Behind the lines with an army in spandex

With 21 shows on the go at any one time, Cirque du Soleil is a global phenomenon. Ahead of its return to Dublin, ROSITA BOLANDgoes backstage to find out how its acrobats fly through the air with the greatest of ease

BACKSTAGE BEFORE showtime at Cirque du Soleil's Saltimbanco, in Glasgow, and it's hard to know where to look first. At the two men practising their astonishing act, which involves one balancing serenely upside down on the head of the other? At the wardrobe department, where 2,500 items, including shoes, masks, wigs and hats, are washed, repaired, counted and rotated each show day? At the trio casually standing on each other's shoulders, with the highest one's skull just shy of an iron girder?

Cirque du Soleil, which is based in Montréal, started up in 1984 as a 73-strong troupe. It now employs more than 5,000 people around the world, and there are usually 21 shows running at any one time in various cities internationally, including resident Big Top shows in Las Vegas, Orlando and Tokyo. There will shortly also be one in Los Angeles, at the Kodak Theatre, where the Oscars are held. You could say Cirque du Soleil is a kind of touring aerial Riverdance.

It has been in Ireland before, but this is the first time it will be bringing Saltimbanco, a show loosely based on the theme of the city. In Italian, Saltimbancomeans something along the lines of "to jump on a bench", which is a rather wonderfully abstract name for what is really a circus with no animals and many skilled acrobats.

Among the many clusters of people backstage, there is a group of 11 sitting on practice mats, all staring intently at a huge television screen. This one group represents, variously, France, Brazil, Australia, Russia, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Belarus. Walking along the side of the mats, I wonder what they’re watching with such obvious concentration. Some run-up programme to the World Cup? But the people on the mats are not watching television at all. They’re watching a DVD of the previous night’s performance, analysing where they did well on bungees, Chinese poles and trapeze, and where they could have done better. They do this every day. It lends a whole new meaning to the phrase “performance review”.

Maxime Charbonneau, the resident publicist with this particular touring show, stops beside an innocuous-seeming structure of wood and metal. It looks a little like a giant hanging flowerbox, although one with neither earth nor flowers in it. This is the “Russian swing”, the key element in the most dangerous of all the evening’s acts.

Charbonneau explains that three performers will get into this contraption and swing it until it’s close to going over the bar in a loop. At that point, the end person will transform into what’s called in the business “a flier”. The flier will then, without harness or safety line, soar backwards up to 30ft in the air and land either on a bar held high in the air or on the shoulders of the apex of a human pyramid. If these are missed, the flier will be caught by one of four people always in attendance.

“This is the most dangerous act in the show because of the height and speed that the performer is being thrown in the air. It’s a big precision number to come come down from that height,” Charbonneau points out, needlessly.

Tonight's flier is Fanny Laneuville Castonguay, a slight firework of grace and muscle from Quebec. She sits in an enviably unselfconscious yoga position on a rigid plastic chair, with her legs tucked up under her. Castonguay trained and competed for 17 years as a gymnast for the Canadian national team. When she was six, she saw Saltimbanco, and announced to her mother the same day that one day she too would join the circus. Fifteen years later, she was spotted by a Cirque du Soleil scout at a gymnastics competition and asked if she would like to consider trying out for the company.

No matter how many times a performer leaps from the Russian swing in a harness, there comes a time when they have to leap for the first time without it. What was this experience like? “I got scared,” Castonguay admits. “I completely missed the bar the first time without the harness. I fell. So I had to convince myself I could do it. The next time I did it! After that, there were times I fell, but now when I fall, I know I’m able to do it. I get stressed but not scared. It’s a big teamwork. I know I have four guys I depend on to catch me if I fall.”

IT HAS BEEN two months since Castonguay flew off the Russian swing and landed on the bar. She hasn’t done this act since then, but she’s going to perform it tonight.

Running even this one touring arena show is a massive production: 16 trucks, 10 washing machines and driers, 300 meals served up on site every day. Each performer has up to five costume changes, and it takes 90 minutes each night to apply their make-up. The highly technical acts must be practised rigorously and frequently. It’s like running a small, extremely fit army, albeit one usually dressed in spandex.

It’s showtime, and the spectacle is anchored by a New York ringmaster with surely the most appropriate name in the business: James Clowney. Clowney is his real name. At seven, he went on a special after-school circus programme for disadvantaged children, and loved it so much that the circus became his profession. Like the best ringmasters, Clowney manages the running of the show so cleverly you’d hardly notice – for example, he is always subtly monitoring the safety of whichever performer is currently airborne.

Saltimbancois bookended by the traditional big opening and closing group numbers of circuses, but it's what comes in between that the Glasgow audience has been waiting for: the famous acrobatics. Ever wondered what a Chinese pole is? Or rather, three Chinese poles? Well, they're vertical, obviously, and each one appears to come with about 100 gravity-defying acrobats attached, who run up and down them like monkeys, frequently leaping insouciantly from one to another.

The house troupe form a quartet who combine bungee-jumping with trapeze work. They bounce up and down from floor to rafters with terrifying speed and accuracy, swinging on to trapeze bars from a distance as if their hands are magnetised. It’s a hugely crowd-pleasing act.

There is also the most talented clown I’ve ever seen, Amo Gulinello, who initiates some beautifully inventive, clever and genuinely funny interaction with the audience. Note to Dubliners: beware if you are a plump man, sitting anywhere near the front of the stage.

By the time the Russian swing comes out on stage, the audience know from the music and the numbers on stage that something especially complicated is coming up. Three performers swing the structure higher and higher. It’s a kind of huge catapult, whose missile is acrobat Castonguay. She flies into the air for the first time in two months – and her feet miss the bar. She tumbles into the waiting arms of her catchers far below, and in a moment, is back on the swing for a second try. The audience watches silently as she flies a second time. This time, she lands perfectly.

Cirque du Soleil performs Saltimbancoat the O2 in Dublin on July 7-11 and July 13-18. See cirquedusoleil.com.