The Cirque’s Global Strategy : Cirque du Soleil is bringing its largest Russian contingent ever for its production of ‘Alegria.’ It was a struggle. Those Russian stars had to deal with Quebec artistic communism--and joy.

Looking like a star is one thing. Acting like one is something else entirely.

And so when Cirque du Soleil’s very own Flying Fabio, more prosaically known as Vladimir Kekhayal, and his chair-balancing compatriot Vassily Demenchoukov arrived from Russia with all the attitude they could pack in their bags, their star quality was considered, well, a bit de trop .

“It was like ‘If I’m here, I’m the star, so you have to treat me as a star,’ ” says Gilles Ste-Croix, Cirque’s artistic director.

Au contraire, mon frere.

“I would say, ‘Listen. Cirque du Soleil is not like this. Everyone is the star. But if I need you to bring a carpet for another performer, if you need them to bring you something for your number, we all share.’

“They said, ‘But that’s communism.’

“I said, ‘Yeah, that’s Quebec communism. But that’s how it works.’ ”

So went the occasionally rocky debut of Cirque du Soleil’s first Russian imports for its early ‘90s show “Nouvelle Experience.” To get them to Cirque’s base in Montreal, Ste-Croix had grappled with Russian bureaucracy and an American producer for six months in the thick of perestroika in 1989. But at least Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms had propped open the gates for Russian artists to perform abroad. And with the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, even more of Russia’s best talent has made an exodus. This year, Cirque du Soleil has plucked its largest Russian contingent ever--16--for its latest shimmering production of circus theater, “Alegria,” which opens Thursday at the Santa Monica Pier and on Jan. 24 at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa.

The Russians’ arrival heralds growth for the 10-year-old Canadian company, which has become increasingly multinational as Cirque du Soleil evolves far from its street-performing roots. It’s also fitting that so many Russians should be part of Cirque’s eighth production, which celebrates the era’s global changes in power. Unlike traditional circuses, which string together unrelated acts, Cirque du Soleil cloaks its acrobatics and clowning in lavish costumes, lighting and dance, all designed around a theme. And for “Alegria”-- joy in Spanish--the phrase that shapes the evening is: “The fools have lost their king.”

“Everybody now has a global concern, but they’re also living in a world of uncertainty and complaining a lot about this,” Ste-Croix says. “ Alegria is like a scream of joy, a scream of life against the moroseness. We would say, ‘The king is dead. Alegria !’ Because there is life after death in the sense that something new is coming.”

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In this $3-million production, something old is evoked in Cirque-speak, a visual language that may not be immediately decipherable. The old regime, for example, is represented by feathers and performers in bird costumes, inspired by the “gilded year” at the turn of the century ruled by railroad and petroleum barons.

As for the new world, simply look down. “Alegria” has more performers under 18 than any other Cirque production.

“When you have a child of 12 who does incredible feats and comes straight at you on the stage and looks at you in the eyes with a smile and goes, ‘Hey!’ ” Ste-Croix says, “you are really taken by that power because they are there to be the future, whereas the old birds represent the period that we are living through that is dying.”

If Cirque’s 12-year-old Mongolian contortionists are prized for their youth--and preternatural flexibility, to a degree peculiar to Mongolians, Ste-Croix says--the Russians are sought after for their aerial abilities. That’s because many former Russian gymnasts and acrobats with Olympic aspirations turned to the circus later in their career, says Pavel Brun, Cirque’s artistic coordinator and choreographer of Andrei Lev’s Flying Trapeze Team in “Alegria.”

Cirque du Soleil’s first attempt to build a Russian act after the fall of the Soviet Union went much more smoothly than earlier enlistment efforts. In 1992, the mayors of Moscow and Montreal signed an agreement joining the innovative Cirque with the more traditional Moscow Circus in staging a flying trapeze act.

The deal called for the Russians to recruit a group of 25 trapeze artists, from which Cirque selected 12. Then Brun and another coach worked with the troupe at the Moscow Circus’ elaborate $50-million facility. The act was designed for Cirque’s show “Mystere,” now in its first of five years at the company’s permanent theater in Las Vegas. (A third production, “Saltimbanco,” will tour Europe next year.)

The Moscow-Montreal agreement had been lauded as the beginning of cultural exchanges between the two cities, but the circus flow has largely been headed in one direction--to the West.

“I don’t think they got anything out of it,” Ste-Croix says of the Moscow Circus. “We could have had a collaboration that could have gone for years, but I think the system turned into a very rotten thing that is worse than what communism was.”

Artistic standards have sagged, Brun says, and corruption has left its mark on the Russian circus. A few days before the Cirque trapeze troupe left Moscow in 1993, the commercial director of the Moscow Circus was shot dead in the door of his apartment with a hunting rifle.

“Maybe he knew (why),” Brun says. “Maybe not. Maybe it was financial. Is it normal that at the end of the 20th Century, you’re opening the door of your apartment and somebody shoots you three times in the stomach? That’s an example of (organized crime) involvement. Is it connected with the circus? Is it connected with the Las Vegas project with Cirque du Soleil? I don’t know. But it makes me really sad.”

Under Soviet rule, the govern ment prized the circus, but its attentions were like a cobra’s embrace. Hailing the circus as the art of the people, the government institutionalized the big tops, sending it into a spiral of ruin and eventually prompting its artists to flee the country.

The popular appeal was price. Two years ago, a ticket went for 15 rubles--9 cents. The big tops had come down in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and up came 69 permanent circus buildings in every city of more than 200,000 people. Shows were held 11 months a year, a droning continuity that clashed with the tradition of itinerant companies whose briefer appearances drummed up expectations and audiences. Audiences shrank, and a financial crisis for the circus mushroomed.

“Since you have buildings, it was like ‘All right, this is the circus,’ ” Brun says. “It’s like a gas station. It’s like a supermarket. It exists. No celebration anymore.”

In that period, too, the Communist Party ordered the arts to bow to politics. In addition to acrobatics, audiences would be treated to party posters and portraits; beneath a bust of Lenin, poets would declaim their love of the red flag.

Under the Soviets, travel to countries with more liberal circus traditions--often impossible anyway--required Communist Party membership. Even then, artists needed approval from the KGB, the Ministry of Culture and the Soyuzgoscirk, the bureaucracy that governed the country’s 7,000 circus artists and told them where they had to perform. And when artists were allowed to perform abroad, their pay went to Soyuzgoscirk.

“It was very administrative, like everything at those times, and I would say that Soyuzgoscirk was a real product of totalitarianism,” Brun says.

Even the perestroika years of the late ‘80s held bureaucratic roadblocks. In the ‘80s, Brun, who had studied at the Moscow Circus School, was performing mime with Moscow’s top free-lance jazz-rock musician, Aleksei Kozlov, whose performing group, Arsenal, melded jazz, movement and puppetry. The group, described in Hedrick Smith’s “The Russians,” was famous in Russia, wildly popular with youth but detested by Communist officials in part because it was beloved by Americans in Moscow--the U.S. Embassy invited the group to perform at its July Fourth and Thanksgiving celebrations.

When Arsenal was invited to participate in the Live Aid concert at London’s Wembley Stadium in 1985, the Ministry of Culture responded that travel would be complicated because the group was in Mongolia.

“In those years, you say the word Mongolia and it seems almost impossible to reach you,” Brun says. “They say, ‘OK,’ but forget about it. But we were in Moscow.”

Still, Brun, 36, says there was a payoff for performers coming of age in difficult times.

“All this pressure, all this frustration, all this stupidity made us very, very resistant. To be a modern dancer, to be a jazz musician, to be an avant-garde circus performer was prohibited. It made my generation a lot stronger because we did it anyway. And I would say a lot of artistic achievements of the ‘70s and ‘80s were a lot higher than now in Russia, where everything is legal and you can do whatever you want to do.”

Brun quit Arsenal in 1988 and began working with the Moscow Circus’ experimental workshop. He met Cirque founder Guy Laliberte in 1990 in Paris at the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain. Laliberte later went to Moscow to see the workshop.

“And that was it. I was hooked by my heart,” Brun says. “Because I realized that Cirque du Soleil was the exact place where I can express myself as much as I can, where I can have--what’s the American word?--fun, where my experience will be appreciated.”

Clown Slava Polunin was widely appreciated in Russia via the most official of channels--national television--even though his Yellow Clown persona was an alternative meld of influences ranging from Antonin Artaud to Samuel Beckett to Robert Wilson.

Polunin, who performs for Cirque with his 8-year-old son Ivan, is credited with creating the first Russian clown theater in the ‘70s, a time when politics had turned circus clowns into chilly technocrats. Polunin’s Academy of Fools revived the art of clowning by incorporating philosophy, social criticism and surrealistic painting.

Polunin’s tragicomic character Asisay (a bit of baby talk with no real translation) would speak in a kind of “double language,” as Brun, who interprets for him, put it. “You can speak of one thing, but you can keep in your mind totally different things.” The authorities didn’t catch on to his double meanings, “because his childish image was like an excuse.”

By the beginning of the ‘80s, Asisay was a fixture of Russian television and Polunin became a star. “His fame in Russia was equal to the fame of rock stars,” Brun says.

For cube gymnast Mikhail Matorin, 29, joining Cirque du Soleil was a simple matter of picking up the phone. The former Moscow Circus performer had seen Cirque acts at the Paris circus competition in 1990, and he had applied two years ago to join the company. Ste-Croix called him in Moscow a couple of weeks before the Montreal debut of “Alegria” in April. By then, Matorin was in the enviable position of being courted by circuses in France and Canada, and he needed only to pick up and go.

“I had to choose between Cirque La Luna, which is the moon, and Cirque du Soleil, which is the sun, and I chose the sun,” he says. “They just amazed me by the movement, by the music. It was beautiful, and when I changed my act and created new things, I was always thinking about the Cirque du Soleil.”

Matorin performs with a five-foot-square cube, manipulating it while on foot and dangling from an aerial wire. Matorin’s signature act, a highlight of “Alegria,” was created by his father, an artistic director of the Moscow Circus. The idea of juxtaposing the human body with a cube was inspired by drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and such Salvador Dali paintings as “Gala Looking at the Hypercubicus Christ.” It took a year and a half to develop.

F or Matorin, joining Cirque has meant realizing a dream:

“It’s more interesting to perform here. Even if we forget about the financial side, the convenience, it’s more interesting to perform in front of happy people.”

For Brun, joining Cirque has meant understanding that a dream will never be realized.

“There will be a wonderful Canadian big top,” he says, “and you will see lots of Russian performers and a wonderful international troupe, but for me it’s kind of painful that it’s unrealistic to expect that this big top of Cirque du Soleil could be created in the Red Square in Moscow. I want to do that, but I know it will not happen in the near future. Because the needs of the people over there are unfortunately a lot different. They are thinking about what they are going to eat, how they are going to dress, are they going to be killed tomorrow because of some street gangs or will they stay alive. I’m not afraid of that, but it makes me very, very sad because we were expecting something different.”*

Vital Stats

Cirque du Soleil’s “Alegria”

Address: Santa Monica Pier

Price: $13.50-$39.50 (children, ages 12 and under, $7-$26.50).

Hours: Opens Thursday, 8 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesday-Thursday, 8 p.m.; Friday, 6 and 9:30 p.m. (this Friday only, 8 p.m.); Saturday, 4:30 and 8:30 p.m.; Sunday, 1 and 5 p.m. Indefinitely.

Phone: (310) 458-7773