guy laliberte yacht

From Street Performer to Boho Billionaire: Meet Cirque du Soleil Cofounder Guy Laliberté

The entrepreneur’s staging a whole new spectacle on Ibiza.

The first time Guy Laliberté, 56, visited Ibiza, in the late 1970s, he paid his way as a busker, stilts walker, and fire-eater. Back then, the idyllic Spanish island was a hippie enclave frequented by nudists, out-of-favor aristos, and pedigreed thrill seekers on the hunt for mind-altering, round-the-clock bacchanalia. These days, Laliberté owns Can Soleil, a 64-acre spread on Ibiza’s northwest coast, purchased from the art collector and Mercedes-Benz heir Friedrich Christian “Mick” Flick, and he arrives via either his own plane or his 178-foot yacht, the Tiara. While the intervening years have seen the street performer–turned–Cirque du Soleil cofounder become a billionaire, they have done little to diminish his flair for seeing possibility in unlikely places.

“They thought I was crazy when I brought this here,” Laliberté told me one afternoon this past February, practically shouting over the whipping winds as we walked around the first large-scale artwork he had transported to the island. Time and Space the Speed of Light, 13 solid-basalt columns that rise, Stonehenge-like, over the cliffs, was a commission from the Australian sculptor Andrew Rogers. Laliberté laughed as he recalled how local authorities looked askance at his insistence on erecting the 420-ton installation on his property. “They sent police cars!” When it comes to his endeavors—whether it’s creating a global brand out of a band of street artists or becoming the first Canadian space tourist (more on that later)—Laliberté is a high-stakes player, the kind of impresario that his boyhood heroes P.T. Barnum and Walt Disney might have admired. Though he began amassing blue-chip contemporary art only three years ago, the Montreal-based mogul has just unveiled a public sculpture park on the grounds of his Ibiza home, a year after opening two contemporary exhibition spaces near the center of the island’s namesake town. Also in town is Heart Ibiza, a club and restaurant designed by Patricia Urquiola that he co-owns with the celebrated chef brothers Albert and Ferran Adrià, of El Bulli fame.

“I always plant the seeds of my desire and try to be a gardener of it,” Laliberté said with a mixture of understatement and bravado, making it clear that he hopes for nothing less than to turn this sybaritic outpost into a year-round cultural destination even after the summertime highfliers and famous DJs have moved on. “And I’ve been lucky in my life to be very successful in my harvest.”

Dotting his sculpture park’s vast hardscrabble grounds are Ugo Rondinone ’s colossal Stone Figure, 2015, and Ai Weiwei’s Iron Tree, 2013. Nestled strategically in the brush are enormous red boulders inscribed with text, part of the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer ’s site-specific commission. At Laliberté’s invitation, Holzer spent several weeks in residence this past winter, scouring the island for rocks and preparing for the exhibition that now fills Laliberté’s two public spaces—Lune Rouge and Art Projects Ibiza—overseen, as is the park, by Heather Harmon, director of the art advisory KCM Fine Arts. The exhibition, “Are You Alive?” which runs through mid-December, includes Holzer’s iconic LED artworks and a selection of marble benches inscribed with aphorisms. In the sculpture park, she was hoping to carve Dada text or concrete poetry right at the waterline, and sentence fragments or words on the rocks on the slope of the hills. “That way, the thought gets completed by the visitor by the time they get to the bottom,” she elaborated when I joined her and Laliberté on a tour. I asked her later what she made of her patron. “He strikes me as someone who thinks that being a bit wild is a good idea.”

Last summer, the first artist in residence was the Japanese superstar Takashi Murakami, who inaugurated the exhibition spaces to great fanfare. “Guy took a plunge into the deep end of the pool very quickly,” Tim Blum, whose gallery Blum & Poe represents Murakami, says of Laliberté’s ambition. “He’s not theoretical; he has uncanny primal instincts. A lot of what he responds to is work that can be experienced in a spiritual or physical way.” A case in point is Sarah Lucas ’s bawdy sculpture Gold Cup Maradona, a ginormous sunshine-yellow phallus thrusting to the sky that dominated the entrance to Lucas’s exhibition in the British Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale and is now a highlight of Laliberté’s collection. Nearby is Giuseppe Penone’s towering 2012 Albero Folgorato/Thunderstruck Tree, whose sliced branches of bronze and gold leaf call to mind a thunderbolt.

“At first I made mistakes,” Laliberté admitted, pointing out the drunken-angel statue on the lawn, which he plans to keep there as a reminder of those missteps. We were sitting on a white sofa winding around the grand picture windows in the main villa, one of several buildings at Can Soleil. A black toque was pulled down over his shaved head, and he was wearing a black leather jacket, a black scarf, black suede sneakers, and black jeans. With his tattoos, rows of beaded string bracelets, and ever-lit Gauloise, he suggested a French cineast. “My approach was more about buying things that made sense in an autobiographical way, creating the story that I wanted to make. But at a certain point, I wanted to build something serious. I got totally hooked and took it as a challenge to educate myself in a short period of time.”

Three years ago, Laliberté hired Kimberly Chang Mathieu, the founder of KCM Fine Arts and a former art adviser to Los Angeles mega collectors Maurice and Paul Marciano of Guess. Chang Mathieu and Laliberté spent a year looking at museums, fairs, and galleries without buying a thing. “It was my Art History 101,” he joked. Since 2014, he has made up for lost time, purchasing about 100 pieces by 30 artists. “When something piques his interest, he can’t let it go,” Chang Mathieu told me. “He needs to understand, master, and be the best at it.” Sure, there are plenty of splashy current names in his collection, but Laliberté is also willing to dig deep into previous generations. In a recent show of works he owns at Lune Rouge, Kara Walker’s 2013 cut-paper wall installation The Sovereign Citizens Sesquicentennial Civil War Celebration shared the room with one of David Hammons’s shrouded mirrors, Nam June Paik’s 1994 video pieces, and a wall sculpture by Martin Kippenberger.

If Laliberté’s tastes now lean more to the avant-garde than to mass entertainment, sharing his treasures with the public has always been part of his plan: One of the ways in which he reinvented the traditional circus with Cirque du Soleil was by combining musical theater, spectacle, and acrobatic disciplines from around the globe. “Your capacity to build a great institutional collection defines your quality as a collector,” he said, noting that he’s made major loans to the island’s only other public contemporary space, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Ibiza, which last year organized a show of collaborative works by the artists Douglas Gordon and Tobias Rehberger—another sign that Ibiza’s new crowd includes players on the international art circuit.

Fabulous wealth, of course, has allowed Laliberté to move quickly, but so too has his rapport with the artists whose work he collects. “I think the fact that I was an artist really helps me get access to certain things that I wouldn’t have if I were only a rich collector,” he said. “I like spending time with people who have passion.” After a studio visit with the famously reclusive Hammons got off to an awkward start and Hammons left to get coffee, Laliberté sought him out on his own and clicked with the artist by talking about his days in New York as a street performer. He’s hosted Murakami and his family at elaborate Cirque premieres in Tokyo, and for the artist’s opening on Ibiza last summer, Laliberté threw a party at home for 1,700 guests and played DJ all night. Last October, he flew to Paris for Sterling Ruby ’s first solo show with Larry Gagosian and, while there, bought Rondinone’s film of John Giorno performing his poem Thanx 4 Nothing, after seeing the work in the Giorno retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo. Ruby says he knows within the first 30 minutes of a studio visit if there is going to be a relationship with a collector. “I’ve had sheikhs and hedge fund kings come through,” he says. “With Guy, you could tell art was an obsession. His comments were intuitive and edgy.” Ruby considers him one of a handful of his “old-school patrons—the kind who come to the studio, talk about the work, and then come to see how it evolved in the show.” (And then buy it.)

Laliberté sleeps anywhere from one to six hours a night, getting by on power naps. His style is decidedly laid-back, but he’s a stickler for detail, even choosing all the housewares and linens himself for the homes he owns around the world. His friends like to say that nothing makes him happier than masterminding the best party in town, whether it’s in Montreal or Tahiti. “He can just rip-roar-on-the-floor laugh because someone’s having a new experience,” said Chang Mathieu, who travels with him regularly. “He’s so excited when somebody’s eyeballs are like, ‘Holy shit!’ ”

His knack for “organizing chaos,” as he described his early role at Cirque, extends to his personal life. This past year, Laliberté took his two youngest kids out of middle school so they could travel around the world on the Tiara; the group included their mother, his ex-partner Claudia Barilla, his masseuse, and his then-girlfriend. Laliberté has three older children with his first partner, Rizia Moreira, a Brazilian former model, and the entire brood, together with all the grandparents, gathers for holidays in Kona, Hawaii. Two of his kids inherited their father’s love of adrenaline: His son Kami, 16, is a promising race-car driver on the Formula 4 circuit; his daughter Naima Moreira-Laliberté, 19, is a champion Canadian junior equestrian in dressage. Last year, when Laliberté sold 90 percent of his stake in the Cirque juggernaut to U.S., Chinese, and Canadian investors, he announced that he didn’t want to burden his children with burnishing his passion—he wanted them to discover their own. He still retains a 10 percent stake and remains in the role of artistic adviser for every Cirque show.

Laliberté grew up in Quebec City, where his father worked in client relations for the aluminum manufacturer Alcan and his mother was a nurse. Both parents played music, and their son became adept at accordion. In school, he said, “I was a troublemaker, for sure. There was a moment when I could have jumped on the dark side, versus going for my dream.” He got kicked out of a few schools before the director at one of them recognized Laliberté’s ability to mobilize the students and put him in charge of student-faculty relations. At 18, he hit the road as a juggler and fire-eater; later, he started a theater troupe in which everyone preformed on stilts. In 1984, at the age of 25, he united a bunch of street performers he knew in Baie-Saint-Paul, a city on the northern shore of the St. Lawrence River, for a performance that would seed Cirque du Soleil, a spectacle that bridged the gap between circus and theater with a theme, lavish sets, commissioned scores, and no animal acts. Ever the showman, Laliberté said he sensed in the 1990s “that Las Vegas was the market to grab” and persuaded the casino mogul Steve Wynn to make Cirque a permanent fixture at his then-latest hotel, Treasure Island, and to cede him creative control of the show. In short order, Laliberté redefined Las Vegas as a family–entertainment destination.

During my visit to Ibiza, I joined Laliberté for dinner at one of his villas, along with Holzer, Chang Mathieu, and various friends and colleagues. Though his conversation was punctuated with New Agey references to energy points, Laliberté laughingly recalled his unlikely foray into gambling. One night in 2006 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, he asked to join a game of poker, but no one would let him in because he was a beginner. So he plunked down $50,000 on the table and got a seat. “He observed for about 20 minutes,” his friend Sean O’Donnell, who oversees Laliberté’s real estate and hospitality ventures, remembered, picking up the story. “Then he said to me, ‘Listen, they’re going to think we’re a bunch of drunk French frogs and that they’re going to take all our money.’ Of course, he ended up cleaning everybody out at that table that night.” A year later, Laliberté finished fourth in the World Poker Tour World Championship.

In 2009, he upped the stakes on his adventures by traveling to outer space on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, paying $35 million for the trip to the International Space Station. Before takeoff, he spent six months training alongside cosmonauts in Star City, Russia, where he learned about spaceflight and survival and lived and cooked for himself in a tiny apartment. Despite being a chain smoker, he passed dozens of medical tests. While in space—where he dared his fellow astronauts to don clown noses—he was patched in live via satellite to a U2 performance in Tampa, Florida. With Laliberté on the giant screen, his friend Bono chatted him up about the experience—to help raise awareness of Earth’s water-shortage issues on behalf of the One Drop foundation, which Laliberté had founded two years earlier.

Laliberté is even considering a bold reinvention of the modern-day cemetery. Already, the creative maverick has purchased land in Montreal for a public memorial park, where he imagines visitors will celebrate the lives of those remembered there via a museum and interactive installations. He is also in the final stages of completing a private, solar-powered resort on Nukutepipi, the atoll he owns in French Polynesia, which is 475 miles from Papeete—more precisely, in the middle of nowhere. Laliberté has had to create everything from scratch: He erected a facility to make asphalt and cement to build a runway and greenhouses to produce vegetables. Modeled on Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island, it will be completely self-sustaining and serve as a kind of luxe “last” resort, should a doomsday scenario present itself.

But back on Ibiza, the world’s toniest revelers were about to descend on the island, and Laliberté was eager to orchestrate their astonishment. “I want people to poke around and explore,” he said of Holzer’s plan to hide many of her new works across the property. “I’m just an actor in contemporary art. I’m not provoking change, but I’m making my little gesture. I’m taming my garden.”

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Photos: From Street Performer to Boho Billionaire: Meet Cirque du Soleil Cofounder Guy Laliberté

Sarah Lucas’s Gold Cup Maradona, 2015.

Guy Laliberté, this year, at Can Soleil, his Ibiza property, with Christopher Wool’s Untitled, 2014.

Laliberté’s sculpture park, featuring works by Ugo Rondinone, Ai Weiwei, and Giuseppe Penone.

Penone’s Albero Folgorato/Thunderstruck Tree, 2012.

Jenny Holzer’s site-specific For Ibiza, 2016.

Thomas Schütte’s Grosser Geist Nr. 6, 1998.

Rondinone’s I Feel, You Feel, We Feel…

Wool’s Untitled.

Detail view of Rondinone’s I Feel, You Feel, We Feel Through Each Other Into Our Selves, 2012.

Laliberté clowns around before liftoff to the International Space Station, 2009.

Laliberté, as a fire-breathing young man, in the 1980s.

Courtesy of Cirque du Soleil.

Cirque du Soleil’s Michael Jackson ONE, Las Vegas, 2013.

Franz West’s Eidolon, 2009; Erwin Wurm’s Big Pumpkin, 2009, and Weiwei’s Iron Tree, 2013.

Photography Assistant: Kensington Leverne.

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Spain gets first female president of the supreme court, brics considers turkey’s request for full membership, dubrovnik tops list for most tourists per capita, president vučić and ambassador cochard finalize preparations for emmanuel macron’s official visit, belgrade among finalists to host the world congress of the international economic association, guy laliberte, from homeless to multi billionaire.

The story of how Guy Laliberte went from being a broke street performer to a space traveling circus CEO with a personal net worth of $2.6 billion, is amazing and inspiring

G uy Laliberté’s rags to riches story is really one of the most extraordinary.

Laliberté was born on September 2, 1959, in Quebec City, Canada. He developed a passion for performing arts at a very young age after his parents brought him to a Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus that was travelling through town. Guy began producing his own performance art events in high school and became a proficient accordion and harmonica player. He would eventually drop out of his first year of college to follow his dreams.

His first job was “busking”, which is another word for a travelling street performer. He played music and juggled on his own until he was accepted into a performance troupe that hitched around the world putting on street shows that featured fire breathers, sword swallowers, acrobats and stilt walkers. Money was non-existent so eventually, Laliberté returned to Quebec to accept a full-time steady job at a hydro-electric power plant. Three days into his new steady job and the plant workers went on strike and Guy was fired.

Taking this as a sign from God, the newly unemployed and broke Laliberte swore to never work a normal job again and instead to devote himself 100% to performance art. Around this time, Guy began stilt walking with his future business partners Gilles Ste-Croix and Daniel Gauthier. In the early 80s, the three partners organized a summer performing arts fair in the city of Baie-Saint-Paul called “La Fēte Foraine” (The Carnival). “La Fēte Foraine” grew into a moderate financial success over the next few summers.

Guy Laliberte’s first job was “busking”, which is another word for a traveling street performer. He played music and juggled on his own until he was accepted into a performance troupe

In 1983 the government of Quebec offered a $1.5 million art grant to celebrate the 450th anniversary of Jacques Cartier’s discovery of Canada. In order to impress the government and win the grant, Laliberté’s partner Gilles Ste-Croix walked 56 miles from Baie-Saint-Paul to Quebec City, on stilts! The stunt worked and the partners used the $1.5 million to create and launch “Le Grand Tour du Cirque du Soleil”. This first version of Cirque was both a critical and financial success, producing a modest $40,000 profit.

In 1992, Laliberté landed what would become the opportunity of a lifetime when casino mogul Steve Wynn signed Cirque to perform at Las Vegas’ Treasure Island Hotel. The crucial detail here is the fact that Guy Laliberté demanded full creative control of the show and refused to give up any ownership of his company to Wynn or sign an exclusive deal. The first show Cirque produced, “Mystere”, went on to sell out every single ticket in its first year and is still one of seven shows in permanent residence at Treasure Island.

Thanks to the success of “Mystere”, Guy Laliberte and Cirque du Soleil were the hottest show in Vegas. He also had no contract excluding them from setting up shop at other venues. Between the 1990s and 2000s, Cirque du Soleil expanded at a furious pace around the world. Having started with one show in 1990, Cirque would eventually perform for more than 100 million spectators in 300 cities around the world.

Today, Cirque du Solei has over 5000 employees, $1 billion in annual revenue and $250 million in annual profits. Along the way, Guy Laliberté has earned himself a personal fortune of $2.6 billion!!! The Vegas shows have a 97% sell-out rate and produce 60% of Cirque’s annual revenues.

Mr Laliberté still owns 80% of the company and has full creative control of each of his 10 travelling shows and 10 permanent shows, around the globe.

Thanks to the success of “Mystere”, Guy Laliberte and Cirque du Soleil were the hottest show in Vegas. He also had no contract excluding them from setting up shop at other venues

In addition to being a multi-billionaire circus CEO, Guy Laliberte is a passionate philanthropist, space traveller and professional poker player. Laliberté’s “One Drop” foundation is dedicated to giving poor people access to clean water and is funded by a personal donation of $100 million by Guy himself. In September 2009, Laliberte became the first private Canadian space tourist.

He paid $41.8 million in 2009 to be blasted into outer space for a 12-day trip in a Russian rocket, and at the time of the space trip, he was the company’s controlling shareholder.

And now he is literally building a pyramid that will be the Montreal venue to showcase his DJ work. It will cost $15 million to build the pyramid, which is under construction in Varennes, and another $10 to $15 million to create the show.

“The first show is a 3D show. … It’s a journey about our origins. Where we come from. We’re all stardust. It’s a journey from the big bang to today.”

Still, there’s no denying there will be DJ parties and that the Cirque du Soleil founder will be one of the star DJs there. And he’ll be throwing thematic dance parties — say, one where everyone has to try to go back to their childhood years.

He was broadcast to 14 cities on 5 continents, including the International Space Station. Laliberté is romantically involved with Claudia Barilla, and they have two children together.

Guy Laliberté doesn’t seem to worry much about the price of what he wants in life.

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From Street Performer to Boho Billionaire: Meet Guy Laliberté

The first time Guy Laliberté, 56, visited Ibiza, in the late 1970s, he paid his way as a busker, stilts walker, and fire-eater. Back then, the idyllic Spanish island was a hippie enclave frequented by nudists, out-of-favor aristos, and pedigreed thrill seekers on the hunt for mind-altering, round-the-clock bacchanalia. These days, Laliberté owns Can Soleil, a 64-acre spread on Ibiza’s northwest coast, purchased from the art collector and Mercedes-Benz heir Friedrich Christian “Mick” Flick, and he arrives via either his own plane or his 178-foot yacht, the Tiara. While the intervening years have seen the street performer–turned–Cirque du Soleil cofounder become a billionaire, they have done little to diminish his flair for seeing possibility in unlikely places.

“They thought I was crazy when I brought this here,” Laliberté told me one afternoon this past February, practically shouting over the whipping winds as we walked around the first large-scale artwork he had transported to the island. Time and Space the Speed of Light, 13 solid-basalt columns that rise, Stonehenge-like, over the cliffs, was a commission from the Australian sculptor Andrew Rogers. Laliberté laughed as he recalled how local authorities looked askance at his insistence on erecting the 420-ton installation on his property. “They sent police cars!” When it comes to his endeavors—whether it’s creating a global brand out of a band of street artists or becoming the first Canadian space tourist (more on that later)—Laliberté is a high-stakes player, the kind of impresario that his boyhood heroes P.T. Barnum and Walt Disney might have admired. Though he began amassing blue-chip contemporary art only three years ago, the Montreal-based mogul has just unveiled a public sculpture park on the grounds of his Ibiza home, a year after opening two contemporary exhibition spaces near the center of the island’s namesake town. Also in town is Heart Ibiza, a club and restaurant designed by Patricia Urquiola that he co-owns with the celebrated chef brothers Albert and Ferran Adrià, of El Bulli fame.

“I always plant the seeds of my desire and try to be a gardener of it,” Laliberté said with a mixture of understatement and bravado, making it clear that he hopes for nothing less than to turn this sybaritic outpost into a year-round cultural destination even after the summertime highfliers and famous DJs have moved on. “And I’ve been lucky in my life to be very successful in my harvest.”

Dotting his sculpture park’s vast hardscrabble grounds are Ugo Rondinone’s colossal Stone Figure, 2015, and Ai Weiwei’s Iron Tree, 2013. Nestled strategically in the brush are enormous red boulders inscribed with text, part of the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer’s site-specific commission. At Laliberté’s invitation, Holzer spent several weeks in residence this past winter, scouring the island for rocks and preparing for the exhibition that now fills Laliberté’s two public spaces—Lune Rouge and Art Projects Ibiza—overseen, as is the park, by Heather Harmon, director of the art advisory KCM Fine Arts. The exhibition, “Are You Alive?” which runs through mid-December, includes Holzer’s iconic LED artworks and a selection of marble benches inscribed with aphorisms. In the sculpture park, she was hoping to carve Dada text or concrete poetry right at the waterline, and sentence fragments or words on the rocks on the slope of the hills. “That way, the thought gets completed by the visitor by the time they get to the bottom,” she elaborated when I joined her and Laliberté on a tour. I asked her later what she made of her patron. “He strikes me as someone who thinks that being a bit wild is a good idea.”

Last summer, the first artist in residence was the Japanese superstar Takashi Murakami, who inaugurated the exhibition spaces to great fanfare. “Guy took a plunge into the deep end of the pool very quickly,” Tim Blum, whose gallery Blum & Poe represents Murakami, says of Laliberté’s ambition. “He’s not theoretical; he has uncanny primal instincts. A lot of what he responds to is work that can be experienced in a spiritual or physical way.” A case in point is Sarah Lucas’s bawdy sculpture Gold Cup Maradona, a ginormous sunshine-yellow phallus thrusting to the sky that dominated the entrance to Lucas’s exhibition in the British Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale and is now a highlight of Laliberté’s collection. Nearby is Giuseppe Penone’s towering 2012 Albero Folgorato/Thunderstruck Tree, whose sliced branches of bronze and gold leaf call to mind a thunderbolt.

“At first I made mistakes,” Laliberté admitted, pointing out the drunken-angel statue on the lawn, which he plans to keep there as a reminder of those missteps. We were sitting on a white sofa winding around the grand picture windows in the main villa, one of several buildings at Can Soleil. A black toque was pulled down over his shaved head, and he was wearing a black leather jacket, a black scarf, black suede sneakers, and black jeans. With his tattoos, rows of beaded string bracelets, and ever-lit Gauloise, he suggested a French cineast. “My approach was more about buying things that made sense in an autobiographical way, creating the story that I wanted to make. But at a certain point, I wanted to build something serious. I got totally hooked and took it as a challenge to educate myself in a short period of time.”

Three years ago, Laliberté hired Kimberly Chang Mathieu, the founder of KCM Fine Arts and a former art adviser to Los Angeles mega collectors Maurice and Paul Marciano of Guess. Chang Mathieu and Laliberté spent a year looking at museums, fairs, and galleries without buying a thing. “It was my Art History 101,” he joked. Since 2014, he has made up for lost time, purchasing about 100 pieces by 30 artists. “When something piques his interest, he can’t let it go,” Chang Mathieu told me. “He needs to understand, master, and be the best at it.” Sure, there are plenty of splashy current names in his collection, but Laliberté is also willing to dig deep into previous generations. In a recent show of works he owns at Lune Rouge, Kara Walker’s 2013 cut-paper wall installation The Sovereign Citizens Sesquicentennial Civil War Celebration shared the room with one of David Hammons’s shrouded mirrors, Nam June Paik’s 1994 video pieces, and a wall sculpture by Martin Kippenberger.

If Laliberté’s tastes now lean more to the avant-garde than to mass entertainment, sharing his treasures with the public has always been part of his plan: One of the ways in which he reinvented the traditional circus with Cirque du Soleil was by combining musical theater, spectacle, and acrobatic disciplines from around the globe. “Your capacity to build a great institutional collection defines your quality as a collector,” he said, noting that he’s made major loans to the island’s only other public contemporary space, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Ibiza, which last year organized a show of collaborative works by the artists Douglas Gordon and Tobias Rehberger—another sign that Ibiza’s new crowd includes players on the international art circuit.

Fabulous wealth, of course, has allowed Laliberté to move quickly, but so too has his rapport with the artists whose work he collects. “I think the fact that I was an artist really helps me get access to certain things that I wouldn’t have if I were only a rich collector,” he said. “I like spending time with people who have passion.” After a studio visit with the famously reclusive Hammons got off to an awkward start and Hammons left to get coffee, Laliberté sought him out on his own and clicked with the artist by talking about his days in New York as a street performer. He’s hosted Murakami and his family at elaborate Cirque premieres in Tokyo, and for the artist’s opening on Ibiza last summer, Laliberté threw a party at home for 1,700 guests and played DJ all night. Last October, he flew to Paris for Sterling Ruby’s first solo show with Larry Gagosian and, while there, bought Rondinone’s film of John Giorno performing his poem Thanx 4 Nothing, after seeing the work in the Giorno retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo. Ruby says he knows within the first 30 minutes of a studio visit if there is going to be a relationship with a collector. “I’ve had sheikhs and hedge fund kings come through,” he says. “With Guy, you could tell art was an obsession. His comments were intuitive and edgy.” Ruby considers him one of a handful of his “old-school patrons—the kind who come to the studio, talk about the work, and then come to see how it evolved in the show.” (And then buy it.)

Laliberté sleeps anywhere from one to six hours a night, getting by on power naps. His style is decidedly laid-back, but he’s a stickler for detail, even choosing all the housewares and linens himself for the homes he owns around the world. His friends like to say that nothing makes him happier than masterminding the best party in town, whether it’s in Montreal or Tahiti. “He can just rip-roar-on-the-floor laugh because someone’s having a new experience,” said Chang Mathieu, who travels with him regularly. “He’s so excited when somebody’s eyeballs are like, ‘Holy shit!’!”

His knack for “organizing chaos,” as he described his early role at Cirque, extends to his personal life. This past year, Laliberté took his two youngest kids out of middle school so they could travel around the world on the Tiara; the group included their mother, his ex-partner Claudia Barilla, his masseuse, and his then-girlfriend. Laliberté has three older children with his first partner, Rizia Moreira, a Brazilian former model, and the entire brood, together with all the grandparents, gathers for holidays in Kona, Hawaii. Two of his kids inherited their father’s love of adrenaline: His son Kami, 16, is a promising race-car driver on the Formula 4 circuit; his daughter Naima Moreira-Laliberté, 19, is a champion Canadian junior equestrian in dressage. Last year, when Laliberté sold 90 percent of his stake in the Cirque juggernaut to U.S., Chinese, and Canadian investors, he announced that he didn’t want to burden his children with burnishing his passion—he wanted them to discover their own. He still retains a 10 percent stake and remains in the role of artistic adviser for every Cirque show.

Laliberté grew up in Quebec City, where his father worked in client relations for the aluminum manufacturer Alcan and his mother was a nurse. Both parents played music, and their son became adept at accordion. In school, he said, “I was a troublemaker, for sure. There was a moment when I could have jumped on the dark side, versus going for my dream.” He got kicked out of a few schools before the director at one of them recognized Laliberté’s ability to mobilize the students and put him in charge of student-faculty relations. At 18, he hit the road as a juggler and fire-eater; later, he started a theater troupe in which everyone preformed on stilts. In 1984, at the age of 25, he united a bunch of street performers he knew in Baie-Saint-Paul, a city on the northern shore of the St. Lawrence River, for a performance that would seed Cirque du Soleil, a spectacle that bridged the gap between circus and theater with a theme, lavish sets, commissioned scores, and no animal acts. Ever the showman, Laliberté said he sensed in the 1990s “that Las Vegas was the market to grab” and persuaded the casino mogul Steve Wynn to make Cirque a permanent fixture at his then-latest hotel, Treasure Island, and to cede him creative control of the show. In short order, Laliberté redefined Las Vegas as a family–entertainment destination.

During my visit to Ibiza, I joined Laliberté for dinner at one of his villas, along with Holzer, Chang Mathieu, and various friends and colleagues. Though his conversation was punctuated with New Agey references to energy points, Laliberté laughingly recalled his unlikely foray into gambling. One night in 2006 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, he asked to join a game of poker, but no one would let him in because he was a beginner. So he plunked down $50,000 on the table and got a seat. “He observed for about 20 minutes,” his friend Sean O’Donnell, who oversees Laliberté’s real estate and hospitality ventures, remembered, picking up the story. “Then he said to me, ‘Listen, they’re going to think we’re a bunch of drunk French frogs and that they’re going to take all our money.’ Of course, he ended up cleaning everybody out at that table that night.” A year later, Laliberté finished fourth in the World Poker Tour World Championship.

In 2009, he upped the stakes on his adventures by traveling to outer space on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, paying $35 million for the trip to the International Space Station. Before takeoff, he spent six months training alongside cosmonauts in Star City, Russia, where he learned about spaceflight and survival and lived and cooked for himself in a tiny apartment. Despite being a chain smoker, he passed dozens of medical tests. While in space—where he dared his fellow astronauts to don clown noses—he was patched in live via satellite to a U2 performance in Tampa, Florida. With Laliberté on the giant screen, his friend Bono chatted him up about the experience—to help raise awareness of Earth’s water-shortage issues on behalf of the One Drop foundation, which Laliberté had founded two years earlier.

Laliberté is even considering a bold reinvention of the modern-day cemetery. Already, the creative maverick has purchased land in Montreal for a public memorial park, where he imagines visitors will celebrate the lives of those remembered there via a museum and interactive installations. He is also in the final stages of completing a private, solar-powered resort on Nukutepipi, the atoll he owns in French Polynesia, which is 475 miles from Papeete—more precisely, in the middle of nowhere. Laliberté has had to create everything from scratch: He erected a facility to make asphalt and cement to build a runway and greenhouses to produce vegetables. Modeled on Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island, it will be completely self-sustaining and serve as a kind of luxe “last” resort, should a doomsday scenario present itself.

But back on Ibiza, the world’s toniest revelers were about to descend on the island, and Laliberté was eager to orchestrate their astonishment. “I want people to poke around and explore,” he said of Holzer’s plan to hide many of her new works across the property. “I’m just an actor in contemporary art. I’m not provoking change, but I’m making my little gesture. I’m taming my garden.”

{ SOURCE: W Magazine | http://goo.gl/EsEofO }

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BOAT International July Issue On Sale Now

The latest issue of BOAT International is now on sale, bringing you a raft of exclusive stories – including interviews with Giorgio Armani and Guy Laliberte, founder of Cirque du Soleil and owner of sailing yacht Tiara .

But first, our cover boat this month is the legendary Feadship Sussurro , which proved revolutionary when launched back in 1998, and remains a marvel of modern yachting to this day.

"Everyone was terrified. We had not built many fast-displacement boats...[ Sussurro ] was going to have to be aluminium rather than steel – aluminium and composites and carbon fibre possibly. We had not done that," recalls Henk de Vries in the fascinating story of the yacht’s build.

Sussurro  is the first in a new series of retrospectives on famous superyachts and a very worthy recipient of our new Yacht Icons label. Look out for more Yacht Icons in upcoming issues.

Elsewhere, we join Giorgio Armani at his luxurious Antiguan hideaway and learn how he relaxes when not on board his superyacht  Main . We also meet Guy Laliberte in the Dominican Republic and discover what makes this entrepreneur – and space adventurer – tick.

In his column, Sir Ben Ainslie speaks candidly about how Covid-19 has affected his team's America's Cup preparations. "It seems to me that at the very least it would make sense to push back the start of racing as much as possible to allow everyone a chance to recover and prepare as well as they can," he writes.

The new 47 metre Benetti  Bacchanal  goes under the spotlight – and in the spirit of the yacht's name we also learn a few pages later which wines you should be serving on board this season (and how to keep your onboard cellar in tip-top shape).

The July issue of  BOAT International  is packed with much more, so take advantage of one of our special subscriptions offers today, or shop for the issue in our online store.

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Guy Laliberté

Article by Stéphane Zarov

Updated by Tabitha Marshall

Published Online May 27, 2008

Last Edited April 6, 2023

Early Career

Laliberté, who was attracted to the busker's lifestyle from a young age, probably owes something of his sense of fun and love of crowds to the family gatherings of his childhood. Both his parents loved to entertain. Like most street performers before him, Laliberté's skills were largely self-taught. In 1978, he travelled to Paris and acquired the basics of fire-breathing. In 1979, he began stilt-walking alongside Gilles Ste-Croix while the two were organizing activities for the Baie-Saint-Paul youth hostel (in the Charlevoix region of Québec ).

Laliberté spent three winters (1979–81) working in Hawaii, where the thought of organizing large-scale festive events first occurred to him. The Cirque's "sun" symbol, according to Laliberté, owes much to the inspirational Hawaiian sun. In the summer of 1980 he joined Ste-Croix's stilt-walking theatre company Les Échassiers de Baie-Saint-Paul (The Stilt Walkers of Baie-Saint-Paul). The following year, Ste-Croix and Laliberté, along with stilt-walkers Serge Roy, Josée Bélanger and Carmen Ruest, founded the non-profit Club des talons hauts (High Heels Club) to promote stilt-walking events.

Cirque du Soleil

In 1982, Laliberté organized (with the help of Ste-Croix, Robert Lagueux and Hélène Dufresne) his first major event, La Fête foraine de Baie-Saint-Paul (The Baie-Saint-Paul Street Fair), which attracted street performers from across Canada and the US. The fair, which was presented for three successive years, usually ended with a large-scale show that gathered all the best acts together on one stage. These final shows were so popular and spectacular that the idea of a touring "circus without animals"arose.

In 1984 Laliberté, with financial help from the government of Québec , founded Cirque du Soleil . It toured Québec, and its big top had a capacity of 800 seats. The following year, the tour included stops in Ottawa , Toronto and Niagara Falls . In 1986, the Cirque produced a new show, La Magie continue/We Reinvent the Circus (1987), which toured Canada, the US and Europe. When it finally closed in 1990, the big top's capacity was 2,500 seats. Two years later, the Cirque would be running simultaneous shows on three continents.

Laliberté and his principal collaborators, Gilles Ste-Croix and Daniel Gauthier, guided the Cirque's phenomenal development and assembled the creative team that defined its singular style and aesthetic: director Franco Dragone, choreographer Debra Brown, costume designer Dominique Lemieux, composers René Dupéré and Benoit Jutras, and set and lighting designers Michel Crète and Luc Lafortune. Laliberté also established permanent Cirque productions in Las Vegas ( Mystère in 1993 and O in 1998) and Orlando ( La Nouba in 1998). Although Cirque du Soleil's international headquarters and studios remain in Montréal , Laliberté and his team also set up regional headquarters in Amsterdam (1994), Las Vegas (1997) and Singapore (1998).

One Drop Foundation and Space

In 2007, Laliberté announced the official launch of the One Drop Foundation, an organization whose goal is to make water accessible to everyone in the world. The foundation is funded by Laliberté (who committed $100 million), the Royal Bank of Canada and the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, and is closely associated with Oxfam and the Cirque du Soleil .

Laliberté brought water issues to the world’s attention when he embarked on a “poetic social mission” to space. On 30 September 2009, he became the first Canadian space tourist, flying to the International Space Station on the Soyuz TMA-16 spacecraft with Expedition 21 from the Russian Federal Space Agency. Under the theme “Moving Stars and Earth for Water,” Laliberté led a 120-minute webcast on 9 October that featured artistic performances in 14 cities across the world as well as the space station.

Recognition

In 1997, Laliberté received the Order of Québec and in 2004, he received the Order of Canada . In 2000, his brainchild, the Cirque du Soleil , was awarded the Governor General's National Arts Centre Award .

Films have been made about the Cirque du Soleil include Jean-Philippe Duval, L'Odyssée Baroque (Societé Radio Canada/Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1994) and Nathalie Petrowski, Un Cirque en Amérique: La rancon de la gloire (ONF/NFB, 1988).

• businesspeople
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Further Reading

Véronique Vial and Hélène Dufresne (eds), Cirque du Soleil (1993) and Wings: Backstage with Cirque du Soleil (1999).

Recommended

Gilles ste-croix.

Cirque du Soleil Becoming the Disney of the New Age

Cirque du soleil's 25th anniversary.

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Defiant Showman Demands His ‘Wow’

By Jason Zinoman

• June 3, 2011

MONTREAL — With a wolfish grin, mangled pinky and a bald head shaped like a bullet, Guy Laliberté, a co-founder and the owner of Cirque du Soleil, looks like a man with a plan for world domination. Appearances, in this case, do not deceive.

“There are three capitals of entertainment in the world: Las Vegas, New York and London,” announces Mr. Laliberté, the only person smoking in the vast campus here where two-fifths of his 5,000 employees work. “So far the only one I truly conquered is Vegas. New York and London are still on my checklist.”

Mr. Laliberté, whose left hand was injured while cooking, is being modest, since he is hardly a newcomer to New York, where he’s put on 19 shows, or London, where he’s done 18, since Cirque’s founding in the early 1980s. He didn’t make the leap from accordion-playing street performer to one of the world’s most influential and powerful entertainment impresarios by setting his sights low.

Between now and the end of the year Cirque will open three humongous new productions. “Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour,” which has already taken in a $50 million advance, begins touring in October in Montreal. “Iris,” an action-packed fantasy that imagines an alternative history of the movies, is to be Cirque’s first permanent show in Los Angeles.

The highest-stakes gamble, however, may be “Zarkana,” which opens a four-month run at Radio City Music Hall this week. While it will go on to Madrid and Moscow — where it will play the Kremlin — it’s no accident that “Zarkana” starts in New York, the site of what Mr. Laliberté admits is the company’s first real flop. That was “Banana Shpeel,” which opened and closed in an abortive run last year. It began as an attempt to merge the circus and musical theater, telling the story of a devilish producer who promises a clown fame and fortune. By the time the show reached New York, the company had lost confidence in the concept, fired the composer, cut songs and retreated to more traditional Cirque acrobatics, albeit on a smaller scale.

Mr. Laliberté, who owns an island, a boat and seven homes, was hard to reach during some of the troubles; he was orbiting Earth, after paying $35 million to be the seventh space tourist, giving him one of the greatest excuses in the history of show business failure. “I kept hearing there are too many songs, too much like a Broadway show,” said the “Shpeel” director, David Shiner. “Guy wanted to do something different. But he was in space.”

Mr. Laliberté concedes the point and takes responsibility for the rare failure, but it also drove him back to New York, where he hopes “Zarkana” will be a summer staple at Radio City. “We’re returning like men,” he says, to “face the critics who killed us face to face.”

The message is defiant, but it’s delivered in an oddly calm, almost dispassionate voice. Mr. Laliberté has a reputation for fierceness, but despite some forceful arm waving he maintains a poised, business-like demeanor. Philippe Decouflé, the director of “Iris,” describes him as a “very nice bulldozer.”

In aiming “Zarkana” for a run in Manhattan, Cirque du Soleil is inching closer to the heart of the traditional theater world. By numbers alone it’s already a mighty rival; Cirque’s 22 current productions, including its standing Las Vegas shows and the touring big-top productions, annually sell about as many tickets as all Broadway shows combined.

The permanent shows typically cost between $40 million and $50 million, but the business model varies far more for the big-top productions that are pumped out every two years with assembly-line precision. They begin in Canada, move to the United States and then travel the world. (Cirque has touched every continent except Antarctica.) Total revenue, including tickets and merchandise, is expected to pass $1 billion for the first time next year.

Cirque has redefined one of the world’s oldest art forms. Out with the animals and the ringmaster in a red coat; in with New Agey world music, big-budget spectacle, world-class athletes and poetic clowns in swirls of caked-on makeup. The company’s influence ranges widely, from the special effects in “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” which employs former Cirque employees, to the Metropolitan Opera, where the director Robert Lepage used technology he developed while with Cirque. It even extends to the language: eyes rolled when Cirque du Soleil sued a rival American company, Cirque Dreams, for using a common word in its name. (Cirque du Soleil lost the lawsuit.) But is there any mystery why so many Anglophone companies choose to use the word Cirque?

Mr. Laliberté’s greatest triumph, however, has been in Las Vegas. Like Disney did with Times Square, Cirque helped remake the strip into a family-friendly destination. Seven permanent shows have opened there in 17 years, and despite bad reviews, economic downturns and other setbacks of live performance not one has closed.

Dominic Champagne, who has directed two of these shows, “Love” and “Zumanity,” said you could put almost anything “in a jar, put it onstage, call it Cirque du Soleil and it would be a hit.”

As Cirque has transformed from an arty alternative to traditional big-top circus into what it is today, some suggest it has become emotionally cold and risk-averse. “If Cirque is going to succeed in New York, they need to understand story — and they don’t,” said Richard Crawford, an actor currently in “War Horse” who was fired from “Banana Shpeel” last year. “They have no idea about Aristotelean plotting or character. It’s not in their heart. They come from street performers, and now they are street performance with laser beams and millions of dollars.”

The problem is that audiences have come to expect a certain scale from Cirque, and when they don’t get it, as in the case of “Shpeel,” they may be disappointed. It’s a nagging worry for Mr. Laliberté too. “Are we condemned to only doing big acrobatic shows?” he says, leaning forward with a grave look. “Creatively we have the capacity to do much more. The answer is we can explore new stuff, but we need to give the public a bone to chew on.”

For one of the most influential producers in show business Mr. Laliberté keeps a surprisingly low profile in the news media and, pointedly, within Cirque. Analyzing his character is challenging since he has few close friends, and even his longtime associates say they hardly know him. In the wake of the demise of “Banana Shpeel” Cirque opened its doors to a reporter for a rare chance to talk to him and watch as he sat in on what the company calls a “checkpoint” — basically a progress report for the boss — for the Michael Jackson show.

The formula begins with the conviction that you need something novel in every show. “Zumanity” added an erotic edge; “O” turned the stage into a vast pool. After the concept is established, the team develops what it calls the acrobatic skeleton of generally 10 acts; 6 are imported (acrobat troupes hired from China and the like), and 4 are developed internally. As Cirque has brought in directors from theater, opera and film, the script has become more important. Pairing it with the acts is as tricky a part of creation of a Cirque show as the relationship between songs and the book of the musical. Sequence is critical.

“We need to consider two things: rhythm and height,” Mr. Laliberté says. “Is it a floor, mid-range or aerial act? You can’t put three jugglers in a row or three aerialists in a row. Circus has much more highs and lows than in a play. You need your ‘wow,’ your tender moment and humor. We have our conventions.”

Wall-to-wall music, costumes and lighting work hard to create otherworldly designs that are an overwhelming mess of contradictions: nostalgic and futuristic, whimsical and melodramatic, sexy and asexual. There is just a hint of a plot. You can tease out themes. (“Saltimbanco”: immigration. “Ovo”: biodiversity.) But why bother? What it adds up to is something defiantly vague and open to interpretation. “You need to make an artistic product to be able to permit the audience to open their door,” Mr. Laliberté says. “If they want an esoteric door, there is that.”

Behind the Cirque

View Slide Show ›

But in working with the musical catalog of the King of Pop, more than acrobatics is on the line. So after the director Jamie King — who has staged concert tours by Madonna and Britney Spears — presented to Mr. Laliberté a slick video featuring choreography, designs in progress and deafeningly loud versions of “Thriller,” “Beat It” and other hits, the checkpoint grew silent. Dozens of artists and designers watched. With cigarette smoke swirling above his head, Mr. Laliberté’s deadpan expression never shifted. Nor did his posture. After the presentation he finally interrupted the tense stillness and revealed his hand — well, in part. “Michael is not prominent enough,” he said. “I need to hear him. Make his voice stronger.”

The truth is, circus is Mr. Laliberté’s third passion. His second is travel. His first is business. Within the Cirque empire he has been the major fund-raiser since the beginning; in 1983 he landed a $1.3 million grant from the provincial Quebec government to present a show as part of the celebration of the 450th anniversary of the discovery of Canada. At the time his company was a modest nonprofit that divvied up beers at the end of rehearsal in a rented gym. But his original presentation included a five-year plan with multiple shows. He was 24.

Cirque had its breakthrough in Los Angeles in 1987. “Cirque Réinventé,” staged by Guy Caron, was new for American audiences familiar with Ringling Brothers. It was dramatic, emotional, occasionally slow and highly theatrical. Disney made an offer to buy the company. So did Columbia Pictures. Mr. Laliberté turned them both down, insisting on creative control.

Mr. Caron left the company following a dispute over money, and eventually returned, but Cirque’s history is riddled with power struggles that end with one survivor. “I survived three putsches,” Mr. Laliberté says with his usual swagger.

Cirque’s golden age began, many say, when Franco Dragone, a coal miner’s son who worked in commedia dell’arte, started directing in the late 1980s with “Nouvelle Experience.” Over a decade he staged eight shows (including the Las Vegas hits “Mystère” and “O”), and his freewheeling style was rooted in the belief that performers work best when they aren’t thinking. He would ask the acrobats to race around the stage until they were out of breath to prepare for rehearsal.

Steve Wynn, who first presented Cirque in Las Vegas, hired away Mr. Dragone and much of his design team in 1999 to make their own show. Mr. Laliberté was furious. “I called up Steve Wynn and told him: ‘You think you’re buying the creative force of Cirque du Soleil. Be careful,’ ” Mr. Laliberté says. “Will I do business with Steve again? Probably not.”

Behind the scenes there was panic. “There was a concern because we had a successful model and a question of could we do it without him,” said Boris Verkhovsky, Cirque’s director of performance. “Guy said we can now be a great host for innovators and geniuses.”

Instead of finding a new artistic guru, Mr. Laliberté recruited directors from theater and film, injecting fresh ideas into the shows. By bringing in theater directors like Mr. Lepage, who had no experience with circus, and giving them bigger budgets than they had ever worked with, Cirque was taking a risk. For one thing, the chemistry of every show is different.

“At the start it was a team,” Mr. Caron said. “We all knew each other and were friends. So I could tell someone, ‘This is terrible’ and they could say, ‘Go to hell,’ and we’d be fine the next day. Now it’s so big that the decisions take a long time to go from top to bottom.”

As the organization has grown, Mr. Laliberté has delegated more. But he knows he needs to stay on the planet for the start of “Zarkana.” “The machine here is not one I always like, but there’s a limit to what I can do,” he says, flashing a lopsided smile and striking what might be the only note of insecurity in several hours of conversation. “Look,” he says, shifting into confidently matter-of fact mode. “I am in the business of live or die by the public.”

An article on June 5 about Guy Laliberté, a co-founder and the owner of Cirque du Soleil, misstated the source of a $1.3 million grant to the company to present a show as part of the celebration of the 450th anniversary of the discovery of Canada. It was the provincial government of Quebec, not the Canadian government.

How we handle corrections

Under the Tent: This is the first of two articles about the global empire of Cirque du Soleil and its reclusive impresario, Guy Laliberte. Next week: the creative journey of the company’s biggest gamble, “Zarkana,’’ from Montreal to Orlando, Fla., to New York, where it opens this month at Radio City Music Hall.

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Stonehenge Ibiza-style

A visit to some wonderful art on the south west coast of Ibiza

A bare and somewhat desolate stretch of rocky headland on Ibiza’s south west coast has been transformed into a place of international interest due to the creation of contemporary art installation  Time and Space . The sculpture was commissioned by Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte and created by Australian artist Andrew Rogers. It's often referred to as  Ibiza Stonehenge  due to its similarity to that iconic British landmark.

The monument consists of 13 huge basalt columns arranged in a semicircular shape on the edge of the cliffs above tiny Cala Llentia . Erected in 2014 amidst some controversy regarding planning permission and environmental rights, it has not yet ceased to garner questions regarding its purpose and meaning.

Modern art is always open to interpretation but this one really seems to have set peoples minds running. The central column of the structure is the largest and stands at over 20m tall, and is topped with 23 carat gold leaf. Due to its shape many think it was intended as a sundial, some think it's meant to be a compass and still more people think it's a signal, sign or landing zone for passing UFO’s.

Collective imaginations seem to be running wild due to the sculpture’s location in the grounds of Guy Laliberte’s Ibizan home. A man with a reputation for the eccentric, the Canadian not only created the world's most surreal circus experience but in 2009 was also the seventh person in the world to be sent into orbit as a Space Tourist and did so wearing a red nose, becoming the world’s first space clown. Many people seem to think that this experience in space must have something to do with his commissioning of this project and perhaps that is where the UFO ideas have come from, or perhaps they are linked to the sculpture’s location overlooking Es Vedra Rock .

The Island of Es Vedra , off the south coast of Ibiza, has long been a site of myth and legend, its place in the history of Ibiza is surrounded by tales of religious sightings, satanic ritual, sea nymphs and sirens. In modern times people have reported the island interfering with watches, compasses and other technology as well as strange lights and cloud formations being seen above the rock. Many people head to Es Vedra to pray, meditate and otherwise connect with the energy of this mystical place and apparently Guy Laliberte did express that this was a part of his intention when commissioning the project.

The artist himself,  Andrew Rogers , has said many things about his work but none seem to have definitively answered anyone’s questions. Rogers is one of the world's leading contemporary artists and the creator of the world’s largest land art project entitled ‘ Rhythms of Life ’ , which consists of 51 geoglyphs (massive stones structures) scattered across deserts, forests, cliffs and glaciers in 16 countries across the world. Time and Space  was created as a piece to be included as a part of this larger project. Rogers talks about creating pieces that connect people with their land and their heritage, creating work that connects to the past and remains for the future. When talking of this work specifically he speaks of the columns being arranged along an elliptical shape reminiscent of the paths of the planets, he also says there’s a mathematical connection to the Fibonacci sequence which recurs over and over again throughout nature.

Whatever their real intentions and whatever the true meaning of this sculpture, the fact remains that it's a unique and wonderful sight well worth a visit. Perched on the west facing cliffs, as it is this sculpture is beautiful at all times, but especially when viewed in the evening when the basalt columns change colour in the dying light and the rays of the setting sun reflect off the gold leaf tipping the central column.

Unique though it is, this sight is seldom busy as many people do not seem to be aware of its existence.

To visit drive towards Cala Conta or Cala Tarida and then follow signs to smaller Cala Codolar , you can park at the beach where there are toilets and a lovely beach restaurant and then it’s just a short walk up the hills south to the monument. There is some limited parking directly behind the monument affording easier, flatter (although not paved) access to the site.

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Guy Laliberte

Time in space: 11 days

Guy Laliberté was born in Québec City in 1959. An accordionist, stilt-walker and fire-eater, he founded the now world famous Cirque du Soleil in 1984. Guy Laliberté was the first to orchestrate the marriage of cultures and artistic and acrobatic disciplines that is the hallmark of Cirque du Soleil. Since 1984, he has guided the creative team through the creation of every show and contributed to elevating the circus arts to the level of the great artistic disciplines. Cirque du Soleil has become an international organization, as much in terms of its makeup as in the scope of its activities and influence. Guy Laliberté now heads an organization with activities on five continents.

In October 2007, Guy Laliberté entered into a second lifetime commitment by creating the ONE DROP Foundation to fight poverty around the world by providing sustainable access to safe water. This new dream stems from the knowledge that the right to water is key to the survival of individuals and communities all over the world and from the values which have been at the heart of Cirque du Soleil since its inception: the belief that life gives back what you have given and even the smallest gesture will make a difference.

Guy Laliberte became Space Adventures’ seventh private spaceflight client, and first Canadian private space explorer when he launched to space on Wednesday September 30th. During his stay in space Guy embarked on the first “poetic social mission” with the aim of raising awareness for the ONE DROP Foundation. Guy hosted a 2 hour live from space event with stars from across the world coming together at live events in 14 cities around the world. Artists and world-renowned personalities who came together to raise awareness of the importance of access to clean water, included former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, Peter Gabriel, Shakira, and U2

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