Le Grand Chapiteau: La Nouba

“La Nouba was the fruit of 10 years of negotiation, and the fulfillment of long-standing ambition on the part of Disney to include Cirque du Soleil in its roster,” writes Tony Babinski in Cirque du Soleil: 20 Years Under the Sun. Truth told Disney wasn’t the only entertainment conglomerate interested in Cirque du Soleil in its early days. Once Le Cirque Réinventé became a hit out in Santa Monica it quickly became the talk of Hollywood. Laliberté was courted by Columbia Pictures to make a movie about Cirque du Soleil and its characters. Dawn Steel, Columbia’s president at the time, threw a party to announce the deal, but Laliberté, well... "They were seating all the stars, and I was basically put aside," he says. "They just wanted to lock up our story and our brand name and walk around like they owned Cirque du Soleil. I walked right out of the party, called my lawyer and told him to get me out of the deal."

Disney honcho Michael Eisner and Casino mogul Steve Wynn came calling too... but Guy had already learned his lesson. And in 10 years time so did Mr. Eisner. Disney head Michael Eisner remembers that negotiations with Cirque were long and complex, because Cirque insisted on retaining creative independence. His solution was to let Cirque have it. “I’ve been dealing with the movie business for a long time,” says Eisner in the documentary “Run Before You Fly”, “and when you have a Spielberg or a George Lucas or others of that level, you let them have creative control. With Cirque du Soleil and Guy Laliberté, you create a financial box, and you let them do it!”

And so after years and years of negotiations, on July 12, 1996 Cirque du Soleil announced that it had reached a long-term agreement with the Walt Disney Company for a new circus-style theatrical show to be housed within a 70,000 square-foot free-standing theater (to seat up to 1,650 patrons), which would be constructed at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida. “A brand-new production with an international cast of more than 70 performers will take to the stage the magic of Cirque du Soleil. The length of the agreement between parties is extended on a 12-year period and the first Walt Disney World performance will premiere in November 1998,” the post announced but little in the way of the show’s vision was known. Faced with being in the midst of a fairy tale world once upon a time, what would you do? You come up with your own fairy tale of course!

"After working on previous Cirque shows I turned around one day and realized that life had gone by, “Franco Dragone reminisces, “and I hadn't seen my children grow up. I wanted to re-connect with youth, to show my 19-year-old son that I was still hip. The idea became to see how Cirque could live in a modern, urban environment. I was also very aware that we were setting up a show in Disney's territory, so to speak. I wanted La Nouba to integrate that fact: we were going back to the world of childhood and fairy tales."

Every member of the creative team remembers coming to La Nouba feeling depleted after working straight through a challenging string of previous shows. Mystere, Alegria, Quidam, and “O” had all been overlapping productions. Somehow, Cirque had also found time to put together a film production inspired by Alegria in the same period. The group’s fatigue when they came to La Nouba was compounded by the fact that there was very little time to put the show together. Their collective response was to plumb the energy of youth, long the motor of Cirque du Soleil’s inventive power. La Nouba “was made under exhaustion,” admits Laliberte in Babinski’s book. “What helped us get through it,” he continues, “was to make the show a tribute to all the teenagers in the world, which injected a lot of energy into it.”

"With La Nouba we really [went for] an urban, young energy. So we turned to hip-hop,” says Debra Brown. She turned to Clarence Ford, a prolific dancer, choreographer, teacher and film director from Toronto, and invited him to take part in the studio workshops and contribute some of his choreographies for La Nouba. “[He] gave us some essential hip-hop training. If it weren’t for him we would have had to find a completely different way of moving.”

Benoit Jutras (Composer) and Luc Lafortune (Lighting Designer) drew from the same pool of inspiration: “We wanted a very urban show, but it had to be a modern kind of urban, not like something out of Fritz Lang’s ‘Metrpolois’. That’s why you see ‘.com’, ‘shift’, ‘delete’, barcodes and [so forth] on the walls... for the high-tech element.” As for the music? It rocks!

“Franco [Dragone, the writer and director] knew he wanted it to be an attic in your mind, dreams and memories. He knew he wanted to use ordinary household objects as triggers for thoughts — doors, windows, bikes, tables, all of which are part of the show,” Richard Dennison, the original Company Manager at La Nouba said. But even after the show premiered everyone involved realized there was still something missing. Dennison said they decided to add the bike act to La Nouba after its December debut at the suggestion of Laliberte. "He said a contemporary bike act would positively jar the audience, throw a different rhythm of the show. We called casting and within 48 hours we had built the ramps and had the bikers."