Cirque du Soleil started here, in a small Quebec town of about seven thousand people on the north shore of the St. Lawrence.
Baie-Saint-Paul is a Charlevoix village three hundred kilometres east of Montreal, wedged between the river and the Laurentian foothills. Painters have been coming for a century for the light. In the early 1980s, a different kind of artist arrived — young street performers passing through in the summer, staying at an inn called Le Balcon Vert run by a man named Gilles Ste-Croix.
Two of them stayed. Guy Laliberté, a fire-breather from Europe. Daniel Gauthier, who took charge of the business side. The three of them decided to make a troupe.
They practised on the wharves.
The stilt walk to Quebec City
In the spring of 1980, Ste-Croix decided the troupe needed money. So he walked. Ninety kilometres along the Côte-de-Beaupré, on stilts, from Baie-Saint-Paul to Quebec City. He was walking for the province’s attention. Some of his friends thought he was crazy. Some of them walked beside him for stretches.
The province took notice. It funded them.
That summer, they took their first show on the road as Les Échassiers de Baie-Saint-Paul — the Stiltwalkers of the Bay. They toured small Quebec towns. They came back broke anyway.
The hockey rinks
That winter, they needed money. So they took a small regional grant and attached their stilts to hockey skates, performing during intermissions at small-town rinks. The fans did not know what to make of them.
They got paid.
La Fête Foraine (1982)
In 1982, the troupe held a festival in Baie-Saint-Paul. La Fête Foraine. It was modelled on the medieval street fairs of Europe — where the saltimbanques, the travelling acrobats and jugglers, once performed. Stilt-walking lessons in the morning, juggling at noon, fire-breathing at dusk. Some of the locals complained. Most of them came anyway.
The festival ran every summer.
The Cirque du Soleil (1984)
By 1983, the troupe had a new idea: a real circus, with a big top. The following summer would mark the 450th anniversary of Jacques Cartier’s arrival at Gaspé — and the Quebec government was looking for a flagship act. It agreed to fund the circus with one and a half million dollars.
They named it the Cirque du Soleil. The name had come to Guy Laliberté on a beach in Hawaii, watching the sun set into the Pacific.
The first show under the Cirque du Soleil name premiered in Gaspé on June 16, 1984. It came home to Baie-Saint-Paul in mid-July. Forty-two years later, the Cirque du Soleil performs in Las Vegas, Tokyo, and Macau. Its headquarters are still in Quebec.
Le Festif! today
The Fête Foraine that the founders held in Baie-Saint-Paul every summer eventually became something else. It became Le Festif!, which runs each July — four days of music and street performance in the same village where three young men decided, forty-plus years ago, to make a troupe.
The children of the stiltwalkers still juggle on the wharves.
Read more about Gilles Ste-Croix | People of Small Towns
Le Phare by René Derouin
A monumental sculpture, Le Phare, was created by internationally renowned artist René Derouin, in tribute to Cirque du Soleil.
This 10-metre-high metal structure (aluminum, wood and ceramic) holds several hundred ceramic figures on 25 rings stacked one on top of the other, each layer essentially representing a year in the Cirque’s evolving history.
It can be admired at Hôtel Germain Charlevoix, next to the train platform.
Photo: Jeangagnon, Wikimedia Commons
