THE CIRQUE CALL OF LIFE : These Performers Give Their All--and Get Something, Too

Backstage between shows at Cirque du Soleil, dozens of performers saunter into the company bistro tucked behind the blue and yellow big top. They look nothing like the exotic creatures who have just taken their bows to the wild applause of happy, dazzled circus-goers.

They’ve shed their fabulous costumes in less time than it takes to say “Alegria”--the name of this spectacular production--and they are chatting breezily in half a dozen languages: French, English, Russian, Walloon, Mandarin and even Mongolian.

The bistro hums with gossip about everything from newborn babies to holiday travel. It is just days to Christmas here in Santa Monica. The whole globe-trotting company has a month’s vacation before the next stop on its North American tour--a six-week stand in Costa Mesa, beginning Tuesday and ending March 5.

Everybody is itching to take a break. Some will be heading for ski resorts, others for the tropics. Many will be flying home to see their families for the first time in a year. Ulan Batur, here they come. Look out, Moscow.

“I like this life,” says Emilie Therrien, 17, a slim Canadian acrobat who hails from Sherbrooke, Quebec. “But now it’s a lonely time. I’ve been too long (since early October) in the same city.”

Therrien, who intends to become a circus choreographer, earned her high school diploma on the road. When was that? “I graduated in San Jose,” she replies. Cirque’s touring performers tend to think geography is chronology. The troupe was in San Jose in August and September.

Jean-Luc Martin, 29, a veteran of several tours, measures the years in countries. He joined the Montreal-based company in 1990 and has performed since then in Cirque productions all over Europe.

A tumbler, aerialist and juggler, Martin leads “Alegria’s” crusty old gaggle of not-too-bright “nostalgia birds.” They personify the core theme of the show--the old versus the young--and seem to have lost their bearings in the cosmic barnyard.

You’d never recognize Martin out of his weird chicken get-up. He not only looks as handsome as Prince Valiant, but also knows exactly where he belongs.

Martin is a Louisiana native who moved to Canada at 13 and took up rock-climbing at 17. Before he ever thought of becoming a circus performer, he made the mountain walls of British Columbia his home away from home.

“What excites me most right now is just doing my job,” he says. “It’s work that is set in stone. But every morning when you wake up, the stone crumbles. You’re always changing something. There’s always someone injured, or something unexpected happens. You have to make adjustments.

“The other day a father put his child on the edge of the stage and turned around to fix his chair. Well, this child kept staring at me. So I got him to come to me. He held my finger, and the two of us became an act--me in my bird costume and this child in his innocence.”

Martin notes, as every good clown will: “You can never predict what’s going to happen. You have a formula to follow, but you have to be able to improvise. You keep your nose in the wind and your eyes open.”

Of course, circus performers don’t always see life on the road through the same lens.

“I was just talking to one of the little girls,” Martin says. “She plays a nymph. I think she’s 16. She said, ‘My God. I wake up, go to school, practice, do the show, go to bed, wake up, go to school, practice, do the show, go to bed. My life is always the same.’

“For me, the routine has more variation. I’ve made a lot of friends in L.A.”

Meanwhile, the Tongan fire-knife dancer Tovo Lisiate Tuione is just getting used to circus life. He joined “Alegria” in San Jose in September, after the artistic directors realized the production lacked an essential element.

It had music (folksy). It had risk (breath-taking). It had humor (bittersweet). It struck dark chords (despite the title, which means “joy” in Spanish). It had a strong man (not too friendly). It had contortionists (young). It had brilliant acrobats and aerialists (many). It had humanity (clowns). It had hoops (gorgeous).

But their stellar back-to-basics show, a $3-million production intended to celebrate Cirque du Soleil’s street-performance roots, was missing--what?

Of course! A fire act!

They dispatched one of their talent scouts to the Pacific. He found Tovo in Hawaii.

Costa Mesa will be Tovo’s third stop on the tour. But already this spectacular 18-year-old performer can’t get enough of it.

“This is my first time off the islands,” he says. “I want to get around, see the world.”

There are plenty of women out there who want to show it to him, too. Tovo has been getting mail. Lots of mail, with hand-drawn hearts. More, it seems, than any Cirque performer since that flamboyant Russian heartthrob of four years ago. (Remember Vladimir Kehkaial in “Nouvelle Experience”? He soared like a spectral Icarus and looked like a smoldering tease who set pulses fluttering with a mere toss of his jet-black mane.)

Rest assured, Tovo is no tease. He swoops out of the darkness, carrying a flaming baton, wearing nothing but fringes of leather. In the yellow glare of the firelight, his smoothly muscled body has the glow of burnished teak. His million-watt smile takes care of the rest.

Then he begins to do things--dangerous things. He eats the fire, and he’s not timid about it, either. He doesn’t take a split-second lick. He makes it a three-course meal. Then he dances with the fire, twirling one and two and even three flaming batons. And he does it all with remarkable grace and relaxation.

“I love performing,” he says, sitting demurely in jeans and a T-shirt at one of the bistro’s corner tables. “My manager told me I’m supposed to make the dance look hard, not to make it look easy. But it’s hard to make it look hard.”

It’s only when he’s injured--Tovo reveals scars on his feet and taped burns on his hands--that his act is difficult, he says.

But nobody else in the cast seems to agree. The heat from his flaming batons is so intense that even the show’s most agile acrobats won’t grab them without three-foot tongs.

Pavel Brun, a lanky, blond Russian, works behind the scenes. He is the major-domo, officially titled the “artistic coordinator-on-tour,” which suggests a desk-bound corporate bureaucrat.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

“I’m the pompous entertainer for everybody here,” he quips, pulling up a chair and gesturing toward the crowd behind him. “I keep them all alive. I’m the crop and the carrot, the baby-sitter, the shoulder to cry on.”

Brun, 37, has the right experience. Born and raised in Moscow, he trained in pantomime, juggling, acrobatics, classical and modern dance. He made his escape to the circus as a teen-ager, “if nothing else to protest against my parents,” he says. “They wanted me to become a designer or an architect, just like them.”

Instead, at 14, Brun began performing with a troupe of pantomimes “in the Moscow underground.” By that he doesn’t mean the subway. He means “unofficial performances.” It was the ‘70s. “Everything was illegal,” he says, “rock music, jazz, avant-garde painting. We had a very tough government. Very stupid, not just tough. If you were in pantomime, it meant you were gay. If you were gay, you were not normal. If you expressed yourself without words, it meant you must have something secret to say.”

At 16, Brun realized he needed serious circus training. He auditioned for Russia’s most prestigious company, the Moscow Circus, and won an apprentice slot. For each slot, he says, there were 150 applicants.

In the late ‘80s, working as a choreographer, he was creating new acts at the experimental workshop of the Moscow Circus when Gilles Ste-Croix, Cirque du Soleil’s founding artistic director, invited him to Canada. Brun loved what he saw.

“They were doing what I was always thinking about,” Brun says. “It was a totally different kind of circus performance. It was a fusion of the arts--music, theater, acrobatics, singing, dance. It was crazy and romantic.”

In 1992, he left the Moscow Circus to become assistant choreographer for the Cirque’s “Saltimbanco” show, which toured North America for two years, went on to Japan for six months and will begin a two-year tour of Europe in March.

Ironically, Brun’s own kids want no part of circus life--”They’re lazy intellectuals,” he says in jest--and he’s not about to push them. His daughter Valeria, 19, visited him on the tour but left it in San Francisco in July and returned to Moscow, where she attends the Russian Academy of Theater Arts.

“My daughter did not follow me,” Brun says. “She is a historian of theater. When I need to know something now, I ask her.”

He says he has seen “many frustrated circus families with very well-trained kids. They perform at a very high level, but they have no fun doing it. It is a paradox.”

On the other hand, there’s Bochka, the backstage mascot of “Alegria” who just had his fifth birthday and already thinks he’s the Cirque du Soleil ringmaster.

Bochka’s mother, Otgonjargal Shirnen, who hails from Ulan Batur, Mongolia, and coaches the contortionists, says Bochka has seen every performance of the show since Montreal, where the tour began 10 months ago.

“He knows the acts by heart,” she says. “He thinks he can do all of them.”

Bochka, rapidly becoming bilingual, agrees. Asked in English whether he wants to join the circus, he shakes his head up and down. His answer is vigorous and to the point.

“Yes!” he says, grinning like a magnificent imp.

What

The Cirque du Soleil’s “Alegria.”

When

Tuesday through March 12. (Tickets go on sale Sunday at 9 a.m. for performances March 6-12.) Shows are Tuesday through Thursday at 8 p.m., Friday at 6 and 9:30 p.m., Saturday at 4:30 and 8:30 p.m., and Sunday at 1 and 5 p.m. No performances on Mondays.

Where

In the South Coast Plaza parking lot at Bear Street and the San Diego (405) Freeway, Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts

San Diego (405) Freeway, exit Bristol Street north. Go left at first entrance to South Coast Plaza and follow perimeter of the mall parking lot to yellow and blue tent.

Wherewithal

$13.50 to $39.50; $7 to $26.50 for children 12 and under.

Where to call

(714) 557-4111 (box office) or (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster).

MORE THEATER

IN COSTA MESA: ‘THE MISANTHROPE’

Moliere’s classic farce continues at South Coast Repertory through Feb. 12. It’s about a man who scorns humanity for its inherent dishonesty but falls victim to his own petty jealousy. John Vickery is funny and combustible as Alceste; set in Nazi-occupied Paris. (714) 957-4033.

IN SANTA ANA: ‘DEATH OF A SALESMAN’

The Alternative Repertory Theatre begins previews Friday, Jan. 20, of its revival of Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer-winning drama about a middle-aged man pushed to the end of his emotional rope by business failure, loss of self-esteem and a conflict with his son. (714) 636-7929.

IN LAGUNA BEACH: LES AND BESS ON THE AIR

Lee Kalcheim’s comedy, “Breakfast With Les and Bess,” continues at the Moulton Theater through Feb. 5, telling the story of a couple who broadcast a morning radio program from their posh Manhattan apartment during the early 1960s. (714) 497-9244).

* THEATER LISTINGS, Page 20