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In the Mystère Theatre, virtually empty but architecturally vital, a figure hooded in green spandex repeatedly slinks headfirst down a wall toward a color-splayed stage that’s mopped regularly with Coca-Cola. An English aerialist with a biting wit who spends his days as a Las Vegas real estate agent chides a Russian trampolinist with a law degree. A mammoth freestanding snail is pushed across the stage, jiggling, Jell-O-like, past two baby carriages.

In the belly of the Treasure Island hotel and casino in Vegas before the first show even begins, reality wanes.

At 7:45 p.m. a tattered-clothed clown with a troll coif will lead patrons in circles and dump popcorn on their laps. The stage of Mystère will then be swallowed by swirling fog, and decadently covered figures in greasepaint will descend from somewhere above, draped in pieces of pulsating color, gracefully hurling flaming candelabras and steel cubes the size of coffee tables. Needle-nosed lizards, ancient beaked and amphibious creatures, and gymnasts with blazing Mohawks will leap on trampolines and teeter-boards, soaring above the stage, all to the haunting celestial harmony conjured by composers Benoit Jutras and René Dupéré.

And that’s just the opening scene.

With eight shows now running worldwide and two new shows—yet unnamed—debuting this summer in Las Vegas, Cirque has become the world’s architect of the bizarre and brilliant.

Mystère has run two times a night, five nights a week at Treasure Island for the past 10 years, and the waterlogged O has been at The Bellagio for four. The two shows combined entertain 33,000 guests every week. This summer the hotel New York, New York on the Vegas Strip will debut one of the new permanent Cirque shows.

Although all of the Cirque shows have their own story and their own character, the ideology of the company shines through in every production. La Nouba, Cirque’s newest permanent production in Orlando, Fla., which is close to reaching its two thousandth performance, is a subconscious wonderland like Mystère, but the tone, music, props, acts, and cast are entirely different. “The thing that’s common about [every Cirque show] is the joy and the wonder and the awe,” says Richard Dennison, La Nouba company manager. “The common thread is the level of achievement—the costumes, the athleticism—a Cirque product is unmistakably a Cirque product.”

From Cirque du Soleil and La Magie Continue, which debuted in 1984 and 1986, to O, the first Cirque production in water, the element that makes them so Cirque-ish, he says, is the organic creation process. The show’s founder and company president, Guy Laliberte, was a fire breather in a bedraggled crew of street performers in the province of Quebec in the early ’80s. The group bound together to collectively bring in more viewers and has evolved into an artistic machine, unlike any circus the world has ever seen.

The spontaneous nature of Cirque is now incorporated into the development of all the new shows, permanent and touring. In La Nouba, the creation process lasted 100 days and began even before the theater—created and owned by Disney—was built. “It’s the most exciting creative process I’ve ever experienced because you don’t know what the hell you’re going to end up with, and it’s enormously exciting,” says Dennison, who has worked in Canadian theater since 1967.

Like most Cirque shows, the concept for the theater and the assembly of the cast were developed almost entirely around the creator’s vision. “Franco [Dragone, the writer and director] knew he wanted it to be an attic in your mind, dreams and memories. He knew he wanted to use ordinary household objects as triggers for thoughts— doors, windows, bikes, tables, all of which are part of the show,” Dennison says.

The creative team including Dragone (Cirque’s “most prolific” director since 1985), creative director Gilles Ste-Croix, costume designer Dominique Lemieux, choreographer Debra Brown, and set designer Michel Crête collaborated to assemble the acts without even having a script or a score in hand.

The first step was to build a theater to accommodate the show and the troupe, Dennison says. They knew they wanted a trapeze act, the Chinese yo-yo (Diabolo) act, and a tightrope walker. “Not a note of music had been written—but they knew what they wanted. Crête provided concept drawings of a stage and potential set pieces enough that he could sit with the people who were going to create the theater space so they could design the theater that we at least knew would accommodate what we wanted it to do, even though we weren’t entirely clear what the final end product would be,” he says.

“That’s the theater that you see, that’s the theater that we live in. It was designed for us based on the concept of the creative team.” The only major challenge presented by the theater, which Dennison calls an engineering marvel, is lack of space. They created the venue to emulate a typical round big top circus, which doesn’t afford them much room for storage.

But during training and rehearsals, there were other major obstacles to overcome. Although it’s never an insurmountable problem, with so many cast members from around the world, language can be a barrier between performers, directors, and even with the composer. In Dralion in particular, a touring production that features mainly Chinese performers who didn’t speak English or French initially, the show’s producers struggled to communicate with their performers.

Kristy Wilson, a 23-year-old Australian power track performer in La Nouba, says the senior cast members can usually help the freshmen. “It’s challenging with everyone from different countries—sometimes the communication doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to,” she says. “We’ve had some problems with that, but in the end it all works out—everyone understands what they’re supposed to be doing.”

Celestial Bodies
Gilles Ste-Croix, Cirque’s director of creation, who began as a stilt-walker in the founding troupe, describes the performers as “almost untouchable—monsters, if you will.” These creatures’ backgrounds are as varied as their salaries—from $30,000 for apprentices to $250,000 for veterans who have creative rights to the act they perform.

Doug White’s sport—bike trials—challenges competitors to maneuver over waterfalls, riverbeds, even barns, without putting their feet down. He was ranked 22 in the world at the end of 1997 and had never heard of Cirque du Soleil until they called and offered him a job at the end of 1998. His skills on two wheels presented the kind of edge La Nouba creators were looking for to incorporate into the show within a few days. “We talked one night and the next day they flew me here. Two weeks later I was in the show,” White says. Dennison says they decided to add the bike act to La Nouba after its December debut at the suggestion of Laliberte, who felt the show was missing something. “He said a contemporary bike act would positively jar the audience, throw a different rhythm of the show. We called casting, which operates worldwide and knows all the different acts—within 48 hours we had built the ramps and had the bikers. It’s extremely successful.” As the second half of the act, White jumps off high platforms, hops up and down steps, and propels himself into the audience on one wheel.

White, a 39-year-old Florida native, says the most challenging aspect for him is repetition. “In bike trials you’re not allowed to practice or pre-ride any of the obstacles. The sport is to try something for the first time every time,” he explains. “To do the same thing every night in the show got rough for a while. It took me about three years to get settled in.”

Of the more than 500 Cirque performers that come from 40 different countries (almost 35 percent from Eastern Europe and 33 percent from Canada), every one is a master of his or her craft. Many have competed in Olympics, representing countries around the world before joining Cirque. But for most onstage talents, the common bond is performance euphoria. “The idea is to transform the audience to somewhere they’ve never been before and see things they’ve never seen or experienced. As individuals, we are united by one overriding goal: to entertain, uplift, and enlighten audiences the world over,” says 35-year-old Paul Bowler, from Manchester, U.K. Bowler trained as a gymnast for 20 years and competed in the European Championships in 1992 and the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. But at 28, when he “would have given anything to have been four years younger,” he didn’t make the 1996 Olympic team, and began teaching gymnastics to children.

On a whim, he sent a tape in 1996 to a friend who worked with Cirque. Three months later he was training one-on-one with Russian cube artist Mikhail Matorin, who was born into a Moscow Circus family. Matorin had created the cube act with his father 20 years earlier in Russia and adapted the act for Cirque. He traveled with the troupe for 15 years before passing it on to Bowler, who says he instantly felt at home. “The moment I joined Cirque I had no interest in competitive gymnastics at all.”

After Bowler learned the act, he began touring with Alegria across Europe, and juggling Matorin’s cube for the past four years with Mystère. “There’s nobody else in the world that does that cube act, so it’s nice work if you can get it . . . If I could fly forever, I’d fly forever,” Bowler says.

Show Time
La Nouba’s first major number begins as the “urbans” invade the dark stage with determination and begin to dance with hip-hop-inspired motion. In the control booth, which arches around the back end of the La Nouba theater, objects are strewn around each computer station and among the cameras on closed circuit television—walkie-talkies, a Florida safety manual, headsets, a calculator, and a java-filled Marvin the Martian mug. Although everything is automated, on a given night 35 technicians operate the booth and the lighting console that also controls the atmosphere—smoke and fog—because they don’t take any chances.

The 20 motorized line sets, 1,400 lighting instruments including 60 moving lights, and 18 cameras are all set to automatically run the show, but the 35 technicians, seven riggers, three stagehands, and physiotherapist are all in place to make sure nothing goes wrong and to manually make any necessary changes. Nothing at Cirque gets more attention than safety, Dennison says.

But despite all their precautions in the booth and backstage, Dennison says at Cirque injury is endemic, because the artists are required to perform incredibly difficult stunts twice a day, five days a week. Bowler just returned to the show October 13, 2002 (his birthday), after being out for six months with an injured shoulder, “hence the real estate. “When you’re on stage you feel invincible, like you can perform forever. But being out of the show for six months after performing for five and a half years and being a normal person again makes me realize how much I love what I’m doing,” Bowler says.

Regularly treating ankles, hamstrings, and shoulders is stressful for the performers and the physical therapists, Dennison says, but keeping constant vigil on the army of contraptions that are rigged to keep the performers safe is the major challenge. “There are lots of dangerous things that take place in the show both by and from the performers themselves—jumping on the trampoline or the power track or the retractable floor that appears in the finale. All that motorized stuff can be enormously dangerous. Everything is automated as happens in big Broadway shows, big theatrical shows these days, and in all of Cirque’s other ventures.” In the past four years, there has only been one serious incident during a performance, Dennison says, at the end of the trapeze act.

During the high wire dismount one performer landed on the other, knocking him unconscious. But La Nouba’s crew was prepared. “The band kept playing. The show stopped. The activity continued. The physiotherapists who are always on call climbed a ladder that was dropped from the ceiling. The body was stabilized, a neck brace put on, and the body was fastened to the backboard. An ambulance was called before anything else. We only had to do it once live, and they were brilliant.”

Danielle Rodenkirchen, a Canadian fast track performer who gave herself a black eye with a drumstick during a Mystère performance, says the performers are trained to keep the audience from realizing that an incident has occurred. “Some people catch on, but some people are like, ‘Oh, I thought that was part of the show when that big thing crashed on your head.’

“There’s always a sort of plan where everyone is on standby and the people running the show will be able to tell the performers where to go, technically and artistically . . . They’ll say ‘something’s on stage and we need a whole bunch of dancers out there so go improvise’ while the technical side is down there madly fixing the problem. So there is sort of a plan, but you can’t predict exactly what is going to happen.”

Knowing how to prevent injury is as essential to Cirque performers as remembering their routines, says Wilson, who now studies nutrition and personal training on the side. In addition to regular attention from the physiotherapist when they have sore and pulled muscles, the performers do pilates to stay loose and in shape.

When asked why the performers stay with Cirque so long, in spite of the intense risk to their bodies, Bowler says, “It’s a drug.” But Rodenkirchen says the reason is simple. “We love what we do, so until something physically stops us from being able to do it, I’m sure we’ll keep doing it. I hope to be doing it until I can’t do it any longer, until my body breaks down.”