A circus with no animals and a plot. That was the whole bet, and it worked.
Born in 1984 in Baie-Saint-Paul, Quebec, out of a troupe of stilt-walking street performers led by Guy Laliberté and Gilles Ste-Croix. Home base: Montreal. The recipe, “contemporary circus”: characters, a story, live music and acrobatics at the very top level. It grew into a giant (thousands of employees, a billion dollars a year, over 100 million spectators, big tops on tour plus resident shows in Las Vegas).
Then 2020 happened. Every show closed at once, the company went into bankruptcy protection and came out months later owned by its creditors. A reminder that even the sun can have a very bad year.