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.
