The billion dollar circus

Seventeen years ago, Guy Laliberté, a 25-year-old Canadian fire-eater and stilt-walker, took a small band of street entertainers in a van from Quebec to the Los Angeles festival. It was high risk - the journey as much as the show. Had the fledgling Cirque du Soleil failed at the Los Angeles festival, there would not have been enough money for petrol to get back. Fortunately, the audiences loved it, and one entrepreneur offered Laliberté $1m for the ownership of his outfit. The fire-eater from Quebec refused. He had a passionate belief that his fusion of circus and theatre would not only win over the audiences; it could transform circus forever. No animals, no reliance on family acts, but an emphasis on costume, lighting, music and a storyline. There is no spoken narrative, though. These were to be shows that could be replicated anywhere in the world.

As it happens, $1m would have proved a bargain. Cirque's value is now estimated at $1bn. The fire-eater has become the founder, chief executive and president of an international corporation.

Next week, Cirque du Soleil's show Dralion comes to London for its European premiere. It has already been running in Mexico City, a typical Cirque outpost with ready access to an audience wealthy enough to guarantee the high prices - often £100-plus for the best seats - that the expensive productions demand. And they certainly give high profits, high enough to allow Cirque's casts to live in a style to which no other circus performers in the world are accustomed. The cast of Dralion lodge and drink their cocktails at Mexico City's most exclusive and expensive hotel.

But it is in Las Vegas that Cirque has really come of age. It has three shows running there each night, and one of them, named O, is one of the most extraordinary productions you will ever see. The stage features a 1.5-million-gallon tank of water, and interspersed among the acrobatics, dance and music are Olympic-level synchronised swimmers and gymnasts, Busby Berkeley-style routines, fibreglass horses, single and duo trapezes, and a system that delivers over four million watts of light. The acrobats perform on a floating raft, and 40 Olympic divers leap 60ft from a Russian swing into the water. The synchronised swimmers represent the birth of life; characters emerge from the water that itself magically appears and vanishes; seven lifts beneath the water enable the characters to appear as though walking on water, and can be raised completely to form a solid surface. Performers are met underwater by scuba divers who give them air; some even have to make costume changes underwater.

The San Francisco Examiner was moved to say that O was "like a tour of Dante's Inferno, had it been designed and cast by Federico Fellini". Variety magazine contented itself by describing it as "akin to a Dadaist Esther Williams hallucination". Certainly, by the time of this show's inception five years ago, Cirque's and Laliberté's reputation had risen enough for him to call the shots. When he first asked for water, he was told it wasn't possible. "It's what I want; it must happen," he replied.

Artistic imperatives continue to underlie Cirque's financial decisions. Its much- vaunted plan for a permanent base in London at Battersea Power Station, complete with hotel and entertainment complex, was scrapped because a prospective partner demanded a degree of artistic control.

With O, Cirque was allowed to let its collective imagination run riot. The $100m cost of this production makes it unlikely that it will ever be seen in Britain. Indeed, Virgin Airways officials say that, among the many gamblers they take out to Las Vegas, there is usually a nucleus of Cirque fans, dedicated to catching one of the company's three shows that are performed 10 times a week in the city.

Laliberté is not stopping there. Later this year - at the bidding of Las Vegas's billionaire hotel- and casino-owner Steve Wynn - he will open his biggest show yet in the MGM Grand Hotel's 20,000 seat auditorium (home to Siegfried & Roy before the latter was famously attacked by the show's white tiger last year). Much secrecy surrounds the planning of this multimillion-pound show, but it will definitely be directed by one of international theatre's most respected directors, Robert Lepage. He says that it will be "the story of two twins coming of age. It's all about metamorphosis and confrontation". He adds that the show will integrate new media "in a way that has never been seen before". Lepage has said that working for Cirque is the opposite of working for any other producer: "You have so much artistic control that you get a bit of vertigo."

The fact that Cirque can approach Lepage, and that Lepage is keen to be involved is a sign of how Cirque du Soleil has left the rest of the circus world first rubbing its eyes and now desperate to catch up. Guy Laliberté's dream of an artistic fusion of circus and theatre has seen traditional circus performers working with Olympic athletes; acrobats with dancers; musicians and singers with choreographers; theatre directors with storytellers; and more languages in one green room than on a Premiership football field. The one thing that a Cirque show deliberately lacks is a star. Few, if any, in the audience will know the names of the performers. The old-style theatre emphasis on "company" is paramount.

At Cirque's headquarters in Montreal, Guy Laliberté and co-founder and creative director Gilles Ste-Croix have opened a school for children hoping to graduate to the company, and several studios where Cirque's shows are devised, rehearsed and refined. Shows such as Saltimbanco, the first to wow British audiences six years ago and make the newsreader Anna Ford publicly declare that she wanted to be a trapeze artist; Mystère, the story of a journey (a constant motif in Cirque's narratives) punctuated by brightly dressed acrobats with Chinese poles, trampolines, trapezes, bungee cords and the gaudiest plumed costumes imaginable; and Dralion, which, as British audiences will see in its month-long residency at the Royal Albert Hall, combines Western and Chinese acrobatic skills against a backdrop of narrative and 3,000 stunning costumes.

And with development of the art form comes development in the laboratory. In O, for example, it was quickly realised that the make-up had to be extremely thick so that it would not come off in the water. But thick make-up was bad for the skin, so work had to be undertaken with dermatologists. Now, Cirque has an international research and development centre for this area of dermatology. Sometimes, the meticulous professionalism of Cirque is a little disarming. For example, each artist it signs has a mould made of their head so that if a hairpiece breaks it can be refigured in Montreal. For that reason, the Montreal HQ contains what is known as a "head cemetery" - thousands of moulds of performers' heads.

From the hugely successful visits that the company has already made to London, British audiences are familiar with the basic ingredients that make Cirque different from any other circus. Unlike British circuses, which are a collection of unrelated variety acts and acrobatic or animal turns, Cirque's shows have a narrative and plot - admittedly, often too opaque for easy summary or comprehension; rock or world music with made-up words of no recognisable language, and thus, by Cirque's own logic, of all languages; and the aforementioned emphasis on athletic and acrobatic skills, all under the artistic direction of people whose background is theatre.

And it is moments of theatre that define Cirque's shows. The disturbing sight of prams moving on their own across the stage with the sound of babies crying; the echoes of Peter Brook and Yukio Ninagawa, as trapeze artists in Tempest-style costumes fly towards one another. The technical skills, music and mystical nature of the performances are what British audiences seem to find sufficient. The narratives, such as they are, sit less comfortably. Gilles Ste-Croix, creative director for Cirque, says: "If people feel that the storylines are not that important, it doesn't matter. They are important to us when we create the show. There's enough storyline to touch the audience; the emotion touches them."

Certainly, to British audiences, the storylines can seem as abstract as Cirque's description of them can be overblown. Here is how Cirque describes the theme of next week's European premiere of Dralion: "The show pays homage to the four elements - earth, air, fire and water - which take on human form and rule worlds defined by their individual vivid colours. Dralion is an extraordinary voyage through a futuristic dimension - a place without time, ruled by magical laws. Here, the iridescent colours of the costumes are reflected in the metallic glints of a decor straight out of the cinéma fantastique. The musical score simultaneously borrows from traditional sources while entering an electro-symphonic realm of a new world."

That's a lot of baggage to load on an honest-to-God performer. As one of them, the Olympic gymnast Terry Bartlett, says: "If you're running across the stage with a firestick in your hand, you have to concentrate on that. You can't have the story in your head."

Nevertheless, seeing Cirque's four shows in Las Vegas and Mexico City, as I did, and talking to directors and performers backstage, it was clear that the fusion of circus and theatre had effectively created a new art form. It was in Mexico that the artistic director of Dralion, the French- Canadian Sylvie Galarneau, told me: "Acrobatics obviously remain a very important part for us, but are presented in a very different way from traditional circuses, which have acts that are not linked, and no story. We always start by creating a synopsis, a leitmotif that is the inspiration, and the acts support the storyline. The theatricality has made it into an art form. We try to make our artists actors as well as performers.

"We find with the narratives that kids often understand them more than adults. I like to compare it to paintings. You may be touched by one; you may not be. Whether the audiences get the storylines or not is not important; it's whether they are touched. When devising the show, Guy is always there. Most of the time, he will tell us why it doesn't work. He has to agree to the concept. In Dralion, Guy wanted to pay tribute to the Chinese because they were the masters of acrobatics. So we have 37 Chinese performers in Dralion, and had to go through a lot of political hoops to get them here.

"What Guy wanted in this show was to show a society with a hierarchy - women and men, East meeting West. We were two years in Montreal devising the show. We went to China to choose the acts, then we showed the creative team the videos. We all sit together with some good wine to discuss a show. The costume designer starts drawing; and then we might find an acrobat has such strong stage presence that we build music and a storyline round it.

"I come from the theatre, and I didn't like circus, though I've changed my mind. They wanted theatre people who were disciplined and had an eye for detail; but now we've been contaminated - in a good way."

The story of Cirque du Soleil is a triumphant one, so triumphant that perhaps hubris was inevitable. And it came in Las Vegas. If O shows how * * turning circus into an art form can also take it beyond the genre's wildest dreams, a few hundred yards up the Las Vegas strip is a cautionary tale, a sad example of how one can try too hard to break the boundaries of convention and fall flat on one's face. This show, called Zumanity, sees Cirque experimenting as no circus before has experimented. Zumanity is an extended nightclub act, actually hosted by a louche drag-queen, and sees Cirque's highly skilled performers looking embarrassed and uncomfortable, as dance and acrobatic skills take second place to a stream of witless vulgarities and endless sucking of the microphone and other simulated sex acts. The lukewarm applause told its own tale at this depressing show, which can only be of interest to cultural historians seeking an example of a drastic wrong turn by an innovative outfit. How ironic that Cirque, which seems to be effortlessly sexy in its best shows, tried hard to be sexy in this one and ended up looking seedy.

But this is, happily, not the Cirque du Soleil that will take over the Royal Albert Hall next week. Dralion will show Cirque's athletic and theatrical prowess at its best. And perhaps Britain can claim a little credit for that. In the green rooms of Cirque's American shows, among the acrobats and athletes limbering up or being massaged, are some British members of the company. An old-style circus man, Brian Dewhurst is a clown with Cirque and, at 71, is more than twice the age of most of the performers. Indeed, his son appears alongside him. Brian comes from a traditional circus family, his father a knife-thrower, his grandfather a clown. Brian recalls Laliberté and Gilles Ste-Croix coming to see his "political circus" at the Half Moon Theatre in London, a rare example of a British circus show with a theme, on that occasion about black people and the police. When Cirque's top two saw his show, they immediately approached him to be part of their embryonic venture.

"Guy and Gilles said they were putting on a new show in Canada. The basic principles with Cirque are the same. It's democratic and open to input from the artists, but the training is more professional. and they have these great Olympic gymnasts. In Britain now, there is more flexibility, but prior to Cirque, the acts at a British circus - often family-based - would be worked out three days before it opened. Often, you didn't even have to show the management your act.

From a totally different background is Terry Bartlett, who was in Britain's Olympic gymnastics team and competed in three Olympic Games. He is one of the stars of O in Las Vegas. He says: "Where does an international gymnast go after his whole life has been in the gym? When I auditioned, they said: 'Show me something beautiful', so I did a leap. But they also want you to be creative, to take the audience into another world. Not everybody who can do a somersault can be creative. Franco Dragone [the writer and director of O, and a key Cirque figure who has raised eyebrows by moving on to direct the Celine Dion show in Vegas] said to me: 'I don't create. I just have a great eye for seeing the beauty in you'."

Mike Brown, a fire artist and another British member of the Cirque troupe, has seen both the old and the new in circus, and sums it up a little ruefully: "I do miss the travelling, and in some ways I was a little more creative before Cirque - I had to make my show out of a cardboard box and whatever else was in the van," he says. "But I do get to eat now."

'Dralion', Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 (020-7589 8212), 8 January-13 February