  |
The circulation spine running through the Cirque du Soleil's new headquarters also runs beyond it, in a pool of water that reaches out to the circus's big top. The site is adjacent to the second largest landfill in North America. (photo: Eric Piché) |
click here to see the photos and
captions for this article
| The Cirque du Soleil wanted a headquarters that would reflect
its imaginative, risk-taking ethos--and found it on the brink of
a fire- breathing pit. by Ellen Barry "'Wasteland' is a good word," Claude Brault says cheerfully, looking out across the Cirque du Soleil's new kingdom. "It's a non-site. It was designed by default, created out of emptiness, then filled with garbage. And now we have decided to create something." Give or take a few rhetorical flourishes, Brault's got it about right. Outside the window of the executive suite, where he is standing, is an urban panorama as landscaped by Dante. Beyond the craters of the abandoned quarry, beyond the tongues of flame burning off underground gas, on top of 39 years of Montreal's accumulated waste matter, you can sometimes make out the cloud of birds hovering over fresh trash. Brault, who commissions artworks for the Cirque du Soleil's new complex, peers out across the distance and can't get enough of it. "It's like hell," he says several times, with obvious delight. For a company whose local star power approaches supernova status, the former Miron quarry might seem like a strange choice, but--as any of its planners will tell you--the Cirque du Soleil is a corporation at home with paradox. Thus, the Studio: a $40 million complex designed by Montreal's most talked-about architect, unveiled beside one of Montreal's poorest neighborhoods, overlooking the second biggest landfill in North America. The rock-bottom land price ($1.10 Canadian per square foot, compared to $85 to $100 downtown) had something to do with it, but the explanation of company officials is more romantic: They believe that the Cirque du Soleil is uniquely capable of transforming this no-man's-land into an urban treasure. Standing at the lip of a garbage-filled quarry, with a raised expressway to the east, subsidized housing to the north, and a belching power plant to the south, a visitor may find it an optimistic view. "It's a gamble," says Gaeton Morency, the Cirque's vice president of planning and development, who has overseen the move. "It takes some imagination. But we have never been lacking in imagination." There was a moment in the Cirque du Soleil's history when failure was possible. In 1985, it was little more than a troupe of street performers $750,000 in debt, and they flopped, dramatically, in Niagara Falls. Touring under the unfortunate name "Sun Circus," they canceled shows because they couldn't coax 75 customers into a 1,500-seat arena. Of those who came, some were so disappointed not to see animals that they asked for their money back. Meanwhile, loan officers were turning away the 25-year-old founders, Guy Laliberté and Daniel Gaul-thier, informing them laconically that they didn't work with clowns. "We were giving away tickets on the street," recalls Jean David, the vice president of marketing, who has been with the Cirque since the beginning. "We learned a lot about ourselves. When you say 'Sun Circus,' it means a traditional circus, with elephants. But when you say 'Cirque du Soleil,' that's different. If you have been to university, then you have some idea that this might be French, and then, if you're curious, you might ask questions, and then you hear about it from friends." The Cirque discovered a demographic that was educated, middle-class, largely female, and far from Niagara Falls. By 1987, when the Cirque played Los Angeles, the show was sending reviewers into emotional transports over its drama and creativity. In the end, the Cirque succeeded by ignoring the conventional wisdom of the circus industry: no elephants, no ringleader, no irreplaceable stars. Instead, the company stages seamless productions built around single, often metaphysical themes. For instance, the main character of Quidam, which opens in New York this month, is a headless, overcoated man out of René Magritte, a surreal hero who symbolizes modern isolation. It's highbrow stuff, as the $40 ticket prices suggest, but the arty mix of theater and circus has proven a successful formula. Today, the Cirque du Soleil is planning to double its number of touring shows to eight, and its revenues to $300 million, over the next two years. But David emphasizes that any member of the company can still walk into the copresidents' offices with a problem. In the midst of frantic expansion, the Cirque's philosophy has changed little since the days when Laliberté was eating fire for donations on the sidewalk. "To be a creator, you also have to have a little bit of anarchy," human resources vice president Marc Gagnon told the Toronto-based Globe and Mail last year. "If you overmanage, you get a lousy show." The completed Studio, which houses the company's 500 local employees, reflects that daring. For the job, the Cirque chose Dan Hanganu, the Romanian-born architect whose massive, mineral profiles have shocked and reshaped Montreal. Hanganu's blocky, industrial Montreal Museum of Archaeology and History at Pointe-à-Callière, which confronts picturesque Old Montreal, established him as an important, if controversial, architectural player in 1992. It won both the province's prestigious Governor-General's award for artistic achievement, which is rarely awarded to an architect, and the Lemon Prize from the preservationist group Save Montreal for "impoverishing the architectural landscape of Montreal" with a style the society described as "Soviet nuclear plant." The Cirque complex has proven less divisive. Even Save Montreal has amended its view of Hanganu, awarding the project its laudatory Orange Prize for achievement in urban planning. In this building, Hanganu restrained his affection for bare stone; the checkered, corrugated-aluminum facade winks at the desolate landscape with tiny visual jokes. One exterior wall is studded with bicycle reflectors, which jump out like sequins in the sun. Round windows cluster in a corner as if a fish had bubbled them out. Tiny, circular wire brushes are set into another wall like a row of miniature suns, a clever echo of the Cirque's motif. The building's interior is a tribute to the Cirque's slightly chaotic management style. Walking down the alley-like central spine--which is flooded with natural light and lined with matte metal and rosy chipboard--a visitor gets glimpses into a dozen ventricles of this New Age circus, as little girls in tracksuits dart between practice rooms. Jutting off from the spine are immense rehearsal studios, where gymnasts in Metallica T-shirts stretch endlessly and trapeze artists fall into pits full of foam rubber. In the costume studio, high shelves hold plaster casts of every performer's head, plus some torsos, for long-distance costume work. The Studios' movable walls invite rearrangement--a provision whose necessity was brought home to the architects as they poured, and repoured, and repoured the building's foundations in response to the Cirque's changing requirements. "It was a pretty turbulent project from the onset...like the show creation process," Morency says in retrospect, with a rueful smile. "But we set things in concrete when we are building." The main conceptual specifications never changed, though--the Cirque wanted enough structure to accommodate unpredictable growth while avoiding the visual trappings of corporate culture. Accordingly, the interior is playful and open, focused around a large communal kitchen that occasionally sends the scent of vegetable soup wafting down the central spine and throughout the building. Corners offer surprise views into adjoining spaces, so that office workers can watch flipping tumblers and acrobats. For the circus, such crosscurrents are both a relief and a novelty. Before the Studio opened, housing the Cirque du Soleil was like buying clothes for a child in the middle of a growth spurt. Over the last 13 years, the Cirque du Soleil's personnel has soared from 10 people to 1,300, and that number is expected to rise to 2,170 in the next two years. When Morency joined the company, in 1992, it was working in 16 different locations in Montreal--with the closest available rehearsal facility for trapeze artists halfway around the world in Moscow. When Hanganu's building was unveiled, in February of 1997, it was the first time the staff could work together without crossing town five times a day. "I talk to a lot of cab drivers," Morency says. "They've lost a lot of business." Questioned about their choice of sites, Cirque officials like to say that circus people have always been freaks and pariahs banished to the outskirts of town; but the truth is that today they are seen as gold-plated corporate citizens. In building the Studio, as in other ventures, the company received help from both the provincial and city governments, covering almost half the construction costs--a total of $9.6 million. It wasn't a giveaway, though. In return, the company has committed to revamping this neighborhood. The next time the circus performs in Montreal, the big top will be planted on a flat oval adjacent to the building, looking out onto the quarry. The Cirque also agreed to enliven a desolate stretch of highway by building a residential village for performers along the southeastern edge of the site--running alongside a raised expressway--by 2000. It's already put some of its clout to work by convincing city officials to move a depot of stinking garbage trucks that locals had complained about for years. For neighborhood leaders, the circus is an unquestionable plus. "As long as what they want and what we want are the same thing," says Léo Bricault, who edits the local Journal de St. Michel, "it's going to be okay." In fact, the Studio's construction could prove to be the easy part of the Cirque's project, because the Cirque du Soleil built its headquarters smack in the middle of a world-class urban dilemma. It's not often you find a landfill the size of three football fields in the middle of a residential metropolitan neighborhood--environmental experts come from all over the world just to study the way Montreal manages the gas and runoff. As much as everyone would like to shut it down, there are two big problems: First, there's no alternate location for a landfill; and second, Miron's managers signed a contract to accept 39 million tons of garbage, which will not be fulfilled for years. The quarry's neighbors have been engaged in this struggle since the Cirque's founders were in diapers. Bricault can catalogue 35 years of municipal foot-dragging--first, promises from the quarry to stop dynamiting, then promises to stem methane gas leakage from the decomposing garbage, then promises, one after the other, to stop dumping altogether. Bring up the planned park that city officials envision for the site, and Bricault looks slightly weary. "In 1984, they showed us views of a golf course and said 'this will be here within 10 years,'" he says. "One administration will give us a good bulletin, and then they lose an election and we start over again." Local activists frequently bring up a McGill University study performed in the early Nineties that showed a 20 percent rise in certain types of cancer in the neighborhood. No one can prove a direct link, but Bricault maintains that the city planners have no idea how to manage four decades' worth of garbage. Northwest of the Cirque's glittering complex are layers of decaying waste extending 175 feet below the Earth's surface. The Studio itself was built on solid land, and Cirque officials are serenely confident that the trash is too far away to affect them--certainly its smell rarely reaches the Studio--but the landfill to the north settles so much that the surface sinks 15 feet every year. "At the time they were dumping at the bottom, there were no rules forbidding you to put anything dangerous there," Bricault says. "It could be anything. Nobody knows." Hélène Dubé, a local environmental activist, agrees. "I'm very suspicious about having a park above meters and meters of trash," she says. If she had kids, she isn't sure she would let them play there. Of course, the Cirque du Soleil has some practice making something out of nothing, as its St. Michel neighbors--mostly immigrants from Haiti, Central America, and Vietnam--are rapidly learning. Settled beside a low-income area, desiring fruit trees and decorative patches of corn and pumpkins, but not the fences that go along with them, the Cirque enlisted underemployed local young people to help with planting and told them they were free to take a limited portion of the harvest home for themselves. Other St. Michel youths got jobs in security. Circus employees went door to door delivering 35,000 invitations to visit the buildings. Gradually, almost unconsciously, the neighborhood of St. Michel has become invested in the Cirque project. Speaking of the local youths, Dubé, who helped coordinate the planting program, says, "They are the ones--or maybe have friends, or relatives--who are doing the graffiti and vandalism. But since they planted the tree, they won't let anyone touch their tree." And as a result, the Cirque's construction has worked a minor public miracle: People who had long ago given up on this land--people who have lived next door to a fence for their whole lives--are thinking in terms of renewal. The Gazmont plant, which was completed last year, collects underground gas and converts it into enough electricity to power 30,000 homes. The chain supermarket Maxi Plus has followed Cirque du Soleil's lead and opened a branch on the opposite corner of the site, and there is talk about a major cinema complex. Even a skeptic like Bricault, the newspaper editor, marvels at that. "Before Cirque du Soleil, everyone who lived around St. Michel said, 'Oh, this is the dump,'" he says. "With the coming of the Cirque du Soleil, the perception has changed. It's not garbage now." Except, of course, that it is. The garbage trucks still deposit 2,000 tons of garbage every day, above who knows how many layers of collapsing trash. The real test will come next year, when the show returns to Montreal, bringing more people to the edge of the dump than ever before. It's a peculiar spot to pitch a $40 million circus tent, but don't try to tell the Cirque that. "They'll come," Morency says calmly. "We could go a lot farther and people would still come." They'll come and, he implies, they'll stay. He envisions people playing in fields, dozing in the grass, watching movies projected onto the wall of the Studio, all this in a neighborhood Morency recalls from his childhood as a high fence and a smell of decay. How long does St. Michel have to wait for this transformation? Bricault, the editor, suggests I stop by in 20 years. Dubé, the environmental activist, ventures to say 10. And the Cirque's Morency says to come back in three years. Now that would be pure magic. Ellen Barry has been a staff reporter for the Moscow Times and the Boston Phoenix. |
Keywords:
Montreal, circus, Hanganau