FEATURE F EATURE
NO CLOWNING AROUND AT THE CIRCUS
Christian Sylt talks to Cirque Du Soleil founder Guy LalibertŽ about what it takes to run a successful business in the notoriously difficult industry famous for fun and games
MOST INVESTORS WOULD NOT BE HAPPY with the chief executive of one of their assets behaving like a clown but Dubai’s Istithmar World wealth fund is an exception. Nestled in its portfolio, next to its stakes in finance firms such as Standard Chartered and alternative asset manager GLG, is circus company Cirque du Soleil. Istithmar likes nothing more than Cirque’s chief executive, the 50 year-old Guy Laliberté, letting his creative juices flow. There is good reason for this: with annual revenues of over $800m and at a valuation of $2bn Cirque is far from your typical circus. Spectators won’t find any sawdust strewn across the stage in a Cirque show. Nor will they find any animals on the stunning sets with their dramatically coloured lighting and avant-garde acrobatics. The settings are similarly sumptuous as Cirque has seven permanent shows in luxury Las Vegas casino hotels, one in Florida, one in Macau, one in Tokyo as well as seven troupes touring most major cities worldwide. “I love surrealism,” Laliberté says of the dominant drive behind his shows which have appropriately bizarre brand names like Quidam, Kooza and Varekai, which are currently touring through Europe. However, he insists that surrealism isn’t simply a highbrow hook to lure in punters. “We like the audience to have its own emotional association with the acts”. Laliberté explains. Personal interpretation is inevitable since no language is spoken in any of the shows. This means that there are no cultural barriers to cross and it has played a key part in allowing Cirque to perform to nearly 100m spectators in over 300 cities since it was set up. It has come a long way since Laliberté left home in Montreal. “I found out that the best way for me to live while I was travelling was to learn tunes on the accordion
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and be a street performer,” he says. After leaving school, Laliberté hitchhiked throughout Europe as a busker, picking up fire-breathing, juggling and stilt- walking from other street performers. He founded a theatre troupe on stilts with a group of them and their big break came in 1984 when they won a $1m government contract to provide 13 weeks of entertainment marking the 450th anniversary of the discovery of Canada. In a real life rags to riches tale, Cirque du Soleil was born.
Laliberté still looks more like a street performer than a businessman. With short-shaved blond hair he looks like a body-double for Bruce Willis bursting with energy. In his spare time he plays professional poker and last year he became Canada’s first space tourist when he visited the International Space Station. Laliberté has a jet set personality, talking in a turbo-charged stream of consciousness, with his attire of choice being a tight tee shirt, a black jacket and crazily-coloured jeans. Not what you’d expect to see someone wearing in a boardroom but, after the big top, this is where Laliberté is most at home. Over the past 25 years Laliberté has done deals with bosses of the biggest blue chip companies in entertainment from Disney’s big cheese Bob Iger to casino impresario Steve Wynn. Cirque’s success brought takeover approaches aplenty with Disney’s former chief executive Michael Eisner once saying, “if I’d been able to buy Cirque du Soleil, I would have bought it”. It wasn’t until August 2008 that Laliberté finally cashed in some chips when Dubai-based private equity investor Istithmar World Capital and real estate developer Nakheel each took a 10% stake in Cirque. Crucially, the acquisition left Laliberté in control. “I don’t want to put Cirque du Soleil in a situation
RIGHT: LALIBERTƒ Õ S MASTERSTROKE WAS CREATING HIS OWN ACTS RATHER THAN SIMPLY EMPLOYING GUEST ARTISTS WHO BRING THEIR ROUTINES WITH THEM
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