La Nouba | All Access
photography by Chris Garrison
By day, they walk among us like ordinary mortals. They lead suburban lives in suburban homes, eating dinner with their loved ones, watching movies on DVD, reading Nicholas Sparks novels, doing the same things any one of us might do.
Ah, but wait until evening. By sunset, Shoichi Kasuo, Justin Osbourne and Karina Silva undergo a remarkable transformation and begin doing the deeds of dreams: flying, somersaulting, moving at superhuman speed. These astonishing tasks are all in a day’s work to these members of an elite team, the circus artists who perform in Cirque du Soleil’s La Nouba.
Silva, for instance, has two dogs, a fish tank and a fiancé who also performs in La Nouba. “I have a good life,” she says. “I like to walk the dogs and my fiancé likes to cook. Plus at work we’re these crazy people doing crazy things.”
La Nouba (which translates roughly to “to party”) opened at Downtown Disney 13 years ago this month, December 23, 1998. Since then, more than 8 million people have seen one of the show’s 6,100-plus performances.
Working with a show like La Nouba is very different from a typical theater production, says artistic director Daniel Ross. “If you’re working with a ballet company, you’re dealing with ballet dancers,” he says. “But here I work with so many different kinds of performers—acrobats, gymnasts, clowns, character actors and musicians.”
Cirque du Soleil performers come from all over the world and from a variety of backgrounds, he adds. Some, like Osbourne and Kasuo, are competitive athletes-turned performers. Others, like Silva, come from a long line of circus artists.
Osbourne has been with the La Nouba cast from day one. He is one of La Cons (The Nuts), a group of four white-clad clowns whose onstage work incorporates everything from pantomime and modern dance to gymnastics, which is where Osbourne’s career began.
“I planned to go to a university and get a degree in musical theater,” he says. “But I was a gymnast my whole life.” He never made it to the university, however—he joined Cirque du Soleil at age 18 while still in high school.
At the time, Cirque du Soleil was still fairly new. Osbourne hadn’t heard of it, but a roommate encouraged him to audition. By then, he was on the Canadian National Tumbling Team, winning national championships and working his way to the top of the world rankings.
However, he says, competitive gymnasts tend to have fairly short careers, most lasting only into their mid-20s. “So what do you do when your competitive career is done—get an office job?” he wondered. “I was happy to learn there was something out there that would let me use my talents to earn a living.”
When he came home after three days of auditions, Osbourne felt the producers were interested in him. “But when my mom asked how auditions went, I fibbed,” he says. “I told her, ‘Not well,’ because I thought she wouldn’t let me go.”
When he was invited to join Mystère in Las Vegas, however, she was supportive. “She cried in her room for a half hour,” he says. “But then she walked out and said, ‘Let’s do this.’” Osbourne finished his school work early and flew back to Canada for his high school graduation.
Karina Silva is an aerial ballet artist who came to La Nouba in 2006. She grew up in a Brazilian circus family, however. “I’m sixth generation,” she says. “All my family worked in the circus.”
She has brothers working with Cirque du Soleil, and one of them encouraged her to audition. At the time, Silva was working with a traditional circus in Germany; she sent in a video and was invited to audition in London. “Two months later they asked me to go to Canada for training,” she says.
She had always worked in a traditional circus with animals and the other usual circus acts. “But you see a show like this, and you start to dream, wanting to be a part of it,” she says. “To become part of this show was so exciting.”
Shoichi Kasuo came to La Nouba in July 2010, taking time off from graduate school where he is studying Sports Science. He came to the show to jump rope. However, to say Kasuo skips rope is like saying Albert Einstein was pretty smart: While technically true, the statement doesn’t begin to convey the significance of what he does.
Cirque du Soleil decided to freshen up the show about a year ago with new acts like a juggler and the rope skippers, Ross explains. At the time, Kasuo was competing in international competitions. “Competitive rope skipping is fascinating
it was like discovering a new language,” Ross says. “And I’ve never seen anyone as fast” as Kasuo.
Originally from Tokyo, Kasuo learned to jump rope 10 years ago while in grade-school in Japan, where it is a popular competitive sport. “In Japan, we do it all the time in school,” he says. “We do it in class—everyone has to do it.”
As a high school senior, he won his class in the Asian Rope Skipping Championship and went on to compete in world championships—he’s ranked sixth in the world. He auditioned by uploading video of himself skipping rope, and was offered the job.
He works alongside another rope skipper, and there are other artists onstage at the time. A choreographer and the artistic director handle the staging, but Kasuo develops the techniques and tricks he does. “I showed what I could do, and they chose from that,” he says.
Competition is different from performance, he adds. A championship comes once per year, so he can focus on preparing for that specific moment. “Here, I have to focus on the show every single day,” he says. “Sometimes it’s tough.”
The rope is very sensitive, he notes. “If I hit the rope, the performance is going to be stopped,” he says. “So I have to be very precise.”
That need for focus and precision highlights a key difference between the roles played by performers in more traditional theater versus those in the circus arts, where rehearsal is an ongoing process.
“It’s like if you’re a musician—if you want to keep your chops, you have to practice every day,” Ross explains. “An acrobat has to keep in form, too, so they train two or three times a week. The juggler practices every day for two hours.”
Besides doing two performances each day, Kasuo spends an hour each day working out with the rope. Osbourne starts his workday about 4:00 p.m. with some cardio or weight training, or maybe some indoor cycling before putting on his makeup.
Silva, whose onstage job in Ballet air et soie (Aerial Ballet in Silk) requires an enormous combination of grace and strength, spends a large part of each day keeping her body up to the task, both so the performance appears effortless and to prevent injuries.
“We do conditioning and training, workshops between shows and all that,” she says. “We have a core class, an ab class, leg class, and special training. There’s a coach in charge of our conditioning, and he makes sure everyone is strong and our bodies are prepared for the show.”
Beyond the need for training and conditioning, however, performers also add to the show’s ongoing artistic development. No two live performances of any show, circus or otherwise, is the same, Ross points out, but that’s even truer of Cirque du Soleil shows, which are allowed to change over time.
“If you saw the opening of “The Lion King” 20 years ago and then saw it today, you’d be seeing essentially the same show—there wouldn’t be many changes in the music or lyrics,” Ross says. “Here, though, we really let the show evolve,” he says, so the La Nouba that opened 13 years ago is different from the La Nouba of today.
“We respect the initial concept,” he says. “But the music morphs and the characters change. We have the performers put a lot of their selves into their characters and find inspiration from that.”
That helps keep the performers engaged during the heavy schedule, Osbourne says. Le Cons “have a lot of artistic freedom onstage,” he says. “There are certain times we have to be in certain places, but what we’re doing at that moment is up to us, so we’re constantly changing the movements and interactions with each other.”
That respect for artistic growth and evolution keeps the creative process alive, Ross says. “There are a lot of magical moments just being with the cast, feeling their sense of the show and seeing how they collaborate,” he says. “And for me, the best moments are when I discover someone can do something I didn’t know they could do.”
“When you’re working with an artist on something for a while you see them nail it—see it just explode into being right in your face—that makes my week,” he says. “Especially when I see them onstage and see the audience react to it.”
The performers agree the audience is a big motivator. “Some days you’re so tired, but then you see the audience, and it gets you going,” Osbourne says. “And if we have a great audience, that guarantees you’re going to have a really good show.”
“I love what I do and I love to feel the energy from the audience,” Silva adds. “It’s so amazing, it’s hard to describe. I get goose bumps every day when the audience applauds.”
