Dreams of the Solo Trapeze: Offstage with the Cirque du Soleil Book

I've seen a handful of Cirque Du Soleil shows, and each time, I find myself thinking about the lives of the performers backstage. What is it like to be a part of an international band of roving physical artists, I wonder? Now THAT would be a good topic for a memoir.

When I looked for a memoir by a Cirque performer, however, all I could find was this book. Mark Schreiber was a novelist on holiday in Amsterdam when he met Saltimbanco trapeze artist Olga Sidorova at a club. They struck up a conversation that led to him spending the next year of his life following the show around Europe, interviewing the performers off stage as he cultivated a friendship with the mercurial Russian trapeze artist who served as his introduction.

The good news is that this book does contain some genuinely interesting information about the lives of Cirque performers. There are stories about the day to day rhythms of the show and the long and often winding paths some of the individual performers took to get there. There are also some fascinating tidbits, like the conversation in which Schreibner expresses surprise that highly physical Olga engages in such a bad-for-you-habit as smoking, only to have her reply, "Trapeze is bad for you!"

The not so good news is that this is less a book about Cirque than it is the author's memoir of writing about the Cirque. Schreiber knows he has stumbled upon an interesting topic but has failed to find an appropriate place for himself within the narrative. He has made himself a much larger character in this book than is warranted, and spends too many pages telling us about his own personal experiences rather than staying focused on the rich well of stories he was granted access to. For example, while the fact that he ended up writing this book was in due in part to his inability to secure a standby flight out of Amsterdam over Easter, the multiple pages he spends detailing his attempts to get a standby flight, and his digressions about the other people trying to do the same, were so unrelated to the topic that I almost gave up the book early on.

In addition, Schreibner is a huge Cirque fan and spends the bulk of the book expressing star-struck awe of the performers he finds himself lucky enough to get to know. While I can understand those feelings, it makes for a lack of objectivity in his writing and gives it a sycophantic tone that I personally found grating.

Schreibner is a novelist, not a journalist, so perhaps my expectations of more in depth information about the Cirque and the lives of its performers were unrealistic. But I came away from this book feeling that it was really a lost opportunity. If you love the Cirque, the book may be worth reading despite its flaws, but otherwise I think The Fire Within, the 13-part documentary about the making of Verakai, is likely to be a more satisfying view into the world of Cirque du Soleil.