Franco Dragone

In 2017, Dragone's show La Perle opened in Al Habtoor City, Dubai, in a custom-made 10-story theater. The show involved waterfalls, fires, motorcyclists spinning inside a suspended metal sphere, acrobatics into water, and other features. Preparing La Perle took Dragone four to five years, and during its first year he "continually tweaked and improved" the show.

By September 2017, around 100 million people had seen Dragone's work.

In 2014, Dragone opened The Han Show in Wuhan, China, celebrating the essence of the Han culture. The Han Show Theater, designed by Mark Fisher and inspired by the traditional red Chinese lantern, is 60 meters high, 100 meters in diameter and houses more than 2000 seats. In spring 2015, Dragone created a new show in Paris for the cabaret Le Lido, titled Paris Merveilles. In March 2016 he confirmed he was working on a new project for Las Vegas. In 2016, Dragone directed a new show featuring Russian pop icon Philipp Kirkorov called Я (Ya, lit. 'I'), which premiered in the Kremlin Palace on March 16.

In early 2013, Dragone produced, created and directed Story of a Fort, Legacy of a Nation, a show that ran from February 28 through March 9, 2013 as the centrepiece event of the Qasr al-Hosn festival in Abu Dhabi. The show celebrated Emirati history with technology, acrobatics, and traditional Emirati dance and music.

In 2012, Dragone's new cabaret Taboo: The Show Naughty and Naughtier premiered at City of Dreams.

On March 29, 2012, Dragone was awarded a doctor honoris causa degree for general merits by the University of Antwerp, in recognition of his innovative and cosmopolitan approach to theatre.

In 2012 Dragone's business group came under investigation by Belgian authorities for "serious and organized international tax offenses" and money laundering. The group's offices in Louvain, as well as the private homes of Franco Dragone, the group's CEO, its CFO and a former employee, were raided in October 2012 as part of the investigation. The Belgian investigating office suspected Dragone of fraudulently using a global network of shell companies to conceal assets in offshore tax havens to avoid paying taxes. In a press conference addressing the investigation in January 2013, Dragone claimed that the purpose of setting up this international structure had not been to commit fraud, but to avoid double or triple taxation by different countries. He added that he was ready to change his business' structure to provide more transparency. His company Lina International, reportedly used to finance The House of Dancing Water, was named in the Panama Papers in 2015.

Franco Dragone was in charge of the opening ceremony show for the 2010 South American Games that took place in Medellín, Colombia on March 19, 2010. The main themes of the show were inspired by Medellin's culture, business and geography.

In 2010, building on his previous experience using aquatic stages in O and Le Rêve, Dragone directed a Macau-based show entitled The House of Dancing Water in the City of Dreams. The House of Dancing Water is the largest aquatic production in the world, and was developed by Dragone in Belgium over 19 months, with the permanent theater taking five years to build. It features around 70 artists, some from Dragone's previous creations with Cirque du Soleil, performing dance, swimming and acrobatics. The House of Dancing Water is set in the 2000-seat Dancing Water Theater designed by Pei Partnership Architects. The 270-degree theater-in-the-round has a central stage with a diameter of approximately 25 meters (82 feet), surrounded by sloped seating on three sides. The theater arena has a 40-meter-high steel trussed space (30 meters clear) providing generous height to the show’s display of acrobatics. The show, which incorporates various design elements such as fire, water effects, and atmospheric effects, premiered on 17 September 2010.

In 2007, he directed a new musical based on Prosper Mérimée's novella Carmen, which premiered at the La Jolla Playhouse. He also worked on an adaption of the Divine Comedy with composer Ennio Morricone.

In 2005, Dragone debuted his fourth production on the Las Vegas Strip with the opening of Le Rêve at the Wynn Las Vegas. For this show he used performers mainly from disciplines related to gymnastics. Like his 1998 show O for Cirque du Soleil, Le Rêve made extensive use of a custom-designed water stage. CNN called it a "bombastic, splashy celebration of life" with "diving feats and stunning special effects".

In 2000 he amicably split from Cirque du Soleil and formed his own company called the Franco Dragone Entertainment Group (later shortened to "Dragone"), based in his hometown of La Louvière in Belgium. In 2003 Dragone created A New Day... starring Céline Dion at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. When A New Day ended its run in 2007, Billboard reported it was the highest-grossing residency of all time.

His visibility greatly increased after he directed and introduced the cutting-edge Cirque du Soleil production Mystère at the Treasure Island hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. Mystère helped to change the nature of production shows in Las Vegas. While Dragone would direct only one other show with the company in Las Vegas, O in 1998, to many he was the face of Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas. The shows Dragone created with Cirque du Soleil had single-handedly brought the contemporary circus movement into the mainstream of American entertainment. Around the world, close to 100 million people have now seen Dragone’s creations. Dragone directed Cirque du Soleil's first motion picture, Alegría, in 1999. In 1999 Dragone directed the music video for Lara Fabian's song "Adagio".

From the years 1985 to 1998, Dragone would direct nearly all of Cirque du Soleil's most prestigious shows and played a significant role in developing Cirque du Soleil's distinctive merging of theater and circus performance. In the early 1990s, Dragone's reputation grew with the production of Nouvelle Expérience and Saltimbanco, nontraditional circus productions in which postmodern dance, music, and circus acrobatics were interlaced with a dreamlike narrative.

In the 1980s, Dragone came to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in pursuit of "a beautiful girl". In Montreal, Guy Caron, director of the National Circus School, invited him to conduct workshops with the students and teachers at his school. Dragone then created, directed and produced a show for the end of the school year. Guy Laliberté saw one of these performances in 1984, the same year he formed Cirque du Soleil. In 1985, Laliberté sought out Guy Caron to join Cirque du Soleil. Caron, in turn, asked Dragone to join as a creator.

In the 1970s he studied theatre at the Belgian Royal Conservatory of Mons. Starting his career as an actor in subsidized Belgian art theater, he switched to activist theater, or "theater without actors" according to Dragone. His earliest theatrical work was explicitly political, working as a director of theatre and film in the mode of the commedia dell'arte dramatist Dario Fo. The theatre works he helped create expressed social situations, interpreting true stories of the homeless, drug addicts, and prison inmates, and casting non-actors who shared their stories to perform in the shows. In this context Dragone began to teach staging, or visual expression, and came to believe that it was "possible to do high quality shows for mainstream people".

Franco Dragone (born 1952) is an Italian theatre director. He is the founder and artistic director of Dragone, a creative company specializing in the creation of large-scale theatre shows. He is also known for his work with Cirque du Soleil and Celine Dion.

Dragone was born in 1952 in Cairano, a small town in southern Italy. At the age of seven, he moved to the mining region of La Louvière in Belgium with his family so his parents could work in Belgium's coal mines. He remembers that being an "artist" was not treated seriously by the mining community in La Louvière. His father, however, was broad-minded and enrolled Dragone in a liberal lycée. As a student, Dragone was taught a wide range of topics and was allowed to choose his field of interest. Dragone chose the arts.