cirque du Soleil – which translates as “circus of the sun” – has set a trend that other circuses have increasingly adopted. All the performers are human, with no animals in sight.
Laliberte and his co-founders placed trust in the way they had been able to gain the attention – and the coins – of people passing by as they performed on footpaths.
And, beginning with its 1992 Saltimbanco, Cirque du Soleil has given each of its shows a themed story, rather than offering a loose collection of acts.
Saltimbanco’s director, Franco Dragone, was inspired by the way multiculturalism shaped the nature and direction of Cirque du Soleil, with performers drawn from many nations. He chose a theme of “cosmopolitan urbanism” for the show.
At the time, immigration was an issue in the United States and Canada, and Dragone, with Laliberte’s support, put together a colourful range of characters, with diverse skills, to show how people could live and work together, despite their differences.
Saltimbanco was Cirque du Soleil’s first show to visit Australia, touring to several state capitals in 1999 with a distinctive blue-topped fibreglass tent as the performance space.
Saltimbanco is back in Australia again, but seasons in Hobart, Newcastle and Wollongong have been added to the capital city itinerary.
This time, the show is playing in arenas, with a significant cut in staging costs.
Staging the show in a tent requires 50 trailers to move the various tent components, including seating, plus performance rigs, costumes and sets, from place to place, so that a season of six weeks is needed to recover costs. With an arena as a venue, the number of trailers is reduced to 15. As a result of the lower costs, Saltimbanco and other shows can be performed for four or five days, with the troupe then moving on to the next centre.
The Newcastle season, at the Newcastle Entertainment Centre in Broadmeadow, will include nine performances between Wednesday, July 20, and Sunday, July 24.
Cirque du Soleil’s move into arena tours, initiated in 2007, is further evidence of why the company has become such a significant contributor to the global entertainment business.
While arenas like the NEC generally hold fewer people than Cirque’s huge tents – in many cases, just 4000 to 5000 – they are big enough for the whole of the show to be staged, so that new audiences are introduced to the company’s work in a complete form.
Maxime Charbonneau, Saltimbanco’s resident publicist, said the company’s shows in Hobart had attracted 25,000 people, or about 10per cent of the population of the city’s greater urban area.
Newcastle sales, when he was speaking 10 days ago, had passed 20,000 tickets.
While Cirque will revert to a big-top, capital-city itinerary for a planned tour to Australia of a new show next year, it is looking at another arena production in 2013 after the encouraging audience response in the first half of the present five-month tour.
Saltimbanco’s title is related to the Italian word “saltimbanchi” – people who perform somersaults on a temporary stage or platform – and to the French “saltimbanque” – a street acrobat or entertainer.
So there is a tie-in with both Cirque du Soleil’s origins and the show’s presentation of its characters performing their amazing feats in a fantastical city.
The characters include a baron who thinks he is powerful, but is shown to have no authority; a ringmaster who struts around in a yellow jumpsuit with a fanciful green vest and cape; a jester called Eddie, wearing a red cap and black bow tie; a child who is full of pranks; a town crier called La Belle whose songs, in words drawn from many languages, show the power of emotions; a rebellious group called the Baroques who sleep under bridges and emerge to celebrate life; gentle protectors known as the Cavaliers; and weird creatures listed as multi-coloured worms and masked worms.
The show opens with a family unit – mother, father and child – giving an amazing acrobatic display. Multi-coloured beings climb seven-metre high Chinese circus poles, which represent the city’s skyscrapers, and leap from one to another, with breathtaking agility and speed. And the international theme continues with the baroque characters jumping from a Russian swing and being catapulted 12metres into the air, and two performers twirling Argentinian weighted balls called boleadoras in all directions while they do exotic dance steps.
While none of the original 1992 performers is still with the show, its cast mix is much the same. There are 51 acrobats, clowns, gymnasts and musicians from more than 20 countries, including three from Australia.
One of the Aussies is 22-year-old Keiran Bourke, from Melbourne, who was invited to join the company two years ago after he sent Cirque du Soleil a show reel featuring his performances with Albury’s Flying Fruit Fly Circus school and the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne. The others from Down Under are Nathan Dennis, 24, of Brisbane, and Gold Coast singer Charlie Jones who joined the Saltimbanco company in Melbourne during its stopover there in May.
Like the other performers, they wear costumes that are brightly coloured, eccentric and eclectic. The costumes were fashioned as each character emerged in the show’s development program 19 years ago, though alterations in respect of size and shape have to be made when cast members change.
Each performer wears three to five costumes during the show and some include 12 individual pieces, making a total of more than 2500 costume items. It’s unsurprising that four wardrobe staff travel with the show.
The introduction of arena tours has led to one significant change for Saltimbanco and other shows with arena itineraries.
In the original 1992 production the mother, father and child in the opening scene were played by a real family, with the son just six years old when the tour started.
The tent shows, with their six-week sit-down period in a city, were accompanied by a travelling school, so that young performers had lessons with teachers.
That isn’t feasible with the on-the-move schedules of the arena shows, so they no longer have performers aged under 18. The child in Saltimbanco’s first scene is now played by a petite young woman.
Maxime Charbonneau points to another factor that forced the age restriction.
“Where you are moving from one country to another every week, the situation re employment of young people becomes complicated by different labour laws and permit systems.”
And the arena companies are certainly on the move across borders. Saltimbanco played in Turkey and South Africa before coming to Australia – Cirque du Soleil’s first visit to both countries – and from this nation heads across the Tasman to New Zealand, then to Shanghai in China, and through Russia, the Ukraine, Lithuania and Estonia, all new markets.
The company is looking at making its first visit to India next year.
Charbonneau said the trailblazing had mixed results.
“Sometimes it works well, but in some instances not so well, due to different cultures, education, or the fact that people aren’t used to seeing big shows and paying for the occasion.”
Still, time could change that.
Cirque du Soleil was established in 1984 with the aid of a government grant to put together a show as part of the celebration that year of the 450th anniversary of the European discovery of Canada by explorer Jacques Cartier.
The success of the show led Cirque’s founders to continue the company without subsidy. But life was difficult financially until the early 1990s when Saltimbanco helped to put business affairs on a solid footing.
Saltimbanco has been seen by 12million people, and audiences totalling more than 100million people have attended the company’s shows in 300 cities worldwide.
Those numbers can be expected to grow with the expansion of the arena touring program. When it was introduced four years ago, for example, Cirque officials said it would give them access to 100 new cities in the United States alone.
Another key element of Cirque du Soleil’s success has been its investment, in partnership with other corporate interests, in resident shows.
The first, Mystere, opened in the Treasure Island Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas in December 1993, and has been seen by more than 12million people.
Cirque now has seven resident shows in Las Vegas, the most recent of which, Viva Elvis, opened in a new $225million theatre at the Aria in December 2009, with Elvis Presley Enterprises as a partner.
Another show related to real figures, The Beatles Love, celebrated its fifth anniversary at The Mirage Hotel and Casino on June 30. That venture rose from the friendship of Guy Laliberte and George Harrison.
Harrison suggested the project shortly before his death in 2001 and Laliberte carried it through, using a soundtrack of Beatles songs, taken from original master recordings of the Beatles that had been stored in London since the 1960s, as accompaniment to the circus acts.
Cirque du Soleil is now working on a Michael Jackson and Neverland show that will tour the United States in 2012-13, with a resident version opening in the Mandalay Bay casino hotel in Las Vegas after the tour and an international touring production also being put together.
The company, which also has resident shows in Disney resorts in Florida and Tokyo and in a hotel-casino in China’s Macau, is moving into the heart of Hollywood after taking a 10-year lease on the 3400-seat Kodak Theatre, the home of the Academy Awards presentations.
Iris, described by Cirque as “the real, true history of cinema”, will be performed for 11 months of the year, with the Oscars ceremony continuing each February. Film composer Danny Elfman has written the show’s music. It begins previews on July 21 and premieres on September 25.
Cirque du Soleil also is looking at a resident show in Dubai after Laliberte sold 20per cent of his 95per cent shareholding in the company to Dubai interests in 2008, and is interested in New York and London venues not too far down the track.
The resident shows certainly don’t come cheap. The Beatles Love cost $175million to set up and Iris has a $100million price tag.
But they bring in the customers. While 90-minute versions of stage musicals have had a difficult time in Las Vegas hotel showrooms, the Cirque du Soleil shows have been solidly booked, even during the global financial crisis that otherwise impacted heavily on entertainment in the United States.