Cirque du Soleil is a Canadian entertainment company and the largest contemporary circus producer in the world. Located in the inner-city area of Saint-Michel, it was founded in Baie-Saint-Paul on 16 June 1984 by former street performers Guy Laliberté and Gilles Ste-Croix.
Franco Dragone was an Italian-born Belgian theatre director. He was the founder and artistic director of Dragone, a creative company specializing in the creation of large-scale theatre shows. He was also known for his work with Cirque du Soleil and Celine Dion.
Kà is a show by Cirque du Soleil at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Kà describes the story as "the coming of age of a young man and a young woman through their encounters with love, conflict and the duality of Kà, the fire that can unite or separate, destroy or illuminate."
The Lyric Theatre is a Broadway theater at 214 West 43rd Street in the Theater District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. Opened in 1998, the theater was designed by Richard Lewis Blinder of Beyer Blinder Belle, in collaboration with Peter Kofman, for Garth Drabinsky and his company Livent. The Lyric Theatre was built using parts of two former theaters on the site: the Apollo Theatre, built in 1920 to a design by Eugene De Rosa, and the old Lyric Theatre, built in 1903 to a design by Victor Hugo Koehler. The theater contains 1,622 seats across three levels and is operated by Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG). The theater building is owned by the city and state governments of New York and was developed by New 42nd Street.
David Shiner is an American actor, clown, playwright and theater director.
Danny Rutigliano is an American actor.
Philippe Decouflé is a French choreographer, dancer, mime artist, and theatre director. As a child he travelled extensively around Lebanon and Morocco before learning his skills as a teenager at the Annie Fratellini École du Cirque and the Marceau Mime School. While frequenting Parisienne nightclubs he discovered and was attracted to contemporary dance, and he eventually moved to the Centre National de la Danse Contemporaine in Angers to study under choreographer Alwin Nicolais. After briefly working as a solo dancer, he formed the Découflé Company of Arts in Bagnolet in 1983, moving it to a former electrical works in the Parisienne suburb of Saint-Denis in 1995.
Olga Pikhienko is a circus performer who specializes in handbalancing and contortion. Pikhienko started in rhythmic gymnastics at the age of five. When she was eleven, she started performing with her father, Sasha Pikhienko, at the Nikulin Circus based in Moscow. Olga's act with her father won them a gold medal in 1992 at the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain in Paris. In 1993, they won a silver medal in Beijing, China at the World Festival.
Jeremy Kushnier is a Canadian actor, singer and songwriter.
Viva Elvis was the seventh resident Cirque du Soleil show on the Las Vegas Strip. It resided at the Aria Resort & Casino and premiered on February 19, 2010. The show closed on August 31, 2012. Cirque du Soleil partnered with Elvis Presley Enterprises to produce this show, similar to how they partnered with The Beatles' Apple Corps Ltd to produce the resident show Love at the Mirage.
Cirque Productions, also known as Cirque Dreams, is a subsidiary of Cirque du Soleil.
Banana Shpeel was a touring stage show created by Cirque du Soleil which premiered on November 19, 2009, at the Chicago Theater. The vaudeville-based show was directed by David Shiner, who also created Koozå. The show lasted a less than a year, only playing in Chicago, New York City, and Toronto. The show was cancelled in 2010, due to its poor reviews and many complications.
Iris was a resident Cirque du Soleil show based in Los Angeles, California. It premiered on September 25, 2011, after preview performances which began on July 21, 2011. The cost for production of the show was nearly $100 million, which included the cost of renovating the Dolby Theatre in which the show was housed. Iris was written and directed by French director-choreographer Philippe Decouflé. The show explored images from the history of cinema and featured elaborate choreography, acrobatics, and a variety of contemporary circus acts. The name of the show, Iris, comes from the camera diaphragm as well as from the colored iris of the human eye.
Cirque du Soleil: Fire Within is a 2002 Canadian reality television mini-series. The series follows eight Cirque du Soleil performers during the creation and production of the Cirque's touring production, Varekai. Stress ensues as several newcomers try to learn new acrobatic acts for the show, while the subplot also follows the crew behind the show trying to cast new performers, advertise the production, create the stage set, costumes, and make-up, and manage the show under the direction of newcomer Dominic Champagne.
Disgraced is a 2012 play by novelist and screenwriter Ayad Akhtar. It premiered in Chicago and has had Off-Broadway and Off West End engagements. The play, which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, opened on Broadway at the Lyceum Theater October 23, 2014. Disgraced has also been recognized with a 2012 Joseph Jefferson Award for New Work – Play or Musical and a 2013 Obie Award for Playwriting. It is Akhtar's first stage play. The 2014 Broadway transfer earned a Tony Award for Best Play nomination in 2015.
Ruby Lewis is an American actress and singer. Her work is largely based in musicals and television.
Katrina Cunningham is an American actor, model, dancer and musician. They performed in Les Liaisons Dangereuses (2016), Cirque Du Soleil's Paramour, and NYC's Sleep No More. Cunning appeared in the recurring role of Christina Fuego in the later two seasons of The Deuce on HBO starring James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal. More recently, Cunning starred as the mysterious chanteuse Sabine in the Netflix series Trinkets based on the books by Kirsten Smith.
Hillary and Clinton is a play written by Lucas Hnath that premiered in 2016 at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago. The play is set in an alternate universe and tells a story centering on Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign.
Ron Kellum is an American producer, director, artist and choreographer known for being a Broadway veteran and the first African-American artistic director for the award-winning Cirque du Soleil. He was the artistic director for the productions of Koozå from 2015 through 2016 and Volta from 2018 through 2020.
Drawn to Life is a Cirque du Soleil show at Disney Springs' West Side at the Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. It is a contemporary circus performance featuring acrobats, gymnasts, and other skilled performers. A collaboration between Cirque du Soleil, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Walt Disney Imagineering, the show is inspired by Disney's animated film productions and the process of animation. The show is performed in a custom-built, freestanding theater originally built for its predecessor La Nouba, which closed in 2017 after performing for 19 years.
