Technical director Richard Bouthillier, 35, worked as a railway diesel mechanic, which he says was good training for the circus.
"I was brought up to be a very serious guy," he says now. Gilles Ste.-Croix, now 38, studied architecture before deciding to chuck it all and found happiness performing on stilts in the streets. "Didja get into a bad batch of Valium?"īefore they ran off to the streets to begin inventing the nouveau circus, the founding members of Cirque had led fairly ordinary lives. "Whatsa matter?" le Grand shrieked at some somber customers who came to see the troupe perform in Lower Manhattan's Battery Park City this past spring. On occasion, he will mischievously spray perfume from a stolen purse on others in the crowd. Sometimes he snatches women's pocketbooks and examines the contents. Nobody does that better than the pugnacious clown with the stage name of Benny le Grand who wanders through the crowd before the show begins, hectoring ticket holders as they search for their seats. The playful performers and creators of Cirque say one of their aims is to surprise and unsettle spectators. It is a circus that lives up to its feminist ideals by having a standing, sylphlike young woman performer balance her male partner atop her head. The humor is fresh, set in the year 1988. There are lots of high-tech special effects the performers segue from one act to another with choreographed dirty dancing to the rhythms of sensual tangos and syncopated reggae beats. The troupe worries as much about the artistry of its stunts as it does about technique. Think about the musical "Cats." This is a fluid, modern circus with music, lighting and circus feats seamlessly interwoven. But forget about the musty old Barnum & Bailey-style circus. Performing under the bright, blue-and-yellow striped big top of Cirque du Soleil - literally, the "Circus of the Sun" - are trapeze artists, jugglers, acrobats, contortionists and clowns, and an act in which 13 performers climb onto one bicycle and wheel around the ring. In the true story, a bunch of vagabond Quebec buskers, street performers in their twenties and early thirties who shared the outrageous fantasy that they could create a new kind of circus without freaks or animals, a hip one-ring circus that would be wildly cheered across North America, joined forces four years ago and, with a lot of pluck and a lot of help from the government, surprised nearly everyone, most of all their parents, and succeeded beyond all expectations. What is truly amazing about that little fairy tale routine is that something like it actually happened in real life. TORONTO - In the dreamy, opening scene of the performance of Cirque du Soleil, the sassy and poetic, avant-garde French-Canadian circus that debuts Friday in Washington, a ragtag collection of backwoodsy Quebecer types totters into the ring, the men in their loud, mismatched plaids, the plain-jane women in kerchiefs and aprons, and they are magically transformed one by one into dazzling circus performers.
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