It is late August in Montreal and Canada's second-biggest city is inching towards the end of summer, clinging like a limpet to the last warm days of the season before the long, freezing winter takes hold. On this particular day, the sun is shining and the temperature is already in the high twenties - and it's only 9am. Even though it's a weekday, the clean, wide streets are almost deserted as we head to Montreal's poorest district, Saint-Michel.
A half-hour taxi ride from downtown, Saint-Michel sits in the northeast of the city and is home to 145,000-plus people.
The crime rate is high and many are unemployed. But despite the borough's problems, there is a ray of hope here, forthis is where the wildly innovative Cirque du Soleil has chosen to put down its roots. Meaning 'Circus of the Sun' in French, Cirque has been breathing life back into the marginalised community since 1997.
Cirque began its journey in 1984, inaugurated by a merry band of penniless street performers who had joined forces two years earlier to entertain the crowds of Baie-Saint-Paul, a small town near Quebec City, with a colourful mix of juggling, stilt walking, fire breathing and music. Back then, the troupe members, including Guy Laliberte, Cirque's visionary founder and chief executive, and the pioneering Gilles Ste-Croix, had no idea of the incredible journey they were about to embark upon; a voyage that would take their unique human circus around the world and, along the way, make them wealthy beyond their dreams.
Twenty-one years have passed and Ste-Croix is now in his mid-50s. The legendary stilt walker is still with Cirque, where he is the vice-president of creation, new project development. He's seen Cirque balloon from a group of 73 people, who relied on government grants to bring their distinctive brand of entertainment to the masses, to a multi-award-winning global business that generates an annual gross revenue of US$500 million, 85 per cent of which comes from ticket sales, and employs a staff of more than 3,000.
Today, he looks like a cross between a cowboy and a beach bum. Sporting flip-flops, blue jeans, a short-sleeved cowboy shirt, a chunky silver bracelet and a thumb ring, his choice of attire could have been swayed by the weather. Or it could be a reminder of his hippie days, spent on a commune in the 1970s. Then again, he's renowned for a love of horses, which could explain the cowboy influence. Whichever way you look at it, Ste-Croix is not your typical company executive; as one of the founding members of Cirque, his life has been far from ordinary.
'At the beginning, we were people on the street and we were just trying to make ourselves a job. We were trying to make it as a new type of artist - street players - and [we had] no ideas of 'circus' because a circus seemed so big and unattainable for us,' he says. 'The government gave us a grant to create a travelling fair, which was our first formula. That was 1984. It was limited because it was a seasonal project, but it was really through the commitment and the belief of Laliberte to make it stronger and to establish it as a style and a form of circus [that we got off the ground].