Circus Maximized

The people at Cirque du Soleil are experts at manufacturing fantasy worlds and dreamscapes. Yet even those who founded the Quebec-based circus 15 years ago couldn’t have envisioned a scenario as incredible as the worldwide expansion their once-tiny outfit has undergone, particularly in recent years.

Founded in 1984 by a group of French Canadian street performers, Cirque made its U.S. debut as the opening act of the 1987 Los Angeles Festival, performing a sold-out run in a tent on a lot adjacent to downtown’s Little Tokyo.

In those days, Cirque was a chimeric blend of circus and theater--in a single ring, with no animals. There were tightrope walkers, aerialists and other gymnastic performers, not to mention clowns, but the defining ingredient was an intimate theatricality new to American audiences who were more used to thinking of a circus as a massive, relatively impersonal Barnum & Bailey-type spectacle. Using story lines, identifiable characters and an emotional arc, Cirque embodied more than a mere collection of disparate acts and feats.

Now, as Cirque approaches the opening of “Dralion,” its latest extravaganza, which opens Thursday in a big top on the parking lot below the Santa Monica Pier, the company has become something else entirely. With a dozen shows to its credit, Cirque is an international entertainment conglomerate with offices in five parts of the globe, a new $40-million international headquarters in Montreal and seven shows performing on three continents. Permanent productions are installed at Walt Disney World in Florida (“La Nouba”), in Biloxi, Miss. (“Alegria”), and in Las Vegas (“Mystere” and “O”), and some 18 million people around the world have seen a Cirque production.

Not surprisingly, what’s onstage has changed as well. Traces of the early aesthetic remain, but today’s Cirque productions tend to go heavy on contortionists and acrobats and very light on story and theater. There’s only the most tenuous connection between the successive acts, and continuity is provided mostly by a heavily electronic musical score, typically with nonsense lyrics.

Less intimate and personal, the company has traded much of the theatricality and ensemble style for a string-of-pearls approach closer to what Americans commonly identify as circus. And “Dralion” is the most extreme example thus far of this sea change.

“[It’s] very different from all our previous shows,” says onetime stilt-walker Gilles Ste-Croix, a Cirque founder who now sports the title of director of creation, in a phone call from Montreal. “This show is more circusy, but it has also lots of images that make the whole thing flow. There’s lots of large group movement, but [it’s] less theatrical.”

“From the public, some maybe will miss, from the earlier years, the more theatrical [style],” concedes former fire-eater and now founding president Guy Laliberte, speaking from Toronto. “But in the end, we believe it is more important to be constantly challenging ourselves in many ways. We take chances. We went through mistakes, tough moments, but what is most important is how you react to those good or bad moves.”

“Somewhere it’s the same, and sometimes it’s very different, that’s for sure,” says Guy Caron, in an interview at a West Hollywood hotel. Caron was Cirque’s first artistic director and has returned after a decade away to direct “Dralion.” “The company grows, they have more money in the show, and the style of the show changed. At the beginning, it was another world.”

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One of the shrewdest moves Cirque made in its early years was to set up a system to create its own acts, rather than simply relying on employing guest artists who would bring their routines with them (and, consequently, take them away when they would leave).

“We started in 1987 to create our own acts,” says Caron, who founded Montreal’s National Circus School and spent much of the 1990s directing circuses in Europe. “After that, they decided to create more acts that were company acts, [so they could] travel the show around the world, not just for two years, but for seven years, nine years.”

Indeed, this creative copyright has been key not only in allowing Cirque to tour its shows for increasingly longer periods of time, but also to the notion of a permanent show--a landmark Cirque first reached in 1993, with the opening of “Mystere” at Las Vegas’ Treasure Island hotel. The performing facility cost a reported $27 million, and the show itself another $24 million. But that was modest compared to what Cirque has been up to lately.

“O,” as in H2O or the French word for water, l’eau, opened in October 1998 at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. At a cost of $100 million, it was Cirque’s first aquatic show and took the outfit to a new high-water mark in terms of production extravagance.

Yet it wasn’t just “O,” but rather a combination of four shows (three of them new) in the space of 18 months, that really pushed Cirque to a new level. In December 1998, Cirque opened “La Nouba” in Florida. “Dralion” began touring in April of this year, and also during 1999, an older show, “Quidam,” launched a new European tour.

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“That [combination] was the real trigger of getting us to another size of organization,” Laliberte says. “We went from 1,000 to 2,000 workers.”

Still, Laliberte claims that jump hasn’t changed the creative process in any fundamental way. “Actually, the process is still the same,” he says. “It’s just the number of people surrounding the process that’s changed. [Because] sometimes we’re creating more than one show at a time, we need to have a greater production team, more assistants to the actual conceptors to back them up.”

One change, however, is evident. And that is the advent of a new creative team, headed by Ste-Croix. Because Cirque’s usual team of director, designers and composers was tied up with “O” and “La Nouba,” the organization chose to put together a new team rather than wait a year to open another touring show.

“It was an opportunity to do something else,” Ste-Croix says. “Of course, it’s very unsecuring. I have to be more present as a guide. I have to be much more directive. With this new team, I am much more like the gear between parts.”

“Dralion” is the first show by this team. Comparatively modest by the standards of recent years, it was conceived to provide a breather in the wake of Cirque’s “O”-”La Nouba” marathon. “We thought we’ll try, in a certain way, to play it safer,” Laliberte says. “We thought that the show would cost less, be easier and all that. Actually, it’s [been] more difficult. Going into a creative process is never what you expect.”

“Dralion” has a distinctly Chinese flavor, and rather than focus on a single plot, it seeks to highlight its own mechanisms of performance. “It’s clear that it’s a performance: You see the mechanics of it,” explains set designer Stephane Roy. “Everything in the design looks like it’s made out of the same thing that the body’s made of--bones, nervous system and so on. It’s bio-mechanic organic.”

The decision to emphasize the physicality of the performance is a matter of playing to the strengths of the cast. “Dralion” marks the first time Cirque has put together an ensemble dominated by an extant troupe rather than an array of individuals previously unknown to one another. “Dralion” includes only two guest artist acts. The overwhelming majority of key performers are from a Chinese troupe, known as the Xunan (“Flag”) Circus, which hails from the city of Kumming and was chosen from among many Chinese circuses through a scouting expedition led by Caron and several other Cirque officials.

“It’s the first time that we’ve taken a total troupe, 35 artists, from the same city,” Caron says. The acts include single hand-balancing, double trapeze, a ballet on lights and various feats involving hoops and bamboo poles. The challenge was less a matter of original creation than adaptation, conforming the existing troupe’s routine to the Cirque look and style.

What’s more, in a shrewd twist on Cirque’s copyright formula, the adapted acts now belong to Cirque, for a period of at least seven years. Should a performer leave, the Xunan troupe is contractually obligated to find another performer who can do the same routine.

The idea stems, in part, from a desire to speed up the Cirque assembly line. “Dralion” had only five months’ rehearsal, instead of the usual eight. Still, what looks easier on paper doesn’t always turn out that way in the ring.

“It was not as easy as we thought, because the foundation [of what the Chinese circus performers do] is very much straight-line--no dancing, theater, choreography,” Caron says. “It was tough.”

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Most of the rehearsal period was spent trying to coax the Chinese performers into expressing emotion. “The rehearsing was to give the skill to the Chinese to be extroverts,” Caron says. “It was very hard to say, ‘Come on, give me something, give me emotion, one sentiment, only one!’ [Eventually] they gave it to us, but, whew, piece by piece, day by day! And tomorrow they forget it.

“It was very hard for them, because it is not their conception of life, not the way they live in their country,” Caron adds. “But that is why I was trying to say to them, ‘This is different. You’re going to change a little bit the way you are as an artist.’ “*

* “Dralion,” Cirque du Soleil, under the big top at Santa Monica Pier, Santa Monica. Premiere week: Thursday and Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 4 and 8 p.m.; next Sunday, 1 and 5 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 8 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays, 5:30 and 9:30 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 1 and 5 p.m. (Exceptions: Sept. 30 and Nov. 18, 8 p.m. only. No performance Oct. 19 or Nov. 1.) Adults: $34-$55; children, $23.75-$38.50. (800) 678-5440, https://www.cirquedusoleil.com or https://www.admission.com. Opens in Orange County at Irvine Spectrum Center on Dec. 2.