Dream Journeys

Cirque du Soleil storylines are characteristically ambiguous leaving the audience to use their imaginations to fill in the details. Writer Gilles Maheu explains to Closer his inspirations for the tale of Zaia.

“What if a young girl could take a journey into space to visit strange but familiar surroundings?” asks Gilles Maheu as he begins to explain the storyline of his newest work and the first permanent Cirque du Soleil show in Asia, Zaia.

As with all Cirque productions, fantasy and imagination run wild in Zaia to create an amazing journey through a dream world universe, seen through the eyes of a young girl.

“I have a little girl of six years old, and for me the circus is about seeing things through child eyes, bringing back your childhood with the marvel of the clowns and the acrobats, so I started from this point of view”, says Maheu.

This is the first time he has collaborated on a Cirque du Soleil production, and Maheu’s tremendous experience in producing performing arts, not to mention the fact that he is a fellow Quebecer, were no doubt important factors in the decision to entrust him with the reigns of one of the biggest Cirque productions to date.

Back to the storyline of Zaia, and who better to explain it than its creator.

“The story is of a young girl who dreams that her parents are doing a circus number on another far away planet in the galaxy and she is missing them”, explains Maheu in his soft French Canadian accent, as if reading you a bedtime story.

“She wants to do the same thing as her parents, so in her dream she will grab the moon and go into space and in her travels she will discover and encounter many strange and beautiful characters of the Earth. So it is a way also for her to see the beauty of the Earth through her travels”.

According to Maheu, there is a strong theme of environmental awareness to the show, with the title and the name of the lead character, Zaia, being a combination of the Greek word for ‘light’, and the concept of Gaia, the idea that all the physical components of the Earth are interconnected as one single organism. But Zaia is also a love story.

“She will be reunited with her parents, and she will fall in love, and she will try to bring back to Earth, harmony and peace”, explains Maheu.

This love story is highlighted in a beautifully choreographed acrobatic performance in the second act in a scene that Maheu describes as ‘Romeo and Alice’, combining the romance and fantasy of two of the most famous stories ever written.

Maheu is no stranger to creating and producing fanciful theatre shows, having directed such acclaimed shows as Don Juan and Notre Dame de Paris. But where did he find his inspiration for his current work?

“The inspiration for this show came to me very strangely but very quickly, and it came in the form of a very interesting drawing that I saw on a postcard”, he recalls.

“It was a drawing of a very young girl dressed in an astronauts uniform sitting on the ground building a sandcastle on the moon. The image was so strong and full of questions that I immediately began to write the storyline”.

Interesting, Gilles Maheu’s colleague and fellow former Baie-Saint-Paul street entertainer, Gilles Ste-Croix, the Senior Vice President for Creative Content for Cirque du Soleil, tells us that he still has that postcard hanging in his office.

It’s fair to say of course that the storyline of a Cirque performance, while important at a production stage, is perhaps less important for the audience, who for the most part are just content to sit back and take in the spectacle of colours, music, dance and acrobatics that make up every show.

With no spoken narrative throughout, getting the specific details of the storyline across to the audience is always going to be a challenge, but for Maheu this is not a major concern. “For me the emotion is the basis of the show. Passing emotion to the audience is the most important thing”, he says.

Indeed watching the dramatic and colourful performances of Zaia, it is perhaps the emotion and imagination that the audience themselves brings to the show, that enables it to create a unique and individual storyline for each person who experiences it.

Gilles Maheu

by Mark Phillips
photos courtesy of Red Dog Studio

The Circus Comes to Town

Three years in the planning and millions of dollars in the making, the first permanent Cirque du Soleil show is set to arrive in Macau next month, and Closer gets a sneak peak.

In the early days in the life of Cirque du Soleil, Gilles Ste-Croix dressed up in a monkey suit and walked through the streets of downtown Toronto in an attempt to attract publicity for the then little-known production. He even once walked 56 miles on stilts to Quebec City to raise money for an earlier performing troupe that would one day become the forerunner to Cirque.

“Yes, it’s all true”, he admits in an interview with Closer shortly after we were given a sneak preview of the new Cirque du Soleil production, Zaia, soon to be unveiled to Macau audiences at the Venetian. “Anything for making a buck!” he adds with a reflective grin.

Making a buck these days is not something Ste-Croix needs to be all that concerned about. Having been with Cirque du Soleil since its inception, and now as Senior Vice-President of Creative Content, he is a vital part of a small executive team heading up what is arguably one of the most successful and innovative live entertainment companies on the globe, raking in over a million US dollars a day from its numerous shows around the world.

So how did a stilt-walker who discovered his talent when he strapped ladders to his legs while working as an apple picker, end up helping to lead a global entertainment empire? It is perhaps just this creativity and enterprise that was an indication that Ste-Croix was always destined to be more than just a busker. Indeed he had always had an ambition to create new forms of street theatre, and in 1980 he founded the street theatre group, Échassiers de Baie-Saint-Paul. Amidst this eclectic band of jugglers, fire-eaters and stilt-walkers, was fellow street performer Guy Laliberté, who later went on to form Cirque du Soleil (Circus of the Sun), with the help of Ste-Croix.

The original Cirque show performed in 1984 with financial assistance from the Quebec City government, and within a decade the company was running simultaneous shows on three continents, wowing audiences wherever it went and leaving critics in a desperate search for superlatives. Ste-Croix himself was the Director of Creation for all of Cirque’s productions from 1990 to 2000. In 1987 his greatest challenge was finding enough money get the Cirque production from Canada to the Los Angeles Arts Festival and still have enough money left over to get them home again. Today he faces a very different challenge – that of how to continually come up with fresh and exciting ways to entertain audiences in new Cirque productions, that are constantly in demand and continuing to take the world by storm.

“Actually, it’s not so much coming up with ideas”, he clarifies, “but when you start working with new people, very often they will say ‘Oh you know what we could do is this and this and this’, and I say ‘Hmm done that, done that too’. And then the production team will do a presentation and say ‘Well we’re thinking of doing this’ and I say ‘Well, we have that already in Macau’. ‘Really? Damn!’”

And so it’s back to the drawing board, which at the beginning of any Cirque production is simply a big blank piece of paper. The Zaia production is an entirely new cast, crew, concept and theatre, which all had their beginnings some three years ago. “I called Gilles (Maheu, the writer and director) and asked him, ‘Do you want to work with us? We are going to do a show’. And he said ‘Where?’ and I said ‘Well...Macau’. And he said ‘Where’s that?’ And that’s how it all started”, remembers Ste-Croix.

Indeed with 15 permanent shows running worldwide, five in Las Vegas alone, thinking of something that hasn’t been done before is a task for even the most inventive mind, and yet somehow, every new Cirque show manages to find

new and spectacular ways of stunning its audiences. In the production of Ká, a permanent production at the MGM Grand Hotel in Vegas, the audience faces a seemingly bottomless, smoke-filled pit, while artists perform on a 36,000-kilogram platform that can rotate 360 degrees and tilt 110 degrees. Meanwhile, over at the Bellagio Hotel, much of the performance of “O” takes place in a 1.5 million gallon tank of water! As for Zaia, the first permanent Cirque du Soleil show in Asia, if our sneak peak is anything to go by, there will be even more surprises in store.

One of the key new technological aspects of this show will be a 25 foot sphere hanging from the roof of the theatre, which weighs 1800 kilograms and moves along tracks on the ceiling, while a complete 360 degree image is projected onto it from the inside.

“We had projection on Ká but the projection in this ball was really designed especially for this show.” says Ste-Croix. “Usually people project onto the outside of the ball, but for Zaia we have six projectors on the inside, all queued to project a complete, seamless and moving image. This was a big achievement”.

Another technological innovation is the spectacular backdrop of 2000 fiber-optic lights, which create an accurate depiction of the constellation of stars in the night sky over Macau.

And of course there is the theatre itself, which was custom-made for the Zaia show, and features three large circular lifts that raise the performers high on the stage. In all, the production costs for Zaia were around US$150 million, much of which went towards the 1800 seat theater, and a good chunk no doubt spent on the 300 elaborate costumes.

Gilles Ste-Croix

Of course in this day and age of CGI and Hollywood special effects, technology alone is not enough to keep audiences happy. Any circus is only as good as its performers. Zaia is one of the largest Cirque productions so far, featuring 75 performers from 12 countries, including 15 Chinese acrobats. Such is the demand for highly skilled performers for Cirque shows that the company constantly combs the globe looking for talent, often finding them in competitive sporting arenas including the Olympics. Interestingly, it was the 15 Chinese acrobats that presented Ste-Croix with one of his greatest challenges in putting together the Zaia production here in Macau. Was communication the problem? Actually it was just getting them here in the first place.

“This was the strange thing”, he remarks. “When we take a Chinese acrobat to perform in America, it is very easy to organize a visa. But when we tried to bring a Chinese acrobat to Macau, it was much more complicated”, he muses. “We thought it might take four weeks – that’s what we’re used to for America. But it took 10 weeks! I mean the Chinese dancers in our preview today...they only just arrived!”

Another significant challenge related to the level of sophisticated technology incorporated into the show. “This type of high technology show does not exist here, so there are no companies to supply us, not even in Hong Kong”, comments Ste-Croix. “So we really had to bring everything, including knowledge, from companies in America”.

Despite the immense complexity of the production which includes a crew of 65

technicians, it appeared from Ste-Croix’s relaxed demeanor on the day we spoke with him, that everything was going according to schedule for the production, and he was certainly in no doubt that the first performance of Zaia will go ahead as planned on August 26, the first anniversary of the Venetian Macao.

But regarding how the predominantly Mainland Chinese audiences would receive the show, Ste-Croix was a little more reserved in his predictions.

“I’m very curious about the audience reaction here”, he says. “I’ve been to an acrobatic festival here in China and when somebody misses their trick, they laugh, whereas in America the audience will go ‘oooh’ and feel sorry for the person.

I think its just their way of saying, ‘Whoops, don’t worry about it’, so the reaction is different because of the different culture”, he observes.

One thing that was very evident at the press day was the interest that the local Chinese media had in knowing what Chinese elements or Chinese influences were to be included in Zaia, given that it will be shown in Macau to a predominantly Chinese audience.

When questioned as to whether the location of the show and the culture of the audience had any impact on the content of the show or the storyline, Ste-Croix’s response was an emphatic, “No”. “Our themes are very general and very universal. It’s about emotions, and emotions are always felt in a similar way, from a Chinese point of view or from a Japanese point of view. Every show we do, we just try to connect with the imagination, the child in you”, explains Ste-Croix.

Regardless of the lack of specific Chinese content, given the worldwide success of all Cirque shows to date, it is hard to imagine that Zaia will be anything but a hit here in Macau. And this is certainly what the folks at Venetian are banking on as well. “Entertainment is a key part of our strategy here in Macau and Cirque du Soleil will change how entertainment is viewed in this part of the world,” announced Mark Brown, President of the Venetian Macao Resort, at the press gathering.

Undoubtedly the Cirque du Soleil franchise single-handedly transformed the entertainment appeal of Las Vegas when its first show Mystère, arrived in 1990. At the time, investors were worried it might not take off, but to their relief the show was a sellout within 10 days of opening. Now there are five permanent shows in Las Vegas attracting around 10,000 people a night and leaving the revenue of the likes of Celine Dion and Elton John in their dust.

“When our shows don’t play in one hotel, it’s pretty dead”, observes Ste-Croix in a very matter-of-fact tone. “So our show is a definite draw card.” The Venetian executives are of course well aware of this and expect the arrival of Zaia to have a similar effect on Macau, creating the impetus to transform it from a purely gambling city to a hub of entertainment in Asia. Given this, can we expect that Zaia will be the first of many Cirque shows in Macau?

“It all depends on how Macau develops”, offers Ste-Croix. “I don’t think we will do only one, certainly two, but more...?” Either way, Macau will now be the Asian base for this multibillion dollar, global entertainment empire.

All this seems a far cry from his days as a street entertainer in the quiet town of Baie-Saint-Paul near Quebec City in the early 1980’s. So does he miss the old days of grass roots street performing?

Hardly surprisingly his reply is “No”. But he adds, “You know, if I could turn the clock back 20 years, I would do one thing differently”. Are you serious?! What?! “I would like to be a clown!”

‘Zaia’ will open at the Venetian Macao on August 26. Tickets are already on sale and are available from the Venetian Macao ticketing office or online at their website.

by Mark Phillips
photos by Carmo Correia