After James Cameron attended a Southern California performance of “Cavalia” last year, he gave the equine and acrobatic extravaganza a review greater than the proverbial two thumbs up. The “Avatar” director told artistic director Normand Latourelle that he thought his big top show was nothing less than the future of entertainment.
A longtime admirer of Cameron’s work, Latourelle was stunned and asked why. While movies are becoming increasingly computer-reliant, he recalls the movie producer-director telling him, “What you do is for real. You can’t cheat. The horses are there, the humans are there, they have to share a space. ... And this is happening in front of your very eyes.”
A co-founder of Cirque du Soleil, Montreal native Latourelle has shared a lot of spaces with horses since launching “Cavalia” in 2003, and he believes there is a powerful connection between man and the four-legged creatures.
In “Odysseo,” the “Cavalia” sequel that opens Wednesday under the white big top at a site in Midtown, man and horse gallop off on a journey though beautiful projected landscapes from around the world. It opened to positive reviews in the troupe’s home city of Montreal before traveling here to launch a multiyear tour.
We asked the 56-year-old Latourelle, who speaks with a potent French accent and pauses often to find the right English words to translate what he’s thinking, to discuss the inspirations behind his ode to nature.
Q: “Odysseo” is centered on the theme of appreciating nature. Is this something you’ve felt and wanted to express for a long time?
A: I remember the first time, I was 6 years old, and at home we didn’t have a lot of money. So we didn’t have books, didn’t have a TV. And one of my friends, whose family had money, brought me to their cottage [in the Laurentian region north of Montreal]. There were plenty of books, including a series from National Geographic. And I started to flip the pages for I don’t know how long, but every day I was there. And I thought I was taking off, transported to some of the most marvelous landscapes in the world. Just flipping the page, to me it was a total discovery.
That’s what I’m trying to achieve with “Odysseo” [audiences] — and they just lift off and they start to travel across the world, [and appreciate] what nature gives us.
Q: Is that the message of “Odysseo,” that we should appreciate the natural world more?
A: I don’t have a big message [behind my shows], but I have my messages.
I think life is pretty tough now overall. Being a human being is not easy because we got away from nature. And I think that’s one problem we have.
But looking at the show makes you appreciate nature more. And if there’s something I can achieve, [it would be] that everyone comes out of the show and decides to have a walk in the forest.
You look at a tree, and it has a lot to tell you. It’s hard to explain in English, but for me, life is all about balance and we’re losing balance because we don’t listen to nature enough.
Q: It’s ironic that it would take such a huge traveling production like this to convey a message about appreciating nature, isn’t it?
A: Well, I learn a lot from the horses. Enough to understand that they are much closer to nature than we are.
Q: Did you grow up in the country?
A: I grew up in Montreal. My father was 42 when he bought his first car. I was 12, something like that. So I used to travel around either by trolley or bus. It was very limited.
When I was young, I would half-joke that I was born in the alley, because in Montreal every apartment block has an alley [behind it]. I did my hours as a teenager on the sidewalk. And when I became an adult, I was on the street. Every summer, I had a chance to go to the country. But I’m not a country guy, I’m a city guy.
Q: Have you been thinking about horses and nature and what a sequel would say ever since “Cavalia” had its world premiere?
A: Some ideas I had for “Cavalia 1,” I couldn’t do, so those were registered [in my mind]. I’m not a guy who takes a lot of notes. I do that on purpose. What I remember are the best ideas; the rest, I just forget.
Q: You’ve mentioned that creating “Cavalia” and “Odysseo” is different than a Cirque show that typically takes an existing act, transforms it with changes to everything from costumes to choreography and plugs it into a circus. How do you make your best ideas add up to a show?
A: You have to make decisions in advance, even if you don’t know the whole picture. How many horses do we want? What do we want them to do? What is going to be the mix of the acrobatic and the horses?
Until we see the entire show put together, it’s like a million-piece puzzle. You open the box and go, “Oh my God, what is the image?” Most of the time when you buy a puzzle, you have the image on the front of the box. But here, we’re making up the image. And every piece is brought by this designer, then this guy, this other guy. ...
At some point you start to see, “Oh, this is nice, why don’t we expand it?” And then you make it bigger.
Q: But doesn’t making things bigger make the risk bigger when you tour a production as large as “Cavalia” or “Odysseo”?
A: Yes, I’m as much scared with this one as I was with the first, because it’s crazy. At one point if you look at the figures, you’d say, “OK, I wouldn’t do that!” But you know, I have a lot of confidence in life. From my point of view, I just have one life, and I’m pushing my ideas as much as I can. I’m lucky, because I’m both the artistic director and the producer, so I’m the one who makes the decisions. In reality, the executive producer was my son. He has to follow until he tells me, “OK, that’s enough of your crazy stuff!” But he didn’t say that yet.
You know, in “Field of Dreams,” they say, “If you build it, they will come.” I believe they will come.
Q: Well, they did for “Cavalia,” and no one knew at first what it was about, right?
A: [It was the] same thing with Cirque. When we did Cirque du Soleil, we didn’t know. We just did it. We could have failed, absolutely. It almost failed the second year, we almost were in bankruptcy.
Will this one fail? No. Because I’ve seen the show. It’s my creation, so it’s hard not to sound pretentious. But when I looked at the crowd we had in Montreal at the end of the show, there’s no doubt anymore.
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Performance preview
“Odysseo”
Opens Wednesday, through Jan. 8 (with an extension possible). Show times vary. Spring and Eighth streets, Atlanta. Parking close by at Centergy Building, 75 Fifth St.; parking deck can be accessed via Williams or Spring streets (at the corner of Abercrombie Place). MARTA patrons can walk from the 10th Street station. Tickets, $69.50-$134.50 (with discounts for ages 2-17 and 65 and over), are available via 1-866-999-8111, www.cavalia.net.
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