This is the fourth in a series of articles exploring the life and artistic legacy of Richard MacDonald. Read the previous articles here: Article 1 · Article 2 · Article 3
The First Encounter
It began not with a formal collaboration but with a conversation between a sculptor and a performer.
In the early 2000s, Richard MacDonald's mime sculptures were selected to be displayed at Cirque du Soleil VIP opening night events through Lincoln-Mercury. He was invited to attend, with backstage access to meet the performers. What he found there would expand his creative world in ways he couldn't have anticipated.
Viktor Kee. Sasha Fedortchev. Elena Serafimovich. Stephan Choiniere. Among the most gifted and celebrated performers in Cirque at the time. MacDonald began working with them directly as models, and friendships formed alongside the work. He brought the same obsessive quality of attention he had brought to every subject before them. The mime had given him the language of the body in silence. The ballet had given him the language of the body in discipline. Now he was encountering bodies that operated at the outer limits of what the human form was physically capable of doing, and making it look inevitable.
Richard MacDonald with performer Stephan Choiniere.
He did what he has always done. He immersed himself completely.
The early works from this period, Elena, Sasha, Blind Faith, Caruso, are the record of an artist learning a new subject from the inside, building understanding through sustained observation and direct collaboration with some of the most extraordinary performers of their time.
Richard MacDonald with performer Elena Serafimovich.
The collaboration
In time, that body of work and those relationships found their way to Guy Laliberté, the founder of Cirque du Soleil.
What happened next was unprecedented.
Laliberté and MacDonald began a formal collaboration rooted in a shared recognition of what the other was pursuing. Two artists. Two disciplines. One shared understanding of what the human body is capable of expressing when it is asked to give everything. As part of that collaboration, Laliberté granted MacDonald something no other visual artist had ever been given: exclusive behind the scenes access to Cirque du Soleil performers. Not as a commissioned documentarian. Not as a visiting artist given a guided tour. As a working sculptor given the freedom to observe, study, and record what he witnessed at close range.
Richard MacDonald with performer Anna Batchuluun Brown.
"The art of Richard MacDonald reveals the infinite beauty of the human body," Laliberté said. "The characters he creates are playing forever in the theatre of life."
what the access produced
What made this collaboration transformative was not simply proximity to extraordinary performers. It was what those performers could do, and what that made possible for the sculptor.
A Cirque du Soleil performer operates in a physical dimension unlike any other human subject. Inverted. Suspended. Contorted into positions that produce sculptural compositions simply unavailable anywhere else. The poses, postures, and spatial relationships these bodies could achieve gave MacDonald an entirely new range of compositional possibilities, forms that no dancer, athlete, or model from any other world could have provided.
Beyond what their bodies could do, there was what the access revealed. Backstage. In rehearsal. In the suspended moments between the public performance and the private reality of what these bodies were actually doing. Not the finished spectacle, but the raw physical truth underneath it.
These are the moments that define his Cirque works. Not the peak of the performance but the breath before it. Not the impossible held position but the fraction of a second during which the body is still deciding whether the impossible is possible.
O: The bellagio and beyond
O is the name of Cirque du Soleil's most celebrated production, and by 2009 the collaboration had brought MacDonald directly into its world.
O has performed continuously at the Bellagio since 1998. It takes place in and above a 1.5 million gallon pool. Its performers do things the human body was never designed to do. And it exists in one of the most culturally significant entertainment venues on earth.
For MacDonald, the O Series represented what that moment of access and immersion made possible. The relationships built over nearly a decade. The understanding developed through sustained direct observation. The trust that only time and shared creative purpose can produce.
O-Anya. O-Turu. O-Flier. Bullwhip. Fan.
Each one a different performer, a different discipline, a different answer to the same question he has never stopped asking. Not portraits of performances. Not captured poses. Bodies caught in their most alive transitional moment, held permanently in bronze by a sculptor who understood from the inside what he was looking at.
This is what years of trust, access, and obsessive study produces. Work that could not have existed any other way. And the work is not finished. Neither is the conversation that produced it.
Explore the Cirque Collection · View the Full Collection
Thank you for being a part of Richard's journey. The next chapter is coming. Stay tuned.
Dawson Cole Fine Art is located on the corner of Lincoln and Sixth in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. Open Monday through Saturday 10am to 6pm, Sunday 10am to 5:30pm. Contact us at gallery@dawsoncolefineart.com or 831.624.8200.
80 Years in Motion, works by Richard MacDonald, is on view through December 2026.
August 25, 2026
