The World's Largest Touring Troupe Has Staged Just Two Shows in 11 Years, and Horses Star in Both

After nearly 2,700 performances in 69 cities across the world's continents, the stage show Cavalia has come to China for the first time. The troupe's founder was one of the founders of Cirque du Soleil, the company once hailed as a miracle.

The show begins.

A few white horses walk onto the stage to the music, pace slowly for a few steps, then stop and stand quietly at the front.

For the next two hours the show mixes horsemanship, acrobatics and circus, without a word of dialogue. The performers, of many nationalities and skin colors, also do traditional acrobatic feats such as human pyramids and tumbling, but the real subject is the exchange between people and horses.

They often ride laps around the arena, and when a horse breaks into a gallop, the rider rises from sitting to standing and dances on its back. As if worried the audience might not find this thrilling enough, some performers drive two or even four horses at once.

The horses come in several colors, mostly white and brown. Walking, running, jumping or performing all kinds of moves, they look completely at ease, just as you might picture a horse that has never felt a rein. They have personalities, too: one forgets to leave the stage when it should, another walks out of step with the rest; some are impatient, run fast and cut in line, while others are not only slow but stumble along.

The performers talk into the horses' ears. Sometimes they play comic scenes together: however hard a performer tries to "persuade" a horse, it pretends it has no wish to leave the stage.

Cavalia presents one of the oldest forms of live performance in the world, but it is also a high-tech show. After the performers and the horses, the huge screen at the back of the stage may be its most important prop.

The scenery on the screen merges with the real horses on stage. Most of the images are landscapes: deserts, starry skies, limestone caves, the sea, green meadows below snowy mountains, flowing rivers... every place, imaginable or not, where a horse might appear. At one point a curtain of water falls across the stage, and when the image of a horse is projected faintly onto it, the animal looks like a unicorn from a fairy tale.

When the second half begins, the screen shows a quiet forest and the music turns fresh and gentle. Performers lead several white horses onto the stage, and as they circle the arena, the lighting mimics sunlight falling through leaves in dappled patches, so the horses seem to be weaving through the woods.

At the climax, a female performer on wires swings high above the stage, tumbling without pause, while horses gallop lap after lap below. The pace is fast, the music stirring, and the mood of the whole arena rises with it.

In the final scene, water slowly seeps up at the front of the stage and forms a shallow pool. The screen switches to woods and broad grassland beneath snowy mountains, and the performers, now in classical costume, ride white horses through the water.

Modern people increasingly live in highly urbanized societies, rarely see animals, and have never even thought of making friends with nature. Go and listen to more of nature's sounds: that is what the show wants to say, Normand Latourelle, founder of Cavalia, told QDaily after the performance.

The Canadian, short and a little stout, with the kind of curly hair Frodo wears in The Lord of the Rings, was calm now; before the show he had been darting around the venue, nervously directing the crew. Decades ago, he and several friends founded Cirque du Soleil, which has since become the most successful performing company in the world.

After nearly 2,700 performances in 69 cities across the world's continents, the Canadian troupe Cavalia has come to China for the first time. Since its founding in 2003, it has staged only two shows. But over 11 years, one unusual element has made Cavalia the world's largest touring troupe: horses.

While many modern troupes have dropped animals to focus on human performers, Cavalia chose horses as its leading cast. Partly this was because Normand Latourelle smelled a business opportunity in horses; partly it was because he saw that a gentle horse could stand as a symbol of nature.

"I founded Cavalia some time after I started work on a large production. It was a big show, and it needed one horse. When that horse came on stage, the audience's attention, which had been on the performers, went entirely to it. That was when I started paying attention to horses," Latourelle said. Horses could draw him bigger audiences, which meant more business.

At the same time, he said, horses are gentle herbivores, beautiful and elegant, and can serve as an artistic image of nature. Cavalia portrays people and horses as companions living in harmony on a journey, and suggests that people and nature can trust each other and become close friends.

"This isn't contrived or formulaic. Nature isn't perfect, and neither are people or horses. If a tree is as straight as a stick, that's actually not so good. When I look at a tree, I like it to bend in all sorts of ways, with branches reaching up or down. Nothing is perfect; that is what nature teaches us. I let the horses and the human performers show their natural, perhaps flawed, side."

Putting on such a show is far from easy. The circus today is very different from the circus of the past, in the form and content of its acts as well as in its venues and technology, and a tour on this scale turns Cavalia into a huge undertaking.

The tent complex Cavalia has put up at the Pudong Equestrian Park consists of nine tents. The largest, the big top where the show is performed, covers more than 2,400 square meters and stands about as tall as a 10-story building. The others serve as a warm-up area, rehearsal space, VIP lounge, equipment room and so on.

When the troupe was founded, the crew needed two weeks to raise the big top to its full height; as the technology improved, that has fallen to ten minutes. But because the main tent uses so much material and is so large, it still takes 12 days to build, and raising it takes 50 people working together.

That is why Cavalia's team is so large. Besides more than 40 performers and musicians from different countries, who perform and train the horses, there are 120 regular staff and 100 local staff hired in each tour city. Some put up the tents and prepare the site so the show runs smoothly; there is also a full traveling logistics team that sets up and maintains the equipment and handles the horses, the gear, and the border paperwork for performers of many nationalities.

During the performance, the backdrop screen is 60 meters wide. Hidden behind it is a platform for the live band, suspended 4 meters in the air, where the musicians accompany the show. To get the live sound right, the troupe uses a special sound system. High technology is also used heavily in the lighting and stage design (the water curtain and changing scenery mentioned above, for instance).

The stage in front of the screen is 50 meters long. In the final scene, when water seeps in and forms a pool, the water is heated and disinfected to make it safer and more comfortable for horses and performers.

Normand Latourelle believes that combining live performance with more modern imagery and art has produced many things that never existed before. Modern circus and live performance are moving in a new direction: art forms are merging, and high technology will be used more often.

That is because today's young people have far more ways of getting information than earlier generations did, and through all kinds of screens they see more of the world. To draw them to the stage, you need creativity and a spirit of innovation; you have to invent.

"A piano was just a piano, but I thought: besides the piano, we have guitar, bass, richly colored images, acrobatics, horses. Why not put them all together and create something that never existed before?" he said.

But he also stressed that when many elements are combined and technology enters a show, you must make sure it serves only to help the 40 people and 40 horses on stage, the living performers, express themselves better, and does not end up constraining them. "All of this is to give the show feeling."

On its world tour, Cavalia brings several dozen horses and nearly 200 people to each country, along with 70 shipping containers holding the horses' feed, the soil and materials for building the arena, and the touring tents. As Latourelle puts it, they practically tour with a theater in tow.

Touring with a troupe this size is a huge challenge in itself. And the top priority is looking after its most essential cast members: the horses.

For Cavalia's visit to China, the hardest problems, for Cavalia and its Chinese partner alike, were getting the horses through customs and caring for them.

Wang Xinya, an investor in Quanjun Culture Communication, the show's operator, told QDaily that Cavalia began approaching Chinese companies about a China tour as early as after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Horses entering or leaving any country must pass strict inspection and quarantine, but because mainland China's quarantine standards for horses differ from those in Europe and the US, a horse that has entered China from abroad finds it very difficult to leave again and return home.

The turning point came in the past two years. In each of the last two years, Shanghai hosted a leg of the Global Champions Tour show-jumping series. As a major international event, it set high inspection and quarantine standards for horses, and it could go ahead only after the relevant national government departments, the Shanghai Entry-Exit Inspection and Quarantine Bureau and the European Commission reached agreement. The event broke the ice in bringing Chinese equestrian sport in line with international practice.

So when Cavalia came to China this time, Cavalia first gained more confidence in its Chinese operator, and the authorities eventually gave the show the green light. Even so, the review of the horses' entry stayed strict. A normal concert can start selling tickets three months in advance; for this show, the import permit for the horses arrived only three weeks before the scheduled premiere, and only then did publicity and ticket sales begin.

Cavalia's two shows, Odysseo and Cavalia, need 70 and 40 horses respectively. The 40 equine performers that came to China with the troupe span 13 breeds, and each plays a role suited to its breed's traits, such as especially well-developed muscles, unusual height or a distinctive coat.

After the premiere, performers who also train the horses took the media and VIP guests to the stables and explained how the horses live on tour and how closely they are cared for.

The stables are spacious. According to the trainers, Cavalia's stables are roomier than other circuses', with each stall sized to its horse so that every animal can stretch its legs, lie flat and rest comfortably. During the day, after training, the horses can go outside to sun themselves; at night the individual stalls are opened up, giving them more room to move freely. The whole stable, its air and ventilation systems, and many of the things the horses use travel with the troupe, so the horses never feel in strange surroundings and live more comfortably.

Outside each horse's stall hangs a nameplate giving its name, breed, the kind of act it excels at and so on. The horses are treated like children. "They can live next door to their best friends and talk through the windows between the stalls, whispering secrets," one trainer said with a smile.

The team's veterinarians and grooms work seven days a week without a break, and some live in the stables. They clean the horses' quarters, bathe them and give them massages. Nutritionists draw up a tailor-made menu for each horse, with feed and nutrient ratios set by its age, breed and needs.

Another curious detail: horses have no feeling in their manes, so they don't notice when the hair gets knocked or snagged and hampers their movement. The troupe therefore employs dedicated groomers to tend the horses' coats until they shine, and even plait them into rows of small braids.

During the show, the horses communicate with the performers effortlessly and work with them in close harmony. In training and in their free time, they play every day with the performers they regularly work with, spending many hours together to build mutual affection.

The show runs in several giant white tents south of the China Pavilion in the Shanghai World Expo Park. From a distance, it looks as if a brand-new village had suddenly sprung up in this modern city. After the show, most of the audience walked out of the tents looking satisfied and relaxed.

That may have eased Normand Latourelle's nerves for a while. He hopes the show moves you. "Some Cirque du Soleil shows feel joyful, and some are darker. But we don't do dark shows. Our shows make people happy."

Scenes from Cavalia

Photos courtesy of Cavalia