All entrepreneurs start on the bottom rung of the ladder, but few will have started lower than Guy Laliberté. Interview by Christian Sylt
The crowd in the big top at Dubai’s Ibn Battuta Mall had never seen anything like it. An overhead conveyor belt swept in a team of acrobats hanging off hoops and contorting their bodies in time with music. Then, more stunt-smiths performed co-ordinated leaps over skipping ropes swung so briskly they became a blur. The action peaked with a group of children catching a spinning top on a rope between their hands. The team passed it back-and-fore while somersaulting and standing on each others’ shoulders.
As applause rained down on Cirque du Soleil’s Quidam show – on its first tour of the Middle East – one of the avant-garde circus company’s crew was beaming more broadly than the rest. Among the colourfully costumed characters backstage, Cirque’s founder Guy Laliberté looks right at home. He talks in a turbo-charged stream of consciousness, his hands gesticulating and his face lit up with enthusiasm. With his crazily coloured jeans, tight T-shirt, shiny black jacket and shaved blond hair, Laliberté looks more street entertainer than boardroom bigwig. There is good reason for this.
In 1973, aged 14, Laliberté left home in Montreal with a vision of reinventing the circus, making it more akin to Broadway block-busters than community hall entertainment. Armed with only an accordion and a backpack, he eventually created Cirque du Soleil, a company with annual revenues of around US$1bn. Cirque now has 1,000 artists performing in six tours and six permanent theatre shows playing to more than 10million people per year. The Middle East will soon be added to its roster permanently.
Cirque’s Quidam was the most successful single entertainment project ever to be staged in Dubai, attracting more than 100,000 visitors during its month-long run. The turnout was so great that, when the show ended, Cirque, Dubai’s Nakheel real estate company and The Palm, which sponsored the tour, immediately set about bringing the circus back to town.
Just three months after leaving Dubai, Cirque announced its first permanent show outside of the US, Japan and China will open on The Palm Jumeirah in 2010. A purpose-built, 1,800-seat theatre will house a custom-designed show with estimated construction costs of US$150m. It’s a far cry from the origins of Cirque, but the company’s direction has not wavered.
Laliberté left home as a child not out of rebellion, but because he had dreams of travelling and seeing different cultures. “I discovered the best way to live was to learn tunes on the accordion and be a street performer,” he says. Laliberté then met a group of street artists and became captivated by their juggling. He soon mastered the arts of fire breathing, juggling and stilt-walking, and, in 1979, founded a theatre troupe on stilts.
Their big break came in 1984, when they won a US$1m government contract to provide 13 weeks of entertainment to mark the 450th anniversary of the discovery of Canada. But success in the US, in 1987, was the catalyst that transformed Cirque du Soleil from a single touring troupe into a global group. “We said we live or die in LA,” says Laliberté – and the budget was so tight that, had the show flopped, the cast would have had to sell their new yellow and blue 1,500-seat big top to finance their journey home to Montreal.
Laliberté needed a boost to his business, so he made a deal with the festival organisers in LA. If they guaranteed to pack the opening night with celebrities, Cirque would do everything else. The stars duly turned up, the reviews were ecstatic and Cirque was an instant success. “When I saw movie stars – household names – standing in line to buy tickets, I began to think there was a possibility we might live,” Laliberté says. Achieving success from scratch gave him the core values that remain at Cirque’s heart.
“We made a business and artistic decision not to multiply our shows. They’re more like jewellery – we take a diamond and polish it when we take care of our shows one by one.” Standing by his word, whenever Cirque has added new tours to its schedule, it has retired others. This gives the shows a rarity value and Laliberté’s real genius was creating his own acts rather than employing guest artists who would simply bring routines with them. This allows Cirque’s schedule to remain constant throughout the lifetime of a show and brings the added kudos that its acrobatic displays and stunts can’t be found elsewhere.
Cirque’s control over its creative output doesn’t stop with the stunts. Eighty per cent of the fabric used in the costumes is white when purchased, then dyed in the company’s workshops so exact replacements are available throughout the show’s life. Plaster busts are moulded from the head of each performer to provide them with precisely fitting masks and Cirque even has a shoemaking team that has created and modified 5,000 pairs of shoes since 1998.
Spectators won’t find any sawdust strewn across the stage at a Cirque show. Nor will they find animals on the stunning sets, with their dramatically coloured lighting. “I love surrealism,” Laliberté says of the dominant drive behind the shows, but he insists it isn’t simply a highbrow hook to lure in punters: “We like the audience to have its own emotional association with the acts.” Personal interpretation is inevitable because no language is spoken in the shows. This means there are no cultural barriers and this has allowed Cirque to perform in more than 200 cities since it was set up.
The logistics of a Cirque tour are daunting. Getting the big top to an opening night means transporting up to 80 performers, 20 technicians, 800 tonnes of equipment, 70 containers, a school, warehouses and four generators. Touring takes its toll on the artists because each show is staged 360 times a year, but they can progress to the jewels in Cirque’s crown: its permanent shows. By being in fixed locations, the length of staff service is longer and up to 470 shows can be staged each year. As Laliberté says, they also “permit things we cannot do with tour shows”.
Cirque’s water-based show, O – in Las Vegas’s Bellagio hotel has high diving, trapeze acts and synchronised swimming on a submersible stage with seven underwater lifts. Hundreds of tiny cue lights under the water and 12 sub-aqua speakers are used to prompt the acrobats. A silicone product is applied to costumes to make them fast-drying and, of course, the makeup is waterproof.
With the tours bringing in about US$360m a year, and the six permanent shows about US$100m each, it’s little surprise that, last year, Laliberté was named world entrepreneur of the year by accountancy firm Ernst & Young. His bottom-line achievement is equally impressive. “We have a better break-even in the fixed environment because there are not as many costs. There, break-even is between 50 and 75 per cent,” he says. Analysts estimate Cirque’s overall profit margin is about 20 per cent and much of it is ploughed back into the company, with 40 per cent of profits spent on research and development.
Remembering his roots, Laliberté also gives one per cent of Cirque’s gross revenue to programmes that help youth at risk, especially street children. He recently announced a US$97m donation to the One Drop foundation, which improves access to clean water in impoverished countries. Laliberté’s largesse is fuelled by Cirque’s continued success, but he is not complacent.
This year, Cirque will open new permanent shows in Macau, Tokyo and Vegas, while more are planned for Los Angeles and other gateway cities. The boundaries seem limitless. “We are capitalising on the return on investment in creativity,” says Laliberté. There’s no doubt this modern-day Dali has plenty of that. |
