Original subtitles

Long ago in a northern land too often forsaken by the Sun there lived a man

beyond all men

yet a child of nature, a giant.

With great striding legs, he hastened from city to hamlet, an itinerant

of laughter.

Wherever simple folk gathered, he gladdened hearts with dance, music, and

People of Quebec called him

Alexis the Trotter.

Alexis lives as the Quicksilver Spirit, the primeval energy behind

Cirque du Soleil.

So, the night of the premiere, well, I think that's the night we're going to

all our pants down and say, well, listen, that's the show.

Tonight is the night.

We cannot go back. And especially this year, we cannot change the date of

premiere because Christmas is 25 of December, and that cannot be changed.

So something will be born again this year.

I'm excited. I can't wait for it to start.

It's been a year. We've been training for one year.

We're creating, I mean, we're creating this thing where we can express

as people, you know, to another person, to an audience.

Certainly, Las Vegas represents a great opportunity for Cirque du Soleil.

Artistically, it represents a big task because the kind of show business

entertainment here, which is presented, I would say, is a little different than

Cirque du Soleil. It also represents a big task to do a show

of Cirque du Soleil here and make it successful.

If I could make a reference,

The actual reference is we do believe we could make, grow a flower in the

desert, and that's how we approached Cigna Salé playing in Las Vegas.

The flower journeyed south to the Nevada desert, but had actually taken root in

other places, other times.

During the 70s, flower power smothered North America.

It was the season of the witch, of sit -ins, love -ins, and hair.

Lots of hair.

Caught up in this ferment of values and ideas, the young founders of Cirque du

Soleil learned to reinvent their fractured world.

I became a street performer almost by accident.

In school, I was going to be working in architecture, so I tried out a couple of

years.

I couldn't keep up with the white sheet syndrome every morning.

So I gave it up and really decided to do what I wanted to do when I was a

teenager, which was being in theater.

But I met the Grand Puppet Theater.

Took classes and still walking puppetry and did a show with them as well.

So I said, hey, how come I cannot do this in Quebec?

So I went back and I started to have this idea of gathering friends and

who had some kind of guts and performance and just built a troupe and

the street and maybe walk into a theater one day to do this show.

In 1980, Gilles Sainte -Croix founded a troupe of stilt -walkers, Les Echassiers

de Baie -Saint -Paul.

Soon joined by Guy Laliberte, the young troupe produced its first show, The

Legend of Alexis le Trotteur.

This marked the start of an enduring collaboration between Gilles and Guy.

The life of a street performer is the life of somebody who's, you know,

traveling with his back sack or his little things.

And just going on a quest of adventure.

Guy Laliberté followed the sun to his own South Sea paradise.

In the meantime, in Hawaii, I was also thinking about the project I would be

working on when I was coming back.

during summer in Quebec, which project was at a certain point Les Echassiers de

Baie -Saint -Paul, La Fête Foraine de Baie -Saint -Paul and La Fête du Soleil.

Mid -summer's night, 1982.

The northern sky over Baie Saint -Paul shimmers with ghostly apparitions.

The Aurora Borealis, nature's own celestial performer, hovers over a

assembly of street players.

It is the Fête Foraine of Baie Saint -Paul, a festival that transforms a

town into a giant giddy trade fair of circus arts.

Clowns, jugglers, magicians, acrobats and musicians mount dozens of shows,

filling streets with their riotous workshops, sweeping young and old alike

the gentle madness of this midsummer heat.

By nightfall, the atmosphere is electric.

The performers are primed. They have honed their craft and are now joined

one delirious pagan celebration.

As the final notes sound, the heavens crack.

The sounder comes facing us.

Then, a new circus is born, dedicated to the sun.

The fact that I've been on the beach a lot of times under the sun, thinking

about it as an influence, the sun of Hawaii being a very big influence. But

the other hand, I was looking in the dictionary of symbol,

If you look under the definition of sun, it's a very powerful sign, which means

the power of youth, which means a lot of energy.

So I guess at that time, we're a bunch of young kids, and we certainly had to

identify ourselves with the sun and the energy of the sun. And that's where the

namesake dissonant came from.

The dream was in the soul and the head and the mind of all the street

performers.

On the other hand, I think there was also another motivation 10 years ago,

was also important, was the quest of young people who want to make their

job, who want to make a living out of it, was representing the

dream of...

a certain number of people who want to do their own circus, their own job.

In 1984, dignitaries, among them Premier René Lévesque, threw their support

behind this lunatic band of untried players.

It was a real start.

We wanted to do a tour in Quebec. We had to rent trucks. We needed lighting.

We had to play around.

We had to make our point.

We had to get some credit.

You can't always pay in advance.

And today,

you talk about it, you do it, and no one questions it.

It's just a matter of time.

To understand our financial situation, it was a bit complicated.

The first year, well, it was a government contract. The second year, we

the technical phase.

The third year, we were almost at the point of death in our balance sheet.

In 1987, we went up the ladder. In 1988 and 1989, we invested

a lot. We improved the salaries, the quality of life.

And at that time, we were still a small organization, a small group on tour.

And we were from back east America.

So we just decided to put everything in our truck and come in Los Angeles.

And it was kind of a question of live or die in L .A.

And it was really the case, because if we didn't achieve success, I

think, you know, at that time, we probably didn't have the money to pay

to put back in our truck to come back in Canada.

We don't.

grow tomatoes and we don't produce cars and we produce soap.

Picked off his... He's a piece of art.

Sexy.

You prefer giving jobs to a couple of people than feeding an elephant.

Please welcome the Cirque du Soleil. If you have a chance, go see Cirque du

Soleil. You'll have a marvelous time.

Il y a eu un positionnement que l 'Organisation du Cycle du Soleil s 'est

au tout débit. C 'est -à -dire conquérir l 'Amérique du Nord.

Puis conquérir l 'Amérique du Nord, nous autres, c 'est vraiment descendre

ouest. On a commencé par l 'ouest pour finir dans l 'est.

Et puis New York représente finalement un peu la dernière étape du plan

quinquennal qu 'on s 'était fixé.

I quit.

I resigned two times, and I cried three times.

Just for New York?

Yeah, just for New York. That was the only city I really decided, no, they are

too tough.

First, we got the permit an hour before the door opened.

We were having 400 journalists at the door waiting for the permit.

But when we arrived at the permit, at the kitchen, we opened a huge bottle of

champagne, and at the end of the show, I take some claps for myself.

Puis, le succès aussi, ça me fait peur.

Bon, maintenant que les critiques sont sorties à New York, on sait que ça

marche. Comment on fait pour rester aussi simple?

C 'est le gros danger qui nous guette, c 'est la grande... C 'est là qu 'on va

voir si on est vraiment comme on l 'espérait.

In 1988, following the American triumph, a crisis.

Disillusioned by success, many performers quit.

Tension, losses, goodbyes.

The founders endured and learned.

For the sun must rise again.

Most companies that get larger and bigger and have larger projects and go

the world, they have to structure differently.

So Cirque du Soleil changed in that sense that it's more structured and less

personal.

But at the same time, we try to keep the same spirit of respecting and being

audacious, being creative.

So that spirit is what we started with.

put on a show.

The big top is our oyster and our playground.

Do you remember the pleasure of anything?

The sweet thrill of getting away with doing what you love and doing it like no

one else?

Can you recall passion?

A vision of grace in the heart of chaos? Take a bite out of life. It's here now

and gone already.

Youth unravels under your feet of clay, so play.

Pirouette over the tightrope of conventions for youth.

No past and no constriction.

Let's howl at the sun and dance beneath the lunar sway.

I am a provocation, a celebration.

Look at me and see the child you had forgotten.

The child is king and I the fool who cavorts at his feet.

Close your eyes and follow the visionary flood of intuition.

Sometimes you have three or four interpreters for the director to direct,

Franco being French -speaking but Italian as well, his

English is very poor, and we have to get around to that factor.

I think that as soon as the basic stage language is established, people then

start to function very well.

This studio will be really a church.

So it's me in that.

As soon as you come inside of this, I don't want no one word.

You can talk a lot outside, but as soon as you are here...

No words. Because we will work on this.

And I really need, and you will need, the silence.

We cannot say that each show has a theme, but we choose a theme

just to guide us.

A theme to have a...

discussion between us and I used to say that a team for me is like a country you

decide to visit it's why we choose a team so we have something to

debate and those discussions give us the strength to do the show

Be able to do acting, dancing. You never know what he's going to ask of you. So

you always have this almost a nervous energy.

Because you want to please him. And you know that this man can bring out

anything from your body that he wants.

And so once you finish your rehearsal, the energy is there. So it just goes

you to whatever rehearsal you have for the rest of the day.

Faster, faster.

Don't move this.

Don't move.

Being

a

gymnast, I was constantly thinking about what the judges were going to mark me

down for doing wrong.

And now all I think about is how I can please the audience, what they're going

to love, not what they're not going to like.

I have no artistic pretension and I have no idea.

I try to have a look and to grasp the moment when something happens. And at

moment, if I have looked carefully, if I have grasped well, I can at that moment

talk to the artists, talk to a set and say, that's how it's going to happen. So

my source of inspiration, I would say, is in the look I have on things.

Move within a dream till the dream moves you till the dream dreams you.

Leap, vault, and tumble with a wink at fate, a kiss at danger.

Soar into a bottomless sky because gravity is just another law that's meant

be broken.

Spin out of reach till the dream of you leaves us.

Inspiration is a very fragile thing and a very hard thing to define.

I think that in my work, it's the people who are the inspiration.

It's the material that inspires you. It's very much like a sculpture. I think

that when you find the proper lights, you will paint the proper painting or a

sculpture, the proper marble, and you will get a great sculpture out of it.

Inspiration is very, very fragile, I guess. So it's when we find artists that

are very talented, to build a show with them and they will inspire whatever work

will come out of it.

You need a full comprehension of the intent of the show, the gut feeling, and

that can only be picked up at the earlier stage of the production when

sitting together around a table and we're discussing the show, what the

is, what's the feeling going to be.

And in order to be able to light the show, you need to be able to grasp that.

So you need to be careful not to have choices that are made earlier on dictate

what you're going to do on opening night.

We're going to get rid of the plumes.

Hey,

man.

Hey, Guy. Hello. Hello, Guy.

Have a good one.

We all have a way of walking, running, moving, looking.

But it's not just the physique, it's everything that the person carries in

that inspires me.

It's true that I have a lot of work that I do before, before, for the group in

general, but I have main characters. And there are always people in the group

who detach themselves, who, with time, will take up more space.

And for me, there are costumes that often appear for them.

You think that the numbers of the show will be composed of numbers that will

have a beginning and an end and then another number and then another number.

Well, here I announce to you that we will try to

do the opposite of that.

We are going to discover,

we are going to destructure the numbers in order to make a show that is

integrated.

Bizarrely, I feel like we are still in a transition period.

If the Cirque du Soleil was a transition period between the three previous shows

and the new envergure, the new audacity of the circus, the new experience was

also a transition period, where we still kept some signs of the past.

It's a simple tooth.

the new experience. There was still the track team, but it was called

Corporation, with Madame Corporation, obviously inspired by the circus

tradition, but contrary to the circus tradition, she was a woman.

Usually, it's rather a man who does it, Mr.

Loyal, the track leader.

So we have an image together.

C 'est l 'histoire du planet. It's the story of the world.

All the people and the urgence that we must come together and wake up and save

the world before we all die.

And the gesture.

It's us.

Coming together.

All the world. To fight.

And we are ready to die for the Earth.

Calming the Earth.

The fight.

Around the world, there is suicide. So wake up.

Now.

This rebirth.

The cry.

All over the world.

The urgency to wake up.

Now.

There may be a constant in the scenographies that we install on the

There is always the idea of the saltimbanque behind each of the

the idea of the public square, finally, that we always try to install, which

causes meeting places, which causes demonstrations a little out of the

which, I would say, justifies pirouettes, which justifies madness,

justifies the race, which justifies confrontations, exchanges, etc.

Mon émotion musicale est beaucoup plus du 19e siècle, je pense.

Et là, je ne parle pas avec prétention, mais si je parle de la musique comme je

la vois moi, je vois que l 'émotion que je souris, c 'est beaucoup plus près du

lyrisme du 19e siècle, de la modernité, par exemple, qu 'on a trouvé avec les

courants musicaux des années, les plus synthétiques avec les machines.

Je suis moins près de ça, même si je les utilise.

The influence I got from the Saint -Édouard is perhaps something that

Festival of the Sun. There will always be some. It was like the core to which I

carved other things as it progressed. I carved voices, I carved percussions.

This year, I'm going to carve even more percussions in the spectacle of 1994 for

the 10th anniversary, while trying to return to the core of what this musical

research was that I did for the Festival of the Sun.

J 'aime beaucoup, beaucoup les musiques de toutes sortes de cultures.

Il y a des fois, il y a certaines cultures qui peuvent nous faire peur,

leurs musiques, elles ne nous font jamais peur. C 'est toujours une très

porte d 'entrée dans n 'importe quelle culture, la musique.

Quand j 'ai enseigné au Ciel du Soleil, c 'est que t 'en as 15, 20 qui sont

toujours autour de toi, t 'appuies sur 20 gros tambours.

À un certain moment, tu le vois en face.

Tu vas te dire, ils ont la bête.

They have a sense of observation.

They have the synchronism developed by Baby with the dance.

They have a sense of staging.

So sometimes when I take my baguettes, they're beautiful.

I was telling the artists a month ago, my

challenge is that when people meet you in the street,

Qu 'il... vraiment qu 'il soit intimidé par vous.

En criant, justement, une manière de se démarquer, c 'est en criant un certain

mythe, peut -être.

Comme le cirque est déjà un mythe dans la tête des enfants et de tout le monde,

des grands -enfants aussi, c 'est un mythe, c 'est les gens du voyage.

Increasingly, Gilles Sainte -Croix and Guy Laliberté scour the globe for new

talent, new acts.

England, China, Russia, France, they come from everywhere to join the Cirque

Soleil's core of local performers.

From 1984 on, this internationalism has ensured a constant creative renewal and

a steady stream of distinctions from around the world.

In the U .S., Japan, and soon in Europe, wherever the blue and yellow big top

rises, it signals the fulfillment of this duck's eternal quest for

We were brought up in trailers.

I was. And when Julie and I married, we worked circus for about 10 years and

cabarets and lived in trailers.

And both the kids were conceived in trailers.

So moving to a trailer wasn't difficult.

It's hard to call us gypsies. Chick -fil -A is more or less the Club Med of

circuses in a way.

Yeah, it gives it more of a circus feeling if you're living on the site.

When we bring it down at the end of the city, and before they bring it up in the

next city, I spend a couple of days working, and every time there's this

emptiness.

I don't feel at home anywhere except when I'm here with these people.

Everything else is temporary.

It's the only thing that's permanent in our lives is the Big Top and everything

that surrounds it and the people that live in it and work in it.

It's hard to have a relationship with somebody.

If you want to have a relationship on tour, it's something hard because you're

going to work each day and stay each day with the same person. I don't know, 24

hours a day with the same person. For me, it's something hard.

And if you have a girlfriend with somebody who's not on tour, that means

you'll never see her.

He writes and writes and writes to his girlfriend.

Oh, yeah?

Every day, a letter. A letter, a telephone, and a fax. All moving.

My parents were also in the circus, and my grandparents, but my parents were

knife throwers and rope spinners and whipcrackers and stilt walkers.

So you were one in the circus? Yeah, more or less. My grandparents were

acrobats, foot acrobats.

They called it Risley, Risley acrobats.

I did just two or three weeks in Scotland, in England, and that was it. I

just completely hooked on it. And then they went on and did more tours with

circus, and I spent probably about six months with them all together, just

touring all over England.

And then it just sort of went on. I just couldn't... The idea of going back to

university was like, no, this is too much fun to give up, you know.

Come closer as you are going to be placed.

And I start to read a lot of books and articles about the cities

in the world, and I share it with my friends from Cirque du Soleil, and we

decide to choose the urbanity, the cities in the future to do

Saltimbanco.

It has evolved a lot. My work has had several stages.

My vision of the city at the beginning of my drawings was very black.

that came out was very, very black.

All my tones were gray.

It was green.

It was a bit post -nuclear.

Finally, with Franco, we decided to go the other way.

At the beginning, we wanted a rock

-baroque show.

We tried, and in the end, the show, rather than being rock, remained rock,

became tender.

Because we also said to ourselves, but a little by the strength of things, the

casting with which we work is quite tender.

I tried to make some rockers.

Heavy metal, so he always responded with a certain tenderness.

Voilà, c 'est ça qu 'il faut. Bravo.

Creation has an input, of course, in the whole company because we produce show.

Ten

years

ago, there was about 75 employees, and right now there's 600.

I think I've been able to achieve a good webbing between the art and the

business, and that's what is really in the center of SIC.

They're doing this just before contract negotiations. Now they have a double of

me. How stupid.

I should have waited.

Tomorrow

you

don't work. We work at 6 o 'clock only.

Ten years ago, I was an happiness merchant, and ten years after, I'm still

happiness merchant. So as long as I will be doing the same job, I guess my

motivation will still be there.

After the experience we had in Las Vegas with a show on the stage, after Salta

Banco, after the new experience, and after this show called Alegria, where we

did all these shows, I would say in the same vein or in a certain movement, we

have the intention to look at the 10 years that have passed to see

precisely what we are going to do.

in the near future and in the medium term as well. To see how we have worked,

it is still relevant.

And as far as I'm concerned, the subject of the show that I'm doing

now with the circus actually carries on.

It also carries on the theme of power, but also carries on the look we have of

our past.

There is a category, a family of characters that I call the nostalgic

They are like that, they always have a mirror in their hand to see if they

laugh too much and at the same time look at their past.

And to evolve, I would say, to evolve, we must also accept to kill certain

things. To leave room for the young, we must also accept to die.

So, I don't know if we have a mission, but in any case, it's clear that we...

There's a lot of rituals.

Some are very personal, some are collective, some are related to wishes

we... like to bring to our big top, every big top that we use

and we work in have a name.

Some other rituals are there strictly to wish a good tour or wish a good life to

the show we've been creating.

That's about what I could talk about the ritual because beyond that, it's a very

personal, it's a very intimate moment.

The dream is to do what we're doing, so the dream will be still the same thing

in 10 years.

And then there's another one I'll be also able to achieve, which is going,

I don't know, on a spaceship somewhere on another planet and talk and chat with

those extraterrestrials.

I truly believe in that, so anyway, I'm ready.

Franco Dragong, are you influenced by the forces of the cosmos?

It's a big challenge to do a show. So we try to put all the elements with us.

The wind, the snow, and also the stars.

And of course the people.