10TH
ANNIVERSARY CIRQUE DU SOLEIL
CONTINUED
Page 63 - 65 --
Speaks the Quebecois, known as Gilles with a shrug of the
shoulders, " Being a community of only 6 million French-speaking people in a
sea of 250million makes a soft core out of culture. We fight constantly to survive,
to remain cordial, French-speaking and to keep our culture. We do not accept that
anyone dictates to us how to be. " It denotes an attitude that of a population
which is always specialized in individualism, irreverence and nonconformism.
Audacity constantly defines their work. It is
enough to remember Denis Lacombe massacring the Opening 1812, or the Baroques of
Saltimbanco accommodating a member of the audience like a prodigal brother but
then throwing it out of the capital: let us be irreverent. And small Amelie who carries Eric on her arm with the rate/rhythm of a
tango: let us be women. Or Vladimir, practically in costume of Adam, who sails
on the hundred scented sighs of young women: let us be sensual. Death becomes comedy: let us be sacrileges. Benny Le Grande disputes with Michel Barrette
by abstractedly spraying the audience with a sprinkler pipe. Rene Bazinet locks
himself up in toilets, calmly examining floating droppings (very peculiar but the laugh one gets to this is colossal!) Let us go
there...be odious. Let us be stupid, nice, malicious, virile, feminine, androgens. Letus be marvelous.
In fact, people of Cirque du Soleil could not cease being
bold. The audacity is too deeply integrated in their human makeup. It is bent in
the fabric of the tent.
Their greater audacity has been to take all the risks.
In 1987, Guy Laliberte betted everything on the first voyage to Los Angeles.
The negotiations with Los Angeles Arts Festival have been jolting. Guy feels
that the Festival is not capable to share the enormous financial risk that Clique du
Soleil will launch out alone, while playing in the margin of the Festival which
offers only ticketing, promotion and a mention in its program. But, it is agreed also that the Cirque du Soleil opens the Festival. To go the
hundred mile with the Cirque in Los Angeles with every last penny. And Guy knows
that if the spectacle fails, it must sell the tent to bring back the artists
and the house. The audacity pays.
The audacity, audacity, audacity - more than one repeat,
plus finished by nothing wanted to say. Then the true one, the pure audacity, has rhyme
or not? Franco thinks a little of it, " The audacity, says it, is to
reject all that one did first. It is necessary to function. "
And what of that? As Gilles explains it, it's left to the
Quebecois roots of Cirque du Soleil. But Franco and Debbie are not Quebecois and
are certainly as daring as anyone else. The audacity, is the prerogative of youth and
the rebellion. The same spirit which keeps the Cirque of the so fresh Soleil
makes it also provocative: as could any teenager who has envoyed his father with the devil and left, to never return again. Franco knows that the
audacity comes from rage, it is its personal war against indifference.
The audacity has lacked to them only one time and the
lesson was brutal. In 1989, with successes reversing of their premiere tour, Cirque du
Soleil decided to ensure it: while Guy and the basic team made experiments from
new ideas in Montreal, a second group assembled the tour of 1988-1989. The result is
a repetition of the original production, offering all that the spectacle of 1987 had: beauty, music, color, everything ... except the audacity. The
public is carried more badly, and only some criticisms have remarked the lack of
originality, but the creative team is consternated and Guy remembers that year
with great anguish.
Close-cropped matter! Kids are learning! The rules which
we have broken and remade, let us break them and remake them as new! Love and Desire
control Nouvelle Experience, followed by a sigh of satisfaction when successes
arrive finally. Now, as each time the designers debut a new production of Cirque
du Soleil, they dissect the old spectacle and leave something new, like
phoenix reborn of its ashes.
But how is that useful? Why torture itself and reinvent
the wheel each time? Why risk the failure when it would be so simple to weave things off
of previous successes? Three reasons. Initially: To defy acquired concepts, to bring
new ways of thinking. One cannot mistreat animals. One will do without them! One wants to prove to the entire planet that there is another way
of assembling a spectacle? Let us do it! Let us let the Common Direction say to
us why it is impossible. And when the dogma collapses, let us smile by listening
to the same prophets to tell why all that was possible, even previsible!
Then: Because it goes on. When you leave Cirque du
Soleil, you carry anew range of direction. The spectacle tears off your old way of
thinking, forces you to feel soft and rough emotions and long-time stimulations. Go
in a restaurant, look at a chair and reexamine it by seeing Vassili being balanced
on seven of them, making a whirl of whimsy for your perpetual rebirth. Try also not to think of penguins the next time you see a swarm of
businessmen wearing black-and-white suits. Are you intrigued by a strange language? Listen to the enchanting, foreign words of Rene and you
will understand.
Finally: They simply don't have much of a choice. It's a
change of poison. This is why Gilles cannot travel the ground in the search of
new ideas or new talents. He says himself that it is not useful or has anything to
sit down on its steak ( " to rest on its bay-trees " ). Franco is vehement: " If there is anything of which I am afraid, it is the
repetition There is not only the spectacle which can be repetitive, but also the
procedeitself."
Their following project is thus to reconsider the same procedure,
to reinvent the reinvention. Montreal's future is drawn up, in an old railway deposit. This lately acquired place of work offers a vast space for the
team to give birth to all the possible marvels of their imagination. From now
on, Cirque du Soleil can, if it desires, work it out and develop any number,
some more complicated, of sparks of the premiere until its collapse is final.
Then, go ahead. Be as daring as you want; reinvent the
planet, if you want. Everything is in your power, waiting to be discovered. Because, finally, the audacity is only one version of the
dream. - A.B
Page 73 --
It carries us
since forever
The artist remembers
Still rising,
Rites of flame,
the first times.
The primal fear
The quiet of life and the first men
Its hand, its body
Him, the traveling acrobat,
his immense shade with laughter
on the fabric which wavers
The void of our memory
which presents itself in a flame,
enticing beam which revives
and which, our dazed directions,
become again humbler,
returns happiness to us
- M.P.V.
Continue
to Page 4
Translation by Pam
|