Running with the circus

Few imaginations are so dull that at some point during childhood they haven't whirled excitedly at the thought of running away with the circus. But what kind of person actually devotes his existence to perfecting the art of catapulting from a trampoline dressed in spandex, or twirling above the audience performing tricks in a chrome cube? When Cirque du Soleil performs Saltimbanco in London in the New Year, what percentage of those gaping open-mouthed at the dazzling spectacle of impossibly contorted bodies and death-defying tricks will think that maybe they could abandon their own run-ofthe-mill existence and leap into a life of Lycra?

Carolyne Vita, now 27, was only 10 years old when she first went to see Cirque du Soleil in Quebec, and at that point she had little idea that seven years later she would be one of the few who make it to the other side of the barriers as an established part of the company. 'I've travelled all over the world, and I still love making people forget their lives for two and a half hours,' she says 10 years on.

Yet the story of how she came to end up in a synchronised ballet on bungee ropes is made no less remarkable by the fact that at the time the company's own future had a massive question mark hanging over it.

At the start of 2003 there is no doubt that Cirque du Soleil is one of the companies most responsible for transforming the notion of circus from a Fellini-esque world of freaks, tired clown acts and mangy animals into a commercially supersuccessfuldisplay of highly disciplined physical excellence. Yet at the end of the Eighties the founders Guy Laliberte and Daniel Gauthier were about to gamble everything they had on keeping the circus going.

A bad run in Toronto had been followed by a catastrophically undersold show at the Niagara Falls. In 1987 Laliberte and Gauthier decided to take their circus to the Los Angeles Festival as a fringe event, knowing that if they did not succeed they would have to sell everything they had just to get home. The gamble payed off - now on any given weekend 60,000 people will see a Cirque du Soleil show, while over 33 million people have flocked to see at least one of the 13 shows that have taken the company to 130 cities across the world.

Confronting possible failure head on and triumphing against the odds is central to Carolyne's own story. Her attempt to join proved to be something of a David and Goliath experience. 'I had trained as a gymnast, but I wasn't highly accomplished - and I was about to give up. I was studying science and a little dance in the hope of becoming a physical therapist.

Then one day I got a phone call from my old coach saying that Cirque du Soleil was holding auditions. I was very out of shape and didn't think I would get anywhere, so you can imagine how I felt when I went to the auditions and saw that my heroes - people from the National Gymnastics Team Of Canada - were there.

Aged 17, Carolyne was also uncomfortably aware that she was far younger than almost anybody else auditioning - though maybe she should have taken some comfort from the knowledge that Laliberte himself started his circus career by leaving home at 14 to become a busking accordion player, moving on to fire-eating at the age of 18. 'I wanted to run away from the audition,' she confesses, 'but they kept calling me back for each round.

I just couldn't believe it when they told me I'd got through.' Now she realises that 'you could be the best acrobat in the world but you wouldn't be able to do this job,' citing both the character development (circus members have to play anything from leaping lizards to hyperactive Jacobeans) and the extraordinary 'family' life that grows up between the performers who come from 40 different countries.

Inevitably relationships develop, which the circus members celebrate in their own specific style. Near Las Vegas, where Carolyne performed in Cirque du Soleil's first permanent show Mystere, a spectacular lesbian wedding between the stage manager and the wardrobe mistress took place in an area of the Nevada desert called Valley Of Fire. Other weddings have taken place in Vegas itself while she was there, 'but those don't always count,' she laughs.