CSQ | C-Suite Quarterly: I faced a steep curve trying to learn the business when I started at Cirque du Soleil. By the fall of 2001, about ten months after I arrived, it was clear the company was facing an existential crisis triggered by the departure of its top director, Franco Dragone. After fifteen years of doing things a certain way—Dragone directing new productions, with oversight by company founder Guy Laliberté—we suddenly had to develop a new way to create our shows.
4 comments:
I think this article is a testament to the interdisciplinary ingenuity of theatre makers. This article was written by a member of the board of Cirque du Soleil, talking about how the company had to shift directions after they lost their top director and creative force behind the company. Instead of just hiring someone new to fill this position, they instead decided that their show-creation process would involve outside creative directors from other industries while using Cirque veterans who understood the internal operations of the company to get these shows from vision to reality. This worked spectacularly, creating the golden age of Cirque shows that inspire people across the globe. The main point of this article is one that a lot of theatre people have yet to grasp: there is a need for both new ideas and long-term experience, and that when both of these aspects are blended together it creates entertainment magic.
If I understood the article correctly, I was surprised to see how reliant they had become on the one director, switching them up makes sense and I wouldn’t have expected them to be functioning to that way, but then I realized I had forgotten that was how my high school had been run, one director and artistic head for every show. It probably does happen more than I think, especially in some smaller companies but apparently also in larger very niche and specialized fields as well. I think its easy to jump back to a conversation that has been had numerous time, people who work in theatre have this broad array of interests and backgrounds, especially in terms of artistic construction and how they approach building things or costumes of electronic systems, and there more likely that not is a way to do something that you do not know nad have not considered that someone else has.
Doesn't this make you kind of happy that you decided to get an arts degree at an arts school? I don't know, a lot of people love to make fun of getting a degree in theatre or anything creative when in reality, it's not just about the practicality or the hard skills that you get out of a job, but maybe it's about thinking differently and how to turn that thinking into a process. Maybe we can get rid of the idea that wanting to study something that isn't accounting or business is admirable and could be sustainable. I'm not saying everyone at a standard 9-5 desk job isn't imaginative or can't do out of the box thinking, but what I'm saying and what I think this article is trying to help supplement is that arts people can be marketable not just for their deliverables but their innovation and originality.
I really love how this article highlights the potential of new talent to revitalize a production company, or hell, anything really. I have always loved about theatre the tendency for designers, TD's and managers to take something completely unrelated to theatre and find some crazy new use for it that then goes back out into the world for the rest of the non-entertainment industries to use. It brings joy to that part of me that simply wants to figure out what can you use for this job that might not be standard? Or maybe we don't have/can't afford the standard, what can we make do with?
On the note of redoing your entire process, I've noticed that wherever I've done theatre, there's always been a specific way that they've done things for the longest time. My high school had a single director and the same parent volunteer TD for my entire time there, and my first university had the same faculty doing the same jobs for each production (minus the director) each time. You tend to get used to it, so when you bring in another person to the mix, it gets a bit weird finding a way forward. I love seeing it when it works though, and I love the story of this article having a good ending. It's rather inspiring!
Post a Comment