Cirque du Soleil

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Cirque du Soleil began not under bright lights but on stilts, on a dirt road. In the summer of 1979, Gilles Ste-Croix walked 56 miles from Baie-Saint-Paul to Quebec City on stilts. It was a publicity stunt, designed to convince the Quebec government to fund a summer fair that Guy Laliberté, a college dropout who had taught himself fire breathing, was trying to organize. It worked. That stunt funded Les Échassiers de Baie-Saint-Paul, a stilt-walking troupe that toured Quebec the following year. From that improbable starting point, what would eventually become the world's largest contemporary circus producer was born. How did a troupe of street performers from a small Quebec town build a company that would employ nearly five thousand people from fifty countries? How did they survive near-bankruptcy not once but several times? And what broke the dream wide open in the summer of 1987 in Los Angeles?

• 2. From Stilts to Big Top

  ›

  Les Échassiers was well received by audiences but could not pay its bills. Laliberté spent that first winter in Hawaii while Ste-Croix stayed in Quebec to establish a nonprofit holding company called The High-Heeled Club, which helped the troupe break even by fall 1981. The following summer, Laliberté and Ste-Croix founded La Fête Foraine, a street performance festival that taught circus arts to the public, which Laliberté ran for two more years and turned into a modest financial success. The real turning point came in 1983. The government of Quebec gave Laliberté a $1.6 million grant to produce a show as part of the 450th anniversary celebration of Jacques Cartier's arrival in North America. That grant produced their first official production, Le Grand Tour du Cirque du Soleil, which toured Quebec for thirteen weeks in the summer of 1984. The tent collapsed at one point, and there were conflicts among the artists, but the show made money. With a second year of funding secured through the influence of Quebec premier René Lévesque, Laliberté hired Guy Caron, head of the National Circus School, as artistic director. Together they studied the Moscow Circus and decided that each act should tell part of a larger story. Influences from the Circus of China, Cirque Arlette Gruss, and Circus Roncalli pushed the company further toward theatre, with live music and no stagehands visible on stage. Belgian director Franco Dragone joined in 1985 to direct segments of their second production. That theatrical, character-driven approach, combined with the decision to perform without animals, would define the company for decades.

• 3. A One-Way Trip to Los Angeles

  ›

  The company's first performances outside of Quebec, in Ontario in 1985, left them with a $750,000 deficit. To keep a 1986 tour alive, the Desjardins Group covered $200,000 worth of bad checks, a financier named Daniel Lamarre represented them for free, and the Quebec government provided another year of funding. The 1986 production La Magie Continue and the 1987 show Le Cirque Réinventé, both directed by Dragone, showed steady artistic progress. Then came the invitation to perform Le Cirque Réinventé at the Los Angeles Arts Festival in 1987. The company agreed to go even though they had only enough money for a one-way trip. They opened in September of that year. American audiences and critics responded immediately. By the end of 1987, the show had turned a profit of over $1.5 million. The production went on to tour Canada and the United States, making its first New York appearance at Battery Park in March 1988. Those Los Angeles performances did more than rescue the company financially; they revealed that a theatrical, story-driven circus could find a mass audience well beyond Quebec.

• 4. Nouvelle Expérience and Permanent Stages

  ›

  By the end of 1989, the company was again in deficit. Internal conflict and a lukewarm reception to their revamped American tour of Le Cirque Réinventé had eaten into their gains. Cirque du Soleil responded by developing Nouvelle Expérience, drawing on plans for a shelved show called Éclipse. Dragone returned as director, joined by a full creative team: costume designer Dominique Lemieux, set designer Michel Crête, lighting designer Luc Lafortune, choreographer Debra Brown, and composer René Dupéré. Nouvelle Expérience premiered in May 1990 to critical acclaim and toured North America through the end of 1991 before taking up a one-year residency in Las Vegas. The shows that followed from the same creative team, Saltimbanco, Alegría, and Quidam, were equally successful. The Las Vegas residency of Nouvelle Expérience led directly to a deal with the Mirage Casino-Hotel to create a permanent show. Mystère opened at Treasure Island Hotel and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip on the 25th of December 1993, the first permanent Cirque du Soleil production. Its success opened the door for two more permanent shows in 1998: O at the Bellagio and La Nouba at what is now Disney Springs in Orlando, Florida. The company's International Headquarters took root in Montreal's Saint-Michel neighbourhood during this same period of expansion. Following La Nouba's premiere, the entire Dragone creative team departed, and starting with Dralion in 1999 the company began working with entirely new creative groups.

• 5. Global Reach and Breaking Points

  ›

  Fascination, a 1992 arena show combining acts from Nouvelle Expérience and Le Cirque Réinventé, was created for a tour of Japan at the behest of the Fuji Television Network. It ran from May to August of that year, and its positive reception allowed Saltimbanco to play Japan in 1994, establishing a market in the Asia-Pacific region for the decade that followed. In 2000, Guy Laliberté bought out co-founder Daniel Gauthier's stake in the company, bringing his ownership to 95%. The 2000s brought rapid expansion: a resident show at MGM Grand, their first adults-only show Zumanity, their first collaboration with The Beatles, an arena show called Delirium, and resident productions in Macau and Tokyo. By 2008, the company was opening three resident shows within a span of three months. That same year, Laliberté sold a 20% stake to Dubai investors Istithmar World and Nakheel, but later bought it back after the 2008 financial crisis. The high volume of shows between 2007 and 2011 produced notable failures. Banana Shpeel was panned and closed in Toronto in October 2010. Criss Angel Believe and Viva Elvis received negative reviews. The March 2011 Tohoku earthquake directly affected ticket sales for Zed in Tokyo, which the company closed that July. The company announced fifty layoffs in December 2012 and then a far larger cut on the 16th of January 2013: four hundred positions eliminated from a workforce of five thousand, the majority at their Montreal headquarters. The company acknowledged it had not been profitable in 2012 despite earning over $1 billion in revenue that year. Then, on the 30th of June 2013, acrobat Sarah Guyard-Guillot died during a performance of Kà in Las Vegas after a cable was accidentally cut during the show. She had been with the company since 2006 and was 31 years old. It was the company's first on-stage death in its history.

• 6. Ownership, Bankruptcy, and Rebirth

  ›

  On the 20th of April 2015, Laliberté announced the sale of a 90% joint stake in the company to TPG Capital, Fosun Capital Group, and La Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec for approximately $1.5 billion. He retained a 10% stake. The new owners replaced the finance director, the chief operating officer, and numerous vice-presidents within six months. The company restructured into a parent entity called Cirque du Soleil Entertainment Group and made several acquisitions: Blue Man Group in July 2017 for a reported US$65.5 million, VStar Entertainment Group in July 2018, and The Works Entertainment Group in February 2019 for US$40 million. In February 2020, La Caisse acquired Laliberté's remaining 10% stake for $75 million. Then the COVID-19 pandemic arrived. On the 19th of March 2020, all 44 active shows worldwide were suspended. Four thousand, six hundred and seventy-nine employees, representing 95 percent of the company's staff, were laid off effective immediately. The debt exceeded $1 billion. Even a $50 million injection from shareholders and a $200 million loan from the Quebec government could not prevent what came next. On the 29th of June 2020, the company filed for bankruptcy protection and terminated 3,500 previously laid-off employees. On the 24th of November 2020, the company emerged from bankruptcy after being sold to a group of creditors led by Canadian investment company Catalyst Capital Group. Several shows that had been paused, including Zumanity, Totem, Volta, and Axel, were permanently closed. The company began gradually reopening its Las Vegas resident shows in summer 2021. That same year, the resident show Drawn to Life premiered, the first new production since the pandemic began. Mad Apple opened in 2022, Echo in 2023. In 2025, two new resident shows, Alizé and Ludõ, premiered in Berlin and Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico, respectively.

• 7. Danger and Dispute

  ›

  The fatalities connected to Cirque du Soleil extend beyond the Guyard-Guillot accident. On the 16th of October 2009, Ukrainian performer Oleksandr Zhurov, 24 years old, died at a Montreal hospital from head injuries sustained during a training session on a Russian swing. Quebec's occupational-safety board fined the company $1,915 for failing to adequately identify the risks associated with the equipment. On the 29th of November 2016, set technician Olivier Rochette, 42, died in San Francisco after being struck by an aerial lift while preparing a production of Luzia. Rochette was the son of co-founder Gilles Ste-Croix. On the 17th of March 2018, aerial straps performer Yann Arnaud, 38 and a company member for fifteen years, died in Tampa, Florida, after falling during a performance of Volta. The company has also faced significant legal disputes. In November 2003, gymnast Matthew Cusick filed a discrimination complaint alleging that Cirque du Soleil fired him in April 2002 because he tested HIV-positive, despite having been cleared by company doctors as healthy enough to perform. The company settled with Cusick in April 2004, paying $60,000 in lost wages, $200,000 in front pay, and $300,000 in compensatory damages, in addition to $40,000 in attorney fees. The settlement also required the company to introduce a company-wide anti-discrimination training program and revise its employment practices. In April 2016, the company filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in federal court against Justin Timberlake, Timbaland, and Sony Music Entertainment, alleging that the song "Don't Hold the Wall" from Timberlake's 2013 album The 20/20 Experience infringed the copyright of the Cirque du Soleil song "Steel Dream" from its 1997 album Quidam. The parties settled out of court.