Choreographer Debra Brown can claim that more people have seen live performances of her work than have seen that of most better-known choreographers. Brown has worked on every production of the acclaimed Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil since joining the globe-trotting troupe in 1987. Although most of the performers she works with are formally trained as acrobats rather than as dancers (she prefers to call them simply "movers"), the Cirque is almost certainly one of the world's most widely seen touring theatrical productions that feature dance. As many as 2,500,000 people may see its ninth production, Quidam (pronounced "key-dahm"), during its current North American tour.
The rapidly growing Cirque du Soleil entertainment empire might be described as "Ballets Russes for the end of the century." Its innovative combination of New Age-inspired theatricality, avant-garde set design and costuming, intricate lighting effects, live instrumental and vocal music, award-winning choreography, and spectacular physical display must astonish and enchant audiences in much the same way that Diaghilev's company did at the beginning of the century. Cirque can be said to have truly invented the medium of acrobatic dance-theater.
Other individuals create the themes of the various productions and select the assortment of acts, but Brown is responsible for choreographing the awesome physical feats that are the heart of Cirque's appeal. Currently three different shows are being presented on two continents, and by the end of 1998 six productions will be shown on three continents. Each Cirque performance bears Brown's touch in every handstand, somersault, swing, twirl, and gesture.
Brown was born in Brantford, Ontario (near Toronto). Drawn by a compulsion to spring about on her strong legs, she began studying gymnastics at age nine, eventually becoming Brantford city champion and one of the top university-level competitors in Ontario. Her attraction to dance began at an equally tender age. She says that as a young child she choreographed dances to perform for her classmates or at small neighborhood parades. In high school she choreographed the floor exercise routines of virtually all her fellow gymnasts. (Fortuitously, floor exercise and vault were her favorite events.)
Brown's formal dance education began in earnest with Donna Peterson at the University of Western Ontario in 1973, where she was competing as a gymnast, and continued at York University in 1976, where she majored in dance. There she studied Cunningham technique with Sandra Neels, Graham technique with Norrey Drummond, and ballet with Earl Kraul, Grant Strate, and other teachers from National Ballet of Canada in Toronto. Brown remains grateful to Neels and Drummond for spending extra time helping her body shift from gymnastics to dance.
After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from York in 1978, she moved to Vancouver, where she choreographed, continued her ballet studies with Chiat Goh, and performed with independent groups, such as Experimental Dance and Music. In 1978 she also began an eight-year association with Vancouver's Flicka Gymnastics Club, spending twenty-five hours a week developing a unique blend of dance and gymnastics with a group of eight- to ten-year-old girls. The Flicka group gained international recognition in the world of competitive gymnastics, particularly after two of its members represented Canada at the 1984 Olympics. They also presented innovative performances of expressive gymnastics in an artistic context--good preparation for Brown's current metier.
In 1985 some of Brown's friends suggested that she see the fledgling Cirque du Soleil, which had been founded in Montreal the previous year by an itinerant group of misfit street performers and stilt walkers. When Cirque came to Vancouver for Expo '86 and the Children's Festival, Brown, in classic storybook fashion, literally sneaked under the big top at intermission to watch. Sensing a kinship with the Cirque and its approach to movement, and having learned from a chance meeting with veteran clown Michel Dallaire that the troupe was planning to add a choreographer to its creative team, Brown ventured backstage the next day to announce her availability as a choreographer. Dallaire later mentioned Brown to Guy Caron, Cirque's artistic director at the time. Andre Simard, the Canadian men's national gymnastics coach, who was familiar with Brown's work, vouched for her. Previously, Cirque productions had been put together by a director using contributions from various associates, but Brown's strong background in competitive gymnastics, combined with her proven talent for innovative dance-gymnastics, made her a natural choice to be put in complete charge. Caron hired her to choreograph its 1987 production, Le Cirque Reinvente.
New Cirque productions are now born from brainstorming among the creative team of directors Franco Dragone and Gilles Ste-Croix, set designer Michel Crete, costume designer Dominique Lemieux, and lighting designer Luc Lafortune. They decide on the theme or concept of the show, the casting of acrobats, the choice of apparatus, and the set and costume designs.
Dragone, who has been with Cirque since 1985, gives Brown tremendous freedom in her work once these decisions are made. On two occasions he simply gave her a word or phrase to guide her as she worked with the artists. For Quidam, it was simplicity. For the dance sequences in Mystere, Cirque's permanent Las Vegas production, it was birds mating. Brown feels that her only requirement is "to come up with images that provoke. My only restrictions, really, are my own creative limitations and the constraints imposed by the set environment."
She begins working with the performers within the first month of their arrival for a nine-month training period. As always, she is driven by the search for new, expressive, yet simple movements that are uniquely provocative on traditional acrobatic apparatus. An almost Buddhist surrender to the immediate present is at the heart of her method. She works collaboratively and spontaneously, "relying on the artists' talents, creativity, and personal qualities" for inspiration during rehearsals. She places special emphasis on drawing out their individual creativity, since they must live with their roles for from three to six years.
Quoting singer Loreena McKennitt, she says that the creative impulse is "a visit--a thing of grace, not commanded or owned so much as awaited, prepared for. A thing, also, of mystery." Brown adds, "During the creative process, with the direction becoming clearer along the way, the work reveals itself. If you listen, keep your eyes open, and trust your intuition, creation is all about trust."
The title of the Cirque's currently touring production, Quidam, means "nobody" in Latin; in French the word suggests a nameless passerby, a solitary figure on the street, a person coming and going in our anonymous society. Director Dragone says the show is a tribute to the joys and sufferings of everyday people, a casting of light on our frailties and anguish in the face of the new millennium that is fast approaching. There is as much lament and melancholy as gaiety and irreverence in the live musical accompaniment. Unlike previous Cirque productions that were thronged with such allegorical figures as angels, devils, and birds, Quidam features tramps, trollops, and strapping laborers. Their ragged outfits suggest both the wear and tear that acrobats' bodies must endure and the suffering of the anonymous everyday person, the quidam in each of us.
Brown, who cared for her mother during a drawn-out terminal illness, has been no stranger to such suffering. Moreover, during the development of Quidam, Dragone asked all the performers to pretend that they were in great pain and facing the choice of whether to live or die. Choosing imaginatively to live, he felt, would lead the artists to experience life more fully and passionately, and to "be much more sensitive to the fluttering of butterfly wings, to a kiss that you see in the street, to the sound of the wind, to noise and music."
Although Quidam's story line is abstract, its music and imagery create a thematic unity that evokes the tension between happiness and sorrow; between the infinite possibilities of the dream-world and the too-frequent dreariness of everyday life, between the left-brained Western conscious mind and the right-brained creative, intuitive imagination. The show suggests, in a rather Eastern-philosophical style, that these tensions can be resolved by unearthing what is repressed--a caged red balloon is released at the beginning of the show--and by bravely plunging into the dreamy unknown of the subconscious with the open-minded innocence of a child.
The protagonist of Quidam is a young girl--double cast with Emily Duncan-Brown and Audrey Brisson-Jutras, daughter of composer Benoit Jutras--who flees her parents' bland, mundane, closed-in existence. Her journey is a distinctly psychedelic stream-of-consciousness affair, replete with lightning strikes, physical danger, mysticism, joy, death, and awesome superhuman feats that test the skills of Cirque's astonishing performers. The young girl returns to her parents at the show's end with enough vision and faith to heal their pained, alienated reality.
"Just be in the moment," Brown says, when asked about the message of Quidam. "Take it in as a gift to the soul, a gift for the eyes. I love it when audiences walk out of the show feeling transformed by what they've just seen. I say, yes, we have done our job when we have lifted their spirits during the performance."
Seemingly driven to reinvent art forms, Brown has choreographed for pop artists such as Celine Dion, rhythmic gymnasts such as Lori Fung (who won a gold medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games), and Apogee, a touring fifty-minute exploration of the bed of the trampoline as a dance floor, using three to four musicians and three to five performers. She was the choreographer for the Metropolitan Opera's 1991 world premiere of John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles. At the Chicago Lyric Opera, she choreographed a twenty-three-minute "bungee ballet" for the Rhine maidens in its 1992 Das Rheingold and had acrobatic spear-wielding valkyries bouncing across the stage on a row of trampolines in its 1993 Die Walkure. She is already at work on 1998 Cirque productions for Las Vegas and Disney World in Florida.
Although Canadian arts granting foundations have usually turned down her applications because they didn't consider her work "dance," Brown was honored last November with the Fosse Award for most innovative choreography. Performing at the awards ceremony in Las Vegas was a group of four contortionists with whom Brown has worked for the past eight years. Her widely known "quidripedal choreography" with these contortionists--in which all four limbs are exploited as means of locomotion--won her the first-ever Soviet Press Award for most outstanding choreographer at the 1990 World Circus Festival in Paris.
As childlike in her enthusiasm for her life and work as Quidam would have us all become, Brown hopes to continue working with Cirque "for as long as we're growing together, and for as long as they're still interested in working with me." (She also humorously notes her ambition to continue drinking fresh juices, a passion.) She is grateful to Cirque for "a lot of wonderful experiences that I've had and will, hopefully, continue to have." She would love to choreograph for dance companies, and resolves to schedule her career counter to the usual order, "starting as a choreographer and finishing as a performer. The standing joke is that one day I'm going to perform again." Constantly buoyed by Cirque's insistence on the power of dream, we should not be at all surprised if that comes to pass.
[Gesmer, Daniel. "CANADIAN CHOREOGRAPHER DEBRA BROWN BRINGS ORDER AND FANTASY TO MONTREAL'S ACROBATIC SPECTACULAR, CIRQUE DU SOLEIL." Dance Magazine, July 1998.]
