It's a defining constant in Cirque du Soleil's work. Think of Denis Lacombe slaughtering the 1812 Overture, or "Saltimbanco's" Baroques greeting an audience member like a long-lost brother, then throwing him out of the tent. Be irreverent. Think of tiny Amélie, lifting Eric over her head in one swift beat of the tango. Be a superwoman. Think of Vladimir in the nearly-altogether, floating on the sweet gasps of a hundred pulse-quickened young ladies. Be sensual. Death itself turned into a comedy routine. Be sacrilegious. Benny le Grand arguing with Michel Barrette while absentmindedly soaking the audience with a garden hose. René Bazinet trapped in a flooding outhouse. Be obnoxious. Be stupid. Be sweet. Be nasty. Be masculine, feminine, androgynous. Be amazing.

In truth, Cirque du Soleil couldn't stop being audacious if it tried. Audacity is far too deeply ingrained. From Gilles' historic stiltwalkathon to Guy Caron's mustache to Guy Laliberté's go-for-broke gambling spirit, it's been there from the beginning. It's stitched into the fabric of the chapiteau.

The greatest audacity is the riskiest. In 1987, Guy Laliberté bet everything on that first trip to Los Angeles. Negotiations with the L.A. Arts Festival had been spotty. Guy felt the Festival wasn't prepared to share Cirque's enormous financial risk in traveling to the States. So they decided to go it alone, making Cirque a "fringe" event, the Festival providing only ticketing services, promotion and a listing in their catalogue. It was also agreed that Cirque du Soleil would do the opening of the Festival. Getting to L.A. cost Cirque every penny it had: if Cirque failed, Guy knew he'd have to sell the tent just to get the artists home. Audacity won.

Audacity. Audacity. Audacity. Use the word often enough, it turns into gibberish, a meaningless sneeze. What the Sam Hill does it mean? Franco thinks a minute. Audacity is rejecting everything you have done before, he says.

Even if it worked.

Where does it come from? As Gilles said, it's partly a French Canadian thing. (But Franco and Debbie aren't Québécois, and they'll match anyone for audacity.) Audacity also has a lot to do with youth and rebellion, the same spirit that keeps the Cirque so fresh-faced. Franco says Audacity comes from rage; it's his personal war on indifference.

Has audacity ever failed them? Only once, and it was a brutal lesson. In 1989, faced with the stunning success of their debut tour, the team played it safe. While Guy and the core team experimented with new ideas in Montreal, a second group mounted the '88-89 tour. The result was a flat re-staging of the original. It offered everything the '87 show had: beauty, music, colour...everything, in fact, but audacity. The public didn't seem to mind, and only a few critics noticed, but the creative team was aghast. Guy remembers it as his most agonizing year.

Back to zero, they screamed. Reject everything you have done before, even if it worked. The rules you broke and remade, break and remake again. Dream, desire, demand a Nouvelle Expérience. A sigh of relief when at last you succeed. Now each time the team begins work on a new edition of Cirque they burn the old show to the ground and let the new one rise like Phoenix from the ashes.

So what's the point? Why torture yourself, re-invent the wheel, over and over? Risk failure when it would be so simple to duplicate success?

Three reasons.

ONE: To challenge old notions, to force new ways of thinking. Can't afford animals? Who needs them. Want to show the planet there's another way to create a show? Go ahead. Let the conventional wisdom tell you why it can't be done. When the paradigm shift hits, just smile and shrug while the Conventional Wisdom tells you why it had to work. Gilles speaks of the Cirque's école de pensée, a "school of thought" like the Russian Ballet, Impressionism, the Bauhaus: a method of creation that others may follow.

TWO: Because it works. When you leave Cirque you wear a different set of senses. The show rips away your blinders, forces you to touch raw emotions and feelings you'd thought long since atrophied. Go to a restaurant, look at a chair and there's Vassili, teetering on seven of them, spinning that birthday cake for your perpetual rebirth. Try not to think of penguins the next time you see a flock of briefcase-toting businessmen. Puzzled by a foreign language? Hear the enchanted dialect of René's phoneme lyrics and understand.

THREE: Because, when you get right down to it, they simply don't have any choice. It's where they live: Auda City. They're change junkies. It's why they can't stop prowling the globe for new ideas, new talent. Gilles says It's no good sitting on your steak, by which he probably means resting on your laurels. Franco is more vehement: If there's one thing I'm afraid of, it's the pattern, repetition. Not just the show can be repetitious. Also the process can be.

So their latest project is to rethink the process itself, to reinvent reinvention. The future lies in Montreal: a former railroad shed, recently acquired, give the team a vast working space for all the wonders they can possibly imagine. Now, instead of continually importing major acts from Russia, China and the like, the Cirque can, if it desires, develop even the most elaborate routines from first spark to final tumble.

Go then. Be audacious, or anything you please. Reinvent the planet, if it wouldn't be too much trouble. In the end it's really about discovery. Because audacity is just a smartass version of the truth.