When the largest touring tent show in the world returns here this week, it will bring not just 70 horses or so, but a human crew that has an almost unimaginable variety of backgrounds.

What kind of experience do you need to help oversee Cavalia’s Odysseo, a show that somehow blends horse-riding, circus acrobatics, African dance, the spectacle of gigantic three-dimensional projection screens, a real on-stage dirt mountain, and, for the finale, more than 150,000 litres of water to splash through?

Look no further than Darren Charles, the British resident artistic director of the massive circus-meets-horse-show production set to take place under the gigantic tents by Olympic Village. Speaking to the Straight from Irvine, California, where the spectacle played before it headed to Vancouver, he talks about a background that has spanned everything from hip-hop performance to stunt work to running the African dance musical Zambezi Express.

“I didn’t even mean to have that résumé, because it all happened so naturally,” the modest, multitasking artist says with a laugh over the phone, joking: “You have to train harder when you’re a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none.”

Hardly. What his diverse, driven background has taught him is how to help the different performers in Odysseo meld their skills.

Remembering the early days of creating this production, the Cavalia company’s second, he says: “Putting dancers on-stage with the riders, not everybody was used to horses. The aerialists hadn’t experienced being next to a horse. Then the riders didn’t have experience with the acrobats from Guinea and the acrobats had never experienced horses.

“It was just amazing bringing everything together,” he adds. “Combining that relationship is what the audience sees, as well—and it becomes one magical moment.”

To understand how Charles works today, you have to go back to his life as an ambitious, sports-crazy kid growing up in England.

“When I was a boy I was training for the Olympics—for the decathlon or as a swimmer or as a high-board diver,” he recollects. “My dad used to train me. Every day before school I would be in the pool. After school I would go to the track, and then after track I would go to football. I wasn’t forced to do this. I was a young boy; I felt the sport and I didn’t know which I liked best, so I decided to do them all!”

At around 14, he went to meet a friend who was taking hip-hop dance classes—and he was taken by both the movement and the girls.

“The next time, I lied to my parents and I didn’t go to football. I went to try dance and I was hooked,” he says. “But I kept doing everything else, as well. I just added dance to my curriculum.”

Soon, he was competing in dance festivals, and, at just 16, he headed to London Studio Centre to study dance and acting. He then began four years of training at Bodywork Company Cambridge, and was already getting jobs in his first year, riding a new wave of athletic, hip-hop–infused movement. “We sort of started a new genre in the U.K. I used some of my athletic and diving skills and everything I learned to dance.”

Adding to his skills, the young man delved into stunt work and its various disciplines, including the diving and horse-riding.

Charles embarked later on a busy career touring with the likes of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cameron Mackintosh, and the Spice Girls.

His incredible range of experience brought him to Montreal and the new Odysseo show. Out of all the work he would do there, the most initially nerve-racking was working with the troupe of dancer-acrobats that Cavalia founder Normand Latourelle had brought in from Guinea for a segment of the show that seems (thanks to the 3-D video projections) to unfold on a vast African savannah.

“These guys from Guinea saw this white guy coming in to teach them how to dance. I was nervous,” he admits. “So I said, ‘You guys dance in a circle and I will copy you.’ They started dancing, I started dancing, and the ice was broken. I had to prove myself and they proved themselves to me, too. We just met in the middle. That was five years ago. And now it’s like I have 12 sons. I’m just like a father figure to them.”

Teaching riders how to perform was another big challenge for Charles. As he puts it: “They’re used to competing for the gold or silver, not bringing the performance to the stage. I gave them lessons in facial expressions, how to hold their bodies.”

Steven Paulson, a young rider who joined the show a year and a half ago, remembers that transition.

Like Charles, the American has a far-from-average background. An avid rider as a boy, training at a “little proper English riding school”, he eventually found his way, as a teen, into the world of polo.

He continued on his high-school team and then played professionally until he was 21. He worked his way up from grooming horses to training his own—at one time he had six—and reselling them. “It was fun buying a project horse and developing it,” he tells the Straight from California.

That work training and riding horses led him to Cavalia. It took him three weeks of rehearsing with the troupe to learn how to perform and connect with an audience—something he’d never had to think about before.

“Even at polo matches, the biggest crowds would maybe be 2,000 and at no one time was I ever worried about where I held my head or hand,” Paulson relates. “There’s something Darren has really helped me with: of course, you want to sit up tall and have your heels down, but to connect with the audience was pretty much my mission with him. He’ll even videotape me and say, ‘Look at how you smile,’ or ‘Look at this.’

“But it did not come easily. I’m tall and gangly.…I don’t know how to stage-run. I loved it so much because it was so difficult.”

These days, Paulson enjoys getting into the different characters he plays in the show’s diverse acts, from standing with strength and arrogance on racing horses in the Roman number to running around as the “happy village guy” in the opener. Amid all the tricks and jumps the dressage expert performs, his favourite is Odysseo’s renowned “Liberté” sequence, in which he and other trainers each guide four horses with no reins or commands. It’s about as far as you can get from Paulson’s polo days, as the animals influence the scene according to their moods.

“Last night, one ran away and tried jumping on another one,” he says with a laugh. “ ‘Liberté’ is so different for me and so fun and rewarding. It’s based on your energy, and the horses really react to it; just with positive energy they’ll do the world for you. It’s such a relationship, such a bond.

“The riding is definitely different than professional riding, where everything is straight and correct,” he adds of the show as a whole. “We’re not working so much on being perfect, but working more on the horses having freedom.”

On top of everything, Paulson is also trying to learn French: most of the rehearsals are in the language, and Paulson, one of two Americans, is surprised by how much he is able to understand these days.

Clearly, there’s enough challenge and excitement to convince Paulson to happily stick around. “Six-Week Steven is kind of my nickname at home: I’ll have a fun project and go with it,” he says with a laugh. “This is kind of my dream job. I’m in a city six or eight weeks, then it’s on to the next one, and there are always new horses we get to train coming into the show.”

It says something, too, that Darren Charles, who’s moved between so many careers, still feels fulfilled here after six years.

“There are so many elements in the show, more than in any other show,” he says. “I still get artistic freedom from Normand. With a live show, you will see it always matures. I might change a pattern or a bit of choreography. It keeps me on my toes, too,” he says, and then recalls that boy who always wanted to do everything simultaneously: “It’s like as I was as a child.”

Cavalia’s Odysseo runs from Sunday (January 29) to February 26 at the White Big Top near Olympic Village.