Case Study: Cirque Du Soleil

This case study is titled Cirque du Soleil, written by Thomas J. Delong and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan, and it follows the company of Cirque du Soleil, their performers, and their casting director. Cirque du Soleil was originally a group of street performers that formed in 1984, under the name “Le Club des Talons Hauts.” In the beginning, Cirque only had seventy-three members, which boosted to over two thousand members in 2001. In 2001, Cirque du Soleil was playing to almost six million people a year, worldwide. According to the case study, “For most of Cirque’s existence, it was owned and managed equally by two men, Laliberté and Daniel Gautier. Laliberté had responsibility for most of the creative production of the company, and Gautier managed

The company has many different artist including: street performers, clowns, acrobats, and gymnasts. All of these talents were used to create a form of theater and drama. The music of Cirque was inspired by the Latin language, and pushed the cultural boundaries during that time. It was in Los Angeles in 1987 and that Cirque du Soleil caught its big break. The company was given funds by the Canadian government to go to the Los Angeles Festival, where they received top billing. According to the text, “One Cirque executive recalled, ‘We gambled everything when we went to California. If we failed to bring in an audience, we were going to have to leave everything there in L.A., because we didn’t have the money even to pack the show up and transport it back’” (Delong and Vijayaraghavan, 2002, p.2). Cirque sold out every show at the festival, and was able to use those funds to tour other American cities. After the American tour, Cirque had enough funds to branch of to Europe and create its first European production. The first feature film for Cirque du Soleil would then be released in 1999, and another production film would be released in 2000. The company opened its first store in 1998, which was located in its permanent theater on the Walt Disney World Resort in

The building includes: a fifteen thousand square feet room filled with trampolines and acrobatic equipment, a training room that is over eight thousand square feet, a dance studio, a cafeteria, an outdoor performance area, and a vegetable garden. There were five organization issues the Cirque du Soleil had to take into account, when looking at the bigger picture of the company. The first one had to do with diversification. Both Gagnon and Laliberté discussed diversification as moving into other products with the Cirque brand, including: spas, complex cirques, entertainment complexes. Another organization issue was that more business people were joining the upper levels of the company. Since Cirque was becoming a big business, management was losing the soul of the company. On the other side, since Cirque was a big company, the managers and leaders had to find a way to protect the company’s assets. The third issue was that Cirque had more competition. According to the study, “…Cirque Oz, in Australia, tried to prevent Cirque du Soleil from getting permits. Gagnon commented… “after Cirque du Soleil left, Oz made more money on their next tour. We are still building the market, and it’s better if we don’t all see each other as the enemy’” (Delong and Vijayaraghavan, 2002, p.11). The fourth issue was high ticket prices that started to