The Early Bird Gets the Role
Red Bird is one of the signature roles in Mystère, featuring prominently in the show’s advertisements and overall visual identity. The character appears throughout the show, struggling against their fate as they repeatedly make fruitless attempts to fly.
When Red Bird was being recast for the first time in 16 years in 2021, Cirque du Soleil received over 70 applications for the role.
Of the 1,300 artists who form the current Cirque du Soleil team, an estimated 35% come from sports disciplines such as rhythmic and acrobatic gymnastics, as well as trampoline, tumbling, diving, synchronized swimming, and urban acrobatic disciplines.
John Maxson, Cirque du Soleil performer, on embodying a character:
“The way you move with it, the way you perform with the costume, with your movements, and everything – then you get the story of the character.”
On how he moves as the Strongman character in “O”:
“I think of it as Atlas. You’ve been holding the weight of the world your whole life, you’re weighed down. The strength isn’t coming from muscle. The strength is just the power of overcoming the weight of the world on you for your whole life. So the way you walk is really heavy, really slow. The way you move is very strained at most times. You portray it that way, not ‘I’m picking up a big weight.’ That doesn’t read.”
Kati Renaud, Senior Artistic Director (Resident Shows Division), on conveying spectacle in Cirque du Soleil productions:
“A lot of ways that Cirque [du Soleil] has been able to [convey spectacle] is through the director, the creative director, and their style, essentially. When Cirque [du Soleil] decides to do a show based on a music artist or a theme, they’re going to do their homework on which director would be best suited to deliver a show based on this. The show is built from there.”
“That’s where it starts. That’s the core of how a storyline or a theme can be delivered with such clarity and with success – [it starts], first and foremost, with who the director is, the design team that the director selects. The costume designer, the set designer, who’s going to be the composer – all of the designers help support that core which is the creative director.”
On athletic performance versus artistic performance:
“There are some similarities and common elements, such as discipline, focus, [and] the mental training. What’s different is the athletes are working on one thing in a competition, which is winning. Winning first place, winning gold – years and years of training for that specific competition or event. Yet, what Cirque [du Soleil] does is we piggyback on that, because the athletes that we shift and shape into artists still require that same focus, discipline, and mental conditioning. What we do often when those athletes come to us is help them with the tools of musicality, stage presence, [and] connecting with the audience. That’s a hard wall to break for some of them, because it’s been so engrained in their training, the technical and skill parts of it, but at Cirque [du Soleil], we still want them to hold onto that, but to add on a more organic, sort-of fuzzy feeling to that – it’s challenging, but that’s the fun part of the job.”