DALLAS — Showman Normand Latourelle never thought much about horses until he noticed one was stealing the show at Legendes Fantastiques, a multimedia historical spectacle he created in 1998 in Quebec.
Latourelle was startled.
“At the time, I had 120 performers, and night after night, the audience was looking at the horse walking across the stage, not the performers,” he recalled. “I said, ‘My God, this is a star.'”
The director and producer knows something about mesmerizing an audience. He was a founding member of Cirque du Soleil, the Montreal entertainment empire known for its creative extravaganzas, which he left in 1990 when he decided to stop touring and work on other large-scale productions in Canada.
Latourelle is on the road again as artistic director of Cavalia, an elaborate production that celebrates the beauty of horses and their relationship to people. The show features 47 highly trained horses, most of them stunning Lusitano stallions and geldings, and an international cast of acrobats, aerialists, dancers and riders. An orchestra accompanies this human-equine ballet.
Cavalia, after playing cities such as Boston, Houston and Washington, is scheduled to end its U.S. tour in Dallas from March 14 to April 2, and then head home to Canada to rest for the summer.
Almost everything about the performance is big. It takes 78 trucks to move the cast, crew, horses and a white, castle-like tent that rises to 110 feet at its peaks.
“The show is all about beauty, and the experience starts when you see the tent from outside,” Latourelle said. “The aesthetic of the show is probably one of the most researched in the world. I try to keep everything very pure, as pure as the horses are. They don’t need costumes or makeup. Every horse is a piece of art by itself.”
The production, written by Latourelle, chronicles the evolution of the horse from mere servant to respected companion. Most of the four-legged performers were raised on a breeding farm in France. There, Cavalia equestrian co-directors Frederic Pignon and his wife, Magali Delgado, base their training philosophy on patience and respect — not force.
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“In half the show, the horses are completely free on stage,” Latourelle said. “The artists come on stage and play with them like they would in a field. It’s a very emotional, touching moment. For the horses, the stage is their playground because [Pignon] trains them that way. They are almost like dogs … The other half is a mix of acrobatics, very high-thrill moments, where we use the speed of the horses and do crazy upside down riding. We also have Roman riding where riders are standing on two horses and they are jumping bars at full speed.”
Latourelle hooked up with Pignon in Nimes, France, seven years ago while he was visiting horse shows to learn about the animals. He recognized the trainer from a video and approached him.
“I told him I had this crazy idea to do something very modern with horses,” Latourelle recalled. “And he said, ‘You wouldn’t believe it but we want to do something, too, and we’ve got the horses.’ The day after I was at their horse farm, and I was expecting to see a guy taking a horse into a ring. He brought three stallions into a field and started to run with them. When I saw that I almost cried because it was so true. It was not a trick. It was a relationship. And I said, ‘OK, you got me.'”
Cavalia is in its third year of touring to packed houses and extended runs.
“It reminded me a lot of when we started Cirque, and we opened in Los Angeles in 1987 and it was an instant success,” Latourelle said.
Still, he has yet to swing a leg over a horse. “They’re my friends,” he said. “I like to scratch them and speak to them, but I don’t want to ride them … I’m so well surrounded by horse people, some of the best riders in the world, I feel if I go on a horse, it is like trying to do a trapeze act when I’m better on the ground.”