LOS ANGELES—Normand Latourelle is only half joking when he says that, before he created Cavalia, he could barely tell the difference between a horse and a cow.

As a cofounder and former director general of Cirque du Soleil, Latourelle certainly had a good grasp on large-scale entertainment. But 10 years ago, when the now-independent artistic director started the process of creating a new multimedia hybrid of acrobatics and horse riding—something as far away as possible from the feathered-headdress horse shows of circuses in the past—he knew nothing about the equestrian realm. And that, it turns out, was his big advantage.

“I came to that world without prejudice,” explains the affable and boyishly unpretentious Latourelle, who’s seen his unique touring show play to millions, from Berlin to Boston, over the past eight years. He’s sitting at a Burbank café in late morning, after a warmly received opening night in Los Angeles, where Cavalia is showing before making its way to Vancouver for its local premiere. “First of all, horse people are all in different worlds. You have the dressage, you have the jumping, you have the rodeo people, you have the racers, and you have the circus people—and no one wants anything to do with one another.”

Researching the different forms, and working with French trainers Magali Delgado and Frédéric Pignon, he sought to blend those worlds into a single show. Today, Cavalia features 50 horses, from Lusitanos to Arabians, on a horizontal tent stage as long as an NFL football field. The acts range from the strict formations of the Haute Ecole to cowboys hanging by their bootstraps off the backsides of racing quarter horses to unbridled colts gambolling freely about. But Latourelle also throws other elements into the mix, including digital video projections, live music, and acrobats who sometimes bounce on and off the horses from giant bungees.

“I was totally innocent, and I said, ”˜Well, we need to have people flying,’” Latourelle relates, laughing. “Everyone, everybody in the horse world said, ”˜You’re crazy! The horses are going to be spooked!’”

But in a testament to the patience that went into developing this show—“For all the hours that go into one minute of performance for an acrobat, it’s 10 times that for a horse,” Latourelle says—he encouraged the team to try to teach the animals that the airborne acrobats were not a threat. “Slowly, over two weeks, we brought a girl on a bungee down from the ceiling, lower and lower, and when she finally reached the horse she gave it a carrot. So it’s easy now: every time he sees somebody coming from the ceiling, he thinks a carrot is coming. And he’s okay with that.”

Watch a preview for Cavalia.

If Cavalia’s on-stage antics look different from other shows out there, so does the atmosphere backstage. In the stables—which, along with an exercise paddock, are part of the multipeaked white tent complex—the after-show feeling is surprisingly calm. Latourelle says the artists here are more down to earth than you might find at a regular circus. “The real horse people are very grounded, very balanced. With a horse you can’t cheat; it’s for real,” he says, adding the humans in Cavalia have to be humble, too. “The big difference between Cavalia and the circus is the circus is all about the trainer—about how good you are at training the animal—and you as a trainer get the applause. In Cavalia, it’s the horse that usually gets the applause.”

Less than 45 minutes ago, Fairland Ferguson was riding two galloping horses Roman style, standing with one foot on each one, while driving a team of four others. But, still wearing makeup and costume, she’s now doing her postshow ritual, standing in a stall, and braiding the tail of her favourite quarter horse—Amaretto, whose auburn-red hair is the same colour as Ferguson’s. This time is crucial to bonding with the horse she relies on for her acts, she explains. “I have never spent so much time earning a horse’s trust as I have with this one,” says Ferguson, who grew up in small-town Virginia before getting into rodeo trick-riding and finally learning the normally male-dominated Roman style. “Now he’ll walk through fire for me.”

Further down in the barn, the preternaturally calm Sylvia Zerbini is grooming one of her white Arabians. The ethereal-looking, blond French-American performs one of the most talked-about sequences in Cavalia, the spell-binding “Liberty” act, in which she performs with nine horses that are free of reins, sending them into tight circles with a swoop of a finger or a soft-spoken word. She’s calls herself a “horse listener” who often has to help others in the cast when they have a problem with their animal.

Raised among horses, Zerbini explains she spent years developing her ability to communicate with them. “The most difficult thing is keeping all the attention on all nine at the same time,” she says of her act. “I have to make it fun for them; I don’t ever want them to get bored. But when I go out I never know what to expect because it’s ”˜Liberty’, and it’s the freest form of horsemanship—there’s nothing holding them toward me, they can go at any time.”

In many ways, Zerbini’s act illustrates another way that Latourelle’s outsider take on horses has affected the show: he seems proudest of Zerbini’s rein-free segment, and doesn’t allow the use of crops, spurs, or whips.

For his part, Latourelle admits he had little idea of what he was getting into when he first dreamed up Cavalia—nor the logistical demands of transporting dozens of horses, stopping to let them go out to pasture during breaks between shows, and erecting what is reportedly the world’s largest touring tent. But the horses, and the production, have become his life. Back at home in Montreal, he’s already creating Cavalia 2, a show, he promises, that will push his new genre even further, upping the on-stage maximum of horses from 16 to 44 and building an on-set “mountain” that reaches 17 metres high.

Despite all this, Latourelle is not about to take up riding himself. “I worked for Cirque du Soleil for many years and I’ve never been on a trapeze,” he says with a shrug and a smile, but then adds he has learned to admire and respect the animals in this show. “To me, I see them as an artist. I know them all, I speak to them all. I have small talk with them and sometimes I scratch them. But my passion is looking at them as a performers.”

Cavalia comes to the White Big Top by the Olympic Village on False Creek from March 22 to April 10.