I was able to get our first contract from the government for $1 million.” It was our dream to create our own circus, so I took charge and became the producer. “They asked us, the street performers, to develop an artistic concept that would carry the festivities out across the province. In 1983, the Quebec Government was making plans for a grand celebration the following year to honor the 450 th anniversary of French explorer Jacques Cartier’s arrival in the new world. It could be said that the inciting incident to the birth of Cirque du Soleil occurred in the spring of 1534. “When I came back and told my parents I wanted to be a creative producer and artist, and would not go to university, there were a lot of tears.” He knew breaking the news of his new life direction would not be easy. He had grown up in a comfortable middle-class upbringing where the expectations were he would go to university and get a post-secondary education.
When I was 18 in 1977, I went to Europe with my accordion and discovered the pleasure of entertaining people,” he said in a 2011 autobiographical piece for Fortune. I was attracted to different places, different colors of skin, different food. In fact, that thought had not occurred to him until he had the opportunity to travel to Europe at the age of 18. Growing up in the Canadian francophone province of Quebec, Guy Laliberté did not dream of creating a performing empire. From Middle Class Life to Street Performer There’s hardly anything in their first 25 years of existence that would make him think otherwise. One can hardly blame him for thinking Cirque du Soleil was bullet-proof. In the end, you realize that you don’t always have the internal expertise and that people can’t deliver on their promises,” he said in an interview with the Globe and Mail in 2014. “We fell into the trap of thinking we could do all things entertainment-related. He realized, in some ways, they had become a victim of their own success. A combination of the global economic crisis of 2009, a collapsed deal with Dubai investors, and some internal mismanagement had all combined to form a perfect storm that forced Laliberté to do some serious introspection around 2012.
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