The Cirque’s Secret Weapon : Famed Montreal Troupe Has Mr. Sniff, and a Nose for Street Players With Big Top Talent

Nothing could be further from the grim reality of the Persian Gulf War than the beautiful fantasy of Cirque du Soleil, which opens Friday at the South Coast Plaza parking lot in Costa Mesa.

Yet during a recent afternoon in San Diego, where the Montreal-based circus played earlier this month on its current North American tour, staff carpenter Peter Le Blanc was constructing a can non-like missile launcher behind the blue-and-yellow Big Top tent.

The launcher, designed along the lines of an old Prussian artillery piece rather than a Patriot battery, could become oper able in time to protect South Coast Plaza by firing a droop-nosed Everyman missile called Mr. Sniff, if not on opening night, within a week of it.

“I’m not supposed to talk about it,” said Le Blanc, hinting cryptically that Mr. Sniff’s ballistic plans cannot be predicted with any more accuracy than a Scud missile’s and might well pose a danger to shoppers and circus-goers alike.

In the artists’ rehearsal tent later that day, I caught up with Geoffrey Hoyle, the British-born creator of Mr. Sniff, who was getting ready to practice some of his most dexterous ground moves with a battered bowler hat. I asked him about the launcher.

“If (Gen.) H. Norman Schwarzkopf calls to say he needs a secret weapon,” Hoyle replied, “Mr. Sniff may be it, although I think not. He is an anti-heroist.”

The implication was that Mr. Sniff’s trajectory might not carry him beyond the cannon’s lip, much less across the circus ring. Without Mr. Sniff’s huge proboscis on his face, moreover, Hoyle seemed no threat to anyone. His pale, round eyes had an innocent gaze. His voice was gentle.

But that is not to say he could not become dangerous. Put him in clown costume at center stage and he turns into what he termed “a human bomb,” more than ready to blow up pride and property.

Hoyle, a former student of Parisian mime master Etienne Decroux, has been a theatrical explosive for years in the San Francisco Bay Area (where he lives) and, more recently, at the La Jolla Playhouse in “A Man’s a Man,” “Feast of Fools” and “Don Quixote de la Jolla.”

“My interests lie in the anarchistic elements of the fool’s role,” said Hoyle, who joined the circus tour in San Diego as the clown soloist replacing David Shiner. “I really don’t want the character of Mr. Sniff to get soft or pretty. I want to keep on the edge of risk, not to mention a certain amount of reality, because laughter comes in this situation from breaking taboos.

“If I go into the crowd and I take someone’s clothes off or I mess with someone’s possessions, that’s a huge taboo, especially in America,” he added. “People see the risk. They recognize it as something they probably would like to do themselves. So I’m enacting their unconscious desire. That has been a historical attribute of the clown from way back in primitive ritual.”

Cirque du Soleil does not originate quite that far back. But Gilles Ste-Croix, who helped found the circus in 1984 and is its casting director, admitted that he, too, wanted Hoyle “to really rock the public.” At first, though, Ste-Croix wondered just how daring Mr. Sniff would be.

Hoyle came in as a replacement on only 24 hours’ notice (because Shiner had exercised an option to return to Europe) and, thus, had no time to adjust to the rhythm or the atmosphere of the show. By his second performance, however, Ste-Croix needn’t have wondered.

“Geoff got hold of a lady’s purse,” he recalled in French-accented English. “He went through that purse like a scaven ger. He took the money, the credit cards, the car keys, the old Kleenex. The lady was really embarrassed.”

The casting director, a former stilt walker who at age 41 calls himself the “grandfather” of the troupe, noted further that Hoyle provides a raw counterpoint to the slick beauty of “Nouvelle Experience,” as this edition of the circus is titled. But, above all, the clown soloist serves as an essential link to the troupe’s theatrical roots in street performance.

“We knew with our first edition that we had something different from the traditional circus,” said Ste-Croix, who was sipping an espresso on the terrace of the artists’ canteen after a tasty lunch (this circus travels with its own chef). “It wasn’t the fact that we don’t have animals. It was the way we present the acts. We are from the streets. We brought the essence of that into the tent.

“If you see a performer in the street, even a simple juggler, there is some kind of theatrical approach,” he said. “In the early days, we presented each act that way. Then we refined it into a thematic style. ‘Nouvelle Experience’ is our most developed production in that respect.”

Certainly it is larger than ever, despite the relative intimacy of a one-ring circus. This edition is traveling with 39 performers, 61 crew members, 58 trailers and more than 600 tons of equipment. The new Big Top tent--custom-made in France for more than $750,000--still takes only a day to erect, but now accomodates 2,500 people (750 more than before).

In fact, what began as a risky enterprise with a $1-million grant from the Quebec provincial government has turned into a huge success, commercially and artistically. This year the circus’s worldwide budget totals about $16 million, with only a tiny fraction coming from government funds as a form of “symbolic sponsorship,” Ste-Croix said.

Daily preparations for the show can be both intense and deceptively casual. An afternoon spent wandering the circus grounds, as the troupe went through its usual backstage activities, gave the impression of a rather democratic family of performers who truly appeared to be enjoying their life on the road.

Nobody was more spirited, for instance--nor more different from the role he plays--than Vladimir Kehkaial, a 29-year-old aerialist from the Ukraine with a flowing mane of jet-black hair. In the show he flies virtually naked on leather straps like a haunting figure out of the Icarus legend, as spectral and flamboyant an emblem for this “circus of the sun” as any performer on the tour.

The only hint of Kehkaial’s aerial grace as he careened around the circus grounds on roller-skates for more than an hour was an apparently miraculous ability to avoid bodily injury to himself and others. After diving through alleys between trailers, climbing stairways at breakneck speed and caroming off people like a pinball, he finally took a break for a cigarette.

“When I was 10, I study ice skates,” he said. “Here no ice. So I do this. Is good. Weather is good. I like.”

A former coal miner, Kehkaial said he became a circus performer in the Soviet Union while in his mid-20s. He worked his way up to “the straps,” an aerial style developed by the Chinese, but became a soloist for the first time last year in Canada with Cirque du Soleil after Ste-Croix discovered him in Moscow.

“I try to make solo three years there, and nobody believe me,” he said. “Now I make solo here and they say, ‘Vladimir, come back.’ I don’t want go. I like American public. In Soviet Union, I have no friend, no money. I like bring my mother here. All her life she fix rails for train. Is harder work than coal mine.”

Kehkaial stubbed out his cigarette and examined the blue, cloudless sky. A pennant and three flags--representing the United States, Canada and the province of Quebec--fluttered in the wind above the Big Top tent.

“California is good,” he said. “I like.”

Then he was off skating again, pretending the San Diego asphalt was as smooth as Ukrainian ice.

In the meantime, the four teen-age contortionists featured in the show were busy studying algebra under the tutelage of Robert Ballard at a nearby classroom trailer.

“They must pass the regular school exams at the end of the year just like everyone else,” said Ballard, a 27-year-old teacher from Montreal who joined the tour in April. “So they have to study hard.”

Isabelle Chasse, who is 14, knew that perhaps too well. She looked up from her algebra textbook and groaned.

“I really don’t like this subject,” she said, then tucked her head back down and resumed writing mathematical equations in her notebook.

In a troupe with a profusion of exotic acts dominated by Canadians but drawing many players from different parts of the world--among them Polish acrobats, French trapeze fliers and Flounes (a species of clown), and Soviet balancing artists--the purest home-grown product of Cirque du Soleil is the contortionist team.

Each of the four girls--Chasse, Jinny Jacinto, Laurence Racine and Nadine Binette--trained in gymnastics and contortion at Montreal’s National Circus School, but none had contemplated turning professional until Cirque du Soleil President Guy Laliberte convinced their parents they could succeed as an act.

After studying for a year with a celebrated Chinese contortion teacher, they represented the troupe at the international Circus of Tomorrow competition in Paris in January, 1990. There they won the gold medal for artists up to 14 years of age, besting even the top-rated Chinese team. Three months later, they joined the “Nouvelle Experience” tour.

‘It’s like a dream for me,” said Jacinto, who will turn 15 in August. “. . . I worked hard to be here. It doesn’t come just like that.”

Indeed not. After four hours of academic classes, which let out by midafternoon, Jacinto and her three cohorts took an hour’s break and then spent two hours training.

As showtime approached, activity also intensified in the Big Top. A pair of “Russian bar” fliers tuned up their dazzling somersaults. Choreographer Debra Brown put a cadre of blue-suited acrobats through precision dance steps to heighten their impersonation of corporate automatons.

At the same time, artistic director Franco Dragone was reshaping a trampoline number yet to be inserted into the show because it had not reached the level of excitement that he wanted. Then, for the better part of an hour, the French-speaking Dragone and four of the acrobats sat at the perimeter of the ring and frankly assessed what was wrong.

One of the issues involved Philippe Chartrand, the world champion on the high bar at the 1983 World University Games and captain of the Canadian gymnastic team at the 1984 and 1988 Olympics. The number used to feature the 27-year-old athlete leaping from the trampoline to the high bar. But he was not hired to perform that stunt in the show this year.

“It was a very exciting moment, and they miss it now,” said Chartrand. “So they want it back. I don’t mind. Only I don’t want to do two passes on the high bar. . . .I don’t want to injure myself. I have 300 shows to do this year, and I want to do them all.”

Although the reshaping of the trampoline number was left unresolved, the discussion between the acrobats and Dragone was typical of both the troupe’s seriousness and its open informality.

“Behind the scenes it is very democratic here,” Chartrand said. “We are heard as artists, and we listen as artists. We make decisions to see if something works. If not, we find another solution.

“The question of who will be a star, all that la-la-la , sometimes gets into the air. But when it does, we deal with it, because the whole concept of Cirque du Soleil is that there is no star. We are a unified company, and that is what makes it so good.”

Outside the Big Top, dusk had already begun to fall. In little more than an hour, the tent would fill with spectators about to be galvanized not by particular stars--true to Chartrand’s word--but by an entire constellation of performers.

What: Cirque du Soleil, “Nouvelle Experience.”

When: Opens Friday, Feb. 22, and continues through March 7 (but is expected to be extended). Show times are Tuesdays to Fridays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 4:30 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays at 1 and 5 p.m.

Where: Costa Mesa, in the parking lot of South Coast Plaza (near Saks).

Whereabouts: Take the Bristol Street exit off the San Diego Freeway.

Wherewithal: $12.50 to $33.50 for adults and $6 to $21.50 for children at Thursday, Friday and Saturday evening performances. All other performances are $12.50 to $31.50 for adults and $6 to $19.50 for children. (The opening-night performance on Friday, Feb. 22, is $50 for reserved seats and $100 for preferred reserved seats--a benefit for the Laguna Art Museum, the Newport Harbor Art Museum, South Coast Repertory and the Orange County Performing Arts Center.)

Where to call: (714) 549-2331 or (714) 740-2000.