The murmurs of an excited but anxious crowd rose under the big top. Onstage in Cirque du Soleil‘s nostalgic circus tent, which occupies a permanent, riverside perch in Montréal’s Old Port neighborhood, performers with animal-head masks somersaulted through space, whirling suspended around a white cube the size of a two-story apartment block. Live music, rich with strings and multiple voices, filled the dim space.
It was the opening number of ECHO, Cirque du Soleil’s newest show, which debuted here in April for a Montréal run that goes through August 20. A pair of clowns had warmed up the crowd with pratfalls and practical jokes. We’d already met the show’s protagonists, a wide-eyed girl called Future and her anthropomorphic dog, Ewai. For the next two hours, a cursory sort of story would unfold: It was about evolution, according to the interactive program, plus some hazily inspiring bits about empathy, invention and the promise of imaginative youth. Or something.
Forget the story, though. During the first big set piece, audible gasps and shouts from nearby seats signaled that Cirque du Soleil’s legendary acrobatics and artistry remain the real draw, strenuous wonders that filled the circus tent to capacity on a sunny weekday evening. We’d come to see the people who’d taught themselves to fly.
For Cirque du Soleil, as for the performers, the stakes are high. ECHO is the company’s first new show since the pandemic sent the Montréal-based circus into bankruptcy, as well as a sign of hope for an artistic community staggered by COVID-19 layoffs and cancellations. The troupe began performing again in 2021, restarting touring and resident shows from Las Vegas to London. But new work fuels the organization’s economic engine and, explained ECHO director of creation Chantal Tremblay, is essential to its reputation for innovation.
“It was important for the company to show that we’re still a place where we create,” Tremblay said.
The big top performances also mean playing to a circus-savvy hometown crowd. “To open in Montréal is a must. This is where we open our shows, and it’s still a tradition,” Tremblay said, comparing local circusgoers’ palpable enthusiasm to the ebullient feel at Montréal hockey games. “Québécois and Québécoise are really proud of this company.”
“Montréal is boiling with circus.” Chantal Tremblay
Cirque du Soleil, founded in 1984 by a group of 20 street performers with roots in the artsy Québécois town of Baie-Saint-Paul, is the most famous name in global circus. Still, it’s just the beginning of Montréal’s genre-defining circus scene. The city is home to the world’s three biggest circus companies — rounding out the list are Cirque Éloize and artists’ collective Les 7 Doigts de la Main — as well as dozens of smaller troupes and organizations.
For more than four decades, Montréal’s National Circus School has been a training ground for young performers eager to push creative boundaries. The annual Montréal Complètement Cirque festival, which runs from July 6 to 16 this year, fills the city’s event venues, parks, alleyways and sidewalks with ticketed and free shows staged by an international lineup of circus artists. Aficionados call this city one of the best places in the world to catch a show. “Montréal is boiling with circus,” Tremblay said.
“Montréal is definitely one of the hubs of circus activity writ large,” agreed Louis Patrick Leroux, an associate dean of research at Concordia University’s Faculty of Arts and Science and the author of Cirque Global: Québec’s Expanding Circus Boundaries. Leroux is a former resident scholar at the National Circus School as well as a founder of the Montréal Working Group on Circus Research, a cohort of academics focused on the politics and performance of circus worldwide.
Leroux explained that Montréal’s prominence on the circus scene is a relatively new development. While there was circus activity in Québec as early as the 18th century, Leroux said, for many years, the region’s best performers generally left to join American circuses. They were French-accented artists in the era of seamy traveling carnivals and of P.T. Barnum spectaculars featuring bearded ladies, lion tamers and plenty of hot roasted peanuts.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that Montréal began to emerge as a modern circus city. There was Cirque du Soleil, for one. That decade also saw the opening of the National Circus School, which drew inspiration from rigorous, state-run circus facilities that thrived under the Soviet Union. Before such circus schools developed and spread in Europe, the best way to become a circus performer was to be born into a circus family; state-funded schools refined the genre by instead providing opportunities to the most talented athletes, dancers and actors.
A trio of Montréal circus performers who’d been working in Europe decided to bring the concept back home. “The school, combined with the emergence of Cirque du Soleil, created, almost out of nothing, the emergence of a pretty impressive and important circus scene,” Leroux said. “Now this is a billion-dollar-a-year industry in Montréal.”
Today, Montréal’s circus behemoths feed a whirl of indie performances, small studios and innovation. “All of this creates an ecosystem where people are moving around. Everyone knows each other; it’s the same talent,” Leroux said.
The Montréal artist collective Les 7 Doigts de la Main — now a circus heavyweight whose new Québec-inspired show, Éclats, opens in Charlevoix this September — was founded in 2002 by seven circus performers who worked at Cirque du Soleil. Today, you might find Cirque du Soleil and circus school alumnae at Le Monastère, a nonprofit whose cabaret evenings offer artists a chance to showcase their original work in a converted 19th-century Anglican church.
One evening last summer, I attended an outdoor show in the garden at Le Monastère, where scaffolding for acrobatics climbed the church’s rough-hewn exterior walls. I didn’t know what to expect. “Each time we do a production with the cabaret, we change the entire cast. So each time people come back, they see new artists,” Guillaume Blais, a trapeze artist and cofounder of Le Monastère, had told me.
The show was spare and intimate when compared with the intensely produced experience of Cirque du Soleil. Performers mostly eschewed elaborate costumes for simple leotards. When I visited there was Hula-Hooping; a pink-haired dancer twirled from long strands of silk fabric; a woman built an intricate routine using an aerial hoop dangling from a wire. Untethered from the story arcs of hours-long shows, the numbers were funny and sad and sexy by turns. When a man in skintight black pants matched a daring aerial rope performance to Mötley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls,” long red hair flicking over an intensely muscled back, the result felt transgressive, electric with danger.
All these performances, from Le Monastère’s intimate cabarets to the Cirque du Soleil big top, fall under the umbrella of contemporary circus. That is the catchall term that Leroux applies to the genre’s avant-garde. “It is an acrobatics-based, often thematic but not necessarily dramaturgically driven spectacle which essentially reposes on virtuosity,” he said. Though that virtuosity can be acrobatic, it also extends to clowning, contortion and dance. Often, performers blend astonishing feats with theatrical techniques. Lions, tigers and bears are history.
If Montréal’s contemporary circus can feel like a purely creative outpouring, some also point to structural elements helping to keep all those sculpted acrobats aloft. “The big subject of this conversation, when you’re talking about the difference between American circus and Canadian circus, is that Canada is a socialized democracy,” said Gypsy Snider, a 7 Doigts cofounder, choreographer and former acrobat. “There is actual money for the arts, and society’s relationship to art and creativity is a pillar, just like health care is a pillar, just like education is a pillar.”
After starting 7 Doigts as a nonprofit in 2002, Snider and her cofounders worked to gain recognition for circus arts on provincial and federal levels, opening doors to increased grant funding. (Such recognition has been slower to arrive in the United States; it was only in the past decade that the National Endowment for the Arts added circus to its listed arts grant categories.)
Such investment happens locally, too. “We decided to build a whole circus arts district, just to bring circus to the public,” said Julie Fournier, the director of marketing at TOHU, which bills itself as “a laboratory for sustainable development through culture.” Along with the National Circus School and Cirque du Soleil, TOHU headquarters are in the Cité des Arts du Cirque — the City of Circus Arts — a campus in the Saint-Michel neighborhood north of downtown. TOHU’s centerpiece is an extraordinary performance space whose 360-degree modular stage was purpose-built for circus.
“The doors are tall enough for a giraffe and wide enough for an elephant,” noted Lysandre Chartrand, a tour guide at TOHU who showed me around on a recent visit. (Shortly after TOHU opened, Chartrand said, non-domesticated animals were banned at regional circuses, so no giraffes or elephants have tested those roomy dimensions.) Lining the walls of the circular performance space is the free, long-running exhibition “GOING FULL CIRCUS! The great adventure of circus arts in Québec,” which features ephemera and relics from the collection of circus arts historian Pascal Jacob. Highlights include props from an early Cirque du Soleil production and a colorful clown costume from the beloved Québécois television show “Sol et Gobelet,” which premiered in 1968.
It’s on the TOHU stage that the Montréal Complètement Cirque festival will kick off this summer, with the July 5 North American premiere of The Pulse, a show from Australian circus company Gravity & Other Myths that brings together 24 acrobats and 36 Catalan singers from the Orfeó Català girls’ choir. The Pulse is one of 12 indoor shows scheduled for the 11-day festival, which starts in earnest on July 6 at venues across the city. Another hotly anticipated creation is Dirty Laundry, an 18-and-older burlesque drag queen cabaret presented in Espace St-Denis by Australian collective Briefs Factory. At the same venue, beloved Québécois circus troupe Le Cirque Alfonse will be staging Barbu, an “electro trad cabaret” that evokes a 19th-century fairground as a tribute to Montréal’s own circus history. (If you’re planning to watch multiple ticketed shows at the festival, you can save money by purchasing a discounted passport that gains you access to anywhere from three to six events.)
But the circus festival goes beyond ticketed shows. “The street is full of live performance art, so you don’t have to pay — you get to have a circus performance in front of you,” TOHU’s Fournier said.
Free, outdoor events will take place throughout Montréal. A 52-foot “giant” will preside over Place Ville Marie from July 7 through 30, a roughly humanoid steel structure that serves as a backdrop and mobile scaffold for twice-daily performances of the acrobatic show GIANT by Montréal’s own Cirque Éloize. Each day from 5:30 to 11 p.m. during the circus festival, 30 free performances will unfold along the Latin Quarter’s rue Saint-Denis. On Saint-Denis’ Place Pasteur is the pop-up Cirqu’Easy bar, where a small stage hosts Hula-Hooping, contortionism and the Cyr wheel; bartenders moonlight as diabolo jugglers and Chinese pole performers.
Circus might be big business in Montréal, but the genre still centers on scenes like these, moments that can feel loose and strange and beautiful. Many Montréal circus insiders say that of all the circus festival’s events, it’s the free-to-all street performances that best capture the city’s creative spirit and inclusiveness. They’re an immersion in contemporary circus led by the artists themselves, without the confines of elaborate stage shows and art direction.
“The energy at night becomes very, very frivolous,” Fournier said. “It’s really a free space … That’s the idea of the circus. Everyone is welcome.”
Cirque du Soleil Big Top, Quai Jacques-Cartier, Montréal, cirquedusoleil.com/echo
Montréal Complètement Cirque, July 6 to 16, montrealcompletementcirque.com/en
TOHU, 2345 rue Jarry Est, Montréal, tohu.ca/en
Les 7 Doigts de la Main, 7fingers.com/shows
Le Monastère, 1439 rue Saint-Catherine Ouest, Montréal, le-monastere.ca/en/home-en
Cirque Éloize, cirque-eloize.com/en/shows-tickets
The original print version of this article was headlined “Circus City | In Montréal, the greatest show on Earth looks a little different”
This article appears in The Québec Issue.
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