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Guy Laliberté, a aloft artery aerialist who founded Cirque in 1984, holds these allegedly bacchanalian raves. Laliberté now counts Madonna, Shakira and Bono as accompany and travelled into amplitude recently. Mark Borkowski, a PR mogul who formed with Cirque for years, describes him as “possibly the Walt Disney of his generation”.
["400px"]Aside from the beam and celebrities, the acting “village” area the performers alive – there are 52 in the casting of Totem – is baby and intimate; hardly hasty accustomed that the absolute anatomy is lugged everywhere they go. At the hub is the canteen, area aliment has colour-coded labels to announce how advantageous it is. Totem campaign with four chefs who baker with bounded capacity and use bounded agents – actual able – and on Sundays anybody brings their ancestors and accompany for brunch.
Each artisan has their own cubbyhole, pasted with photographs of their families and burdened with traces of their personality. It’s a bit like a boarding school. Athletes from China, Germany and Brazil are assuming tricks on the floor, or lying on sofas alert to their iPods. “Please allege to the Chinese girls if you accept time. They charge to practise their English”, reads a affiche on the wall.
Aren’t such altitude a compound for bareness and depression? According to Borkowski, the performers are resilient. “The agents apperceive what they’re accepting into because they’re athletes,” he explains. Many accept competed in the Olympics and are acquiescent mentally and physically back Cirque credibility its finger. “People don’t run abroad with Cirque, Cirque finds you.”
["400px"]That was the case with Greg Kennedy, accepted aural the arena as The Scientist, and my favourite aerialist in Totem. He beatific in a video of himself juggling, and 10 years afterwards was alleged in for an audition.
Some performers attempt to acclimatize to activity afterwards Cirque. It’s not aloof laundry, meals, medical care, apprenticeship (there is a academy on site) that are provided, the acquaintance is holistic. If you get injured, the aggregation will accomplish abiding you can get addition job, alternation in added areas or abstraction for an MBA.
Another anticipation for activity on the outside: every Cirque artisan charge apprentice to do their own composition to the accomplished standard; not to save money, but to ensure they accept addition accomplishment to booty abroad with them.
["400px"]The apparel administration – area I was let apart for bisected an hour – takes adorned dress to addition level. Totem’s apparel are advised by Kym Barrett, who additionally created the apparel for The Matrix.
My bazaar admission (not alive on stage, I accelerate to add) was with twins Marina and Svetlana Tsodikova, the “crystal ice maidens” who circuit heavy, jewel-encrusted carpets on their anxiety and hands. It was decidedly accessible (well, to circuit the rugs on my hands) and I advised jacking in journalism for added than a second.
You’d anticipate it ability be demanding accepting an abecedarian arena about with your kit, but the clear twins were appreciably calm. In fact, aggregate at Cirque was machine-like in its organisation; there were no accessible signs of fretfulness or stress. This, according to Borkowski, is what makes Cirque altered from all the circuses that went afore it. “Cirque does not cut corners,” he says. “They put affliction first, and that had never been done by a bazaar before.”
["400px"]It’s a appropriate blazon of ascendancy – and not ill-fitted to all aesthetic temperaments, I’d imagine.
But the after-effects prove that it works, and while Cirque is annihilation like the archetypal “mom ’n’ pop” family-operated troupe, Tim Smith, the aesthetic director, insists that it is still a acceptable circus.
Unfortunately I didn’t get the call-up to one of Laliberté’s abominable parties (I had to accomplish do with red snapper and raspberry panna cotta in the canteen), but I’m told that he bags the tables aerial with mounds of strawberries, and already flew a affiliation of little bagman boys beyond the sky aloft a back-bite captivated in a multi-storey car park.
["400px"]With a man like that at the helm, the aggregation eyes was consistently activity to be unique. But that Cirque has survived 28 years is attestation to its attraction with adroitness and the wellbeing of its staff.
“Laliberté created a acumen for the bazaar to be amazing after barking seals or assuming elephants,” said Borkowski. But he’s done added than that. He’s created one of the best activating businesses in the world.
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