No business like show business

Scott Wallace shows off his prized body tattoos. Picture / Kenny Rodger

Most people go to the circus and get to see girls in spangles and sexy geezers in tights. I turn up and - oh great - the entertainment on offer is two blokes with their shirts off, comparing tattoos. One is Scott Wallace, Cirque du Soleil's very responsible tour manager. The other is the Herald photographer.

"Bloody men," I say. Actually, replies Wallace, "we've got more tattooed women than men".

Goodness, and I thought Cirque du Soleil was one of those politically correct circuses - no monkeys and not an elephant in sight. Alas, I also never get to see a tattooed lady. I do get to see rather a lot of Wallace - and rather a lot of him, in my view, is tattooed. But he says he has "plenty of room" for the Maori tattoo he plans to add.

Wallace is, to all intents and purposes, the big boss of all those who work in, or around, the big top on its Auckland engagement. He is called the tour manager, but he's really the general manager. What people tend to think, on first meeting, is that "I'm a bouncer in a bar somewhere".

I wouldn't have thought that. With his shirt on - even though it is plain black worn over faded jeans - he sounds like any general manager of a large-ish corporation.

Within minutes of meeting him in the large pre-fab which serves as the restaurant to the 138 circus workers, he has used more management jargon than old-time circuses had performing animals. He has silver bangles on his wrists and rings in his ears and is talking about "global initiatives" and "strategic" this and "strategic" that and something called "harmonisation".

This is the sort of nonsense that makes an interviewer want to run screaming. So is the fact that the media minder, despite my having said earlier, firmly, that we were fine from here, thank you very much, has moved back to our table. This has the usual effect: I ask a question; Wallace answers while looking at the media minder.

All this is a reminder that Cirque du Soleil is very big business. If you raise the question about whether it is now a franchise, Wallace says only a few reporters have said any such thing and "each show is so unique anyone who could say franchise doesn't understand creativity".

I don't understand jargon so I have said - nicely, of course: "Harmonisation?" Oh, all right. Perhaps I said it with a slight sneer. Because Wallace, who turns out to be quite a jolly chap who I'm sure would be great fun at a game of strip poker, hastily adds that "it's actually a good word. Because it's harmony that keeps everything in balance ... which is the part I like. I don't like it as a catchword, but I like what it stands for".

What it stands for is some more jargon straight from the company line. He tells me a bit later that since he became the boss - one management word he doesn't much like - "I probably don't go out and get crazy drunk ... I sometimes can be a bit guarded".

So I was, let me tell you, very relieved indeed when he took off his shirt. And we did ask.

Of course I was also relieved to hear that he had done this before. When he went for his job with the circus in 1999, he took off his shirt in that interview too. This was because the human resources person had noticed a small tattoo on his right hand and wanted to know whether "my tattoos were all the way up. And I took my jacket off, and I took my shirt off to show off my tattoos".

Wallace had worn a suit "and I was later told that they thought I was too conservative". The tattoos were "kind of how I got the job".

That and his 20 years in the industry. He started as a lighting technician who became what is called a "technical theatre specialist". He worked in his hometown, Boston, with the ballet and the opera. He had gone to university but "blew it off after six months". His father, a now-retired FBI agent, wasn't "real thrilled". He is now. Wallace says the circus is "one that he can latch on to a little bit better than the opera company or ballet company". His mother, a journalist, "has always been supportive".

Wallace has always been a sort of modern nomad. He doesn't own a home and has never worried about owning one. "I think you certainly have to be of a personality to not be tied to one place. That would be too difficult to pick up your life every six or eight weeks and move again if you were that type of person."

His great-grandfather was a cabin boy on a ship that sailed out of Boston "and he was tattooed wrist to shoulder. I heard stories about him, after I had already started being tattooed and nomadic. But my grandmother is convinced that there is some of him in me: a kind of restless spirit that needs to be on the go".

He is a bit like a sailor whose ship happens to be a very large tent. The tattoos are like those sailors pick up on their travels: mementoes of places passed through, of experiences had. "They mark the places in my life: Japan, Barcelona, Amsterdam."

On the inside of his right arm are the prints of a wolf. He lived - in between travelling - on an American Indian reservation "off and on for about two years. And the wolf seemed to be, kind of, the spirit that spoke most to me".

Wallace says his personal philosophy, and his management philosophy, are taken from a "Lakota spirit belief [called] going round the medicine wheel". He finds this a handy sort of management tool because it means that "if you have empathy for another human being you can't give them harm ... It's hard to hate somebody you have empathy for."

He also still wears a St Christopher medal, which sits beneath his jade carving from New Zealand. He was raised a Catholic and still goes to church occasionally. He also still attends pow-wows when he's in North America.

"I kind of don't believe in the one way up the mountain theory. I believe in multiple ways." This sounds suspiciously like more harmonisation to me. But somehow, coming from a bloke with his shirt off, it's as entertaining as a circus.