It has taken nearly 18 months and more than $500,000 for Cirque du Soleil officials and performers to feel confident and comfortable about reintroducing the Epic Battle Scene that reaches the climatic finale of its spectacular “Ka” at MGM Grand. It was June 29 last year that a cable was cut during a performance, and acrobat Sarah Guillot-Guyard plunged 90 feet off the rising vertical wall to her death.
Her death from blunt force trauma was the first onstage accident resulting in death in Cirque’s 30-year history. Founder Guy Laliberte commented at the time: “I am heartbroken, and we are all completely devastated. We are reminded with great humility and respect how extraordinary our artists are each and every night.”
Shows were put on hold but resumed in a modified form July 16 with a full schedule as of July 23. The battle scene was replaced with an alternative sequence and then a previous video projection of the act.
Now for the first time, Cirque execs have given full details of the malfunctions that led to the tragedy. Performers on Wednesday gave a preview of the reinstated version of the battle scene that returned to “Ka” on Friday and Saturday and then this weekend before its full-time inclusion.
Jerry Nadal and Calum Pearson, senior Cirque officers in Las Vegas, were candid and frank about the circumstances that led to Sarah’s death, but they said that she would have wanted the scene to be kept in the show.
“It was a tragedy that occurred that night,” Jerry said. “We’re not trying to assign blame. It was all of the things happening together, some that were just unforeseeable.”
Calum explained why the scene was in the show in the first place: “Part of the answer has always been with the storytelling, the final part of the journey of good vs. evil, the bad guys had to be overcome, they have to be thrown off the balcony with a violent force that took them out of the combat that had run throughout the whole show fighting hard and in everybody’s faces.
“Bravery was part of the tribe essence of what these people were, so to have them just walk off the battlefield didn’t make sense. The original concept, the good guys came up literally running across the battlefield and forced them off. It was a very violent, high-speed exit.
“We always have several human elements that are guarding the artists. A technician is assigned to each line. That night, it didn’t work. Neither Sarah nor her tech caused the accident, but something allowed the next chain of events to occur. The force of the cable somehow collapsed forward, and in doing so it jumped out of the pulley wheel where the sharp edge of the pinch points collapsed and then cut the cable, sending her into free fall.
“Initial reports said Sarah was traveling too fast, she slipped free of the safety gear. None of that is true. We know from not only our investigation but also the OSHA investigation plus two third parties that conducted a transparent forensic analysis on everything that the cable did not snap, the harness did not fail. The cable was cut because it was able to jump out of its pulley and find a sharp edge it was never supposed to see.
“Before we moved forward, we had to understand everything on how to correct that. The reason it took a year and a half is because out of respect to Sarah and our own safety protocols. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t just take our first view on this and fix all of those things without understanding everything that happened with the chain.
“We brought in a company called REI and a company called Exponents. Both of those companies specialize in accident investigation, mechanical fatigue and family investigation. Between their two reports, the OSHA report and the forensic report, it gave us a full picture of everything that went wrong in each of those steps of the chain and allowed us to correct them.
“The first and foremost factor in all of this was the speed. So we have completely eliminated that speed from being able to occur in the future. We also wanted to make sure that the human element was no longer a last line of defense for this. Even though we are still maintaining the human element, it’s no longer the final say.
“We had to say that because when we looked at this again, either one, Sarah or the technician, could have had a medical issue there that night that would have would have meant they wouldn’t have been able to perform at 100 percent the way they were supposed to. So we introduced a slow zone and a whole second set of software that monitors the first software.
“So if the first one, when it gets to a certain parameter, if it hasn’t been made inactive, the second one will take over and it’s off. All the performers operate their own controls, but for that final fly up that’s now automated, that is now under the machine control so the machine can monitor it, and then the second machine will monitor the first machine.
“During that year and a half, we talked to the artists and the cast and coaches about any other concerns they had with the act. We also added other changes, changed some of the choreography. There is the possibility that two people could collide and that one person could pick up another person and travel several feet and if that person slipped off, it could generate similar shock on the system.
“So we built in changes to ensure that it was addressed in three different ways. If one of the lines sees zero weight on it, it will stop operating. If one person picks up too much weight, like another performer, then the brakes are degraded so they are unable to keep going. The third one is that we constantly maintain a visual from the very first swing out.
“The stage now also makes one extra groove where it closed so there is no way any excess cable will allow them to get underneath the stage. They would just have to walk up the stage to get back into position. So it doesn’t sound like a huge amount of stuff, but the complexity of doing that took a while. The validations of doing that took a while.
“After that of course we wanted to make sure that everybody coaching and artists alike were comfortable with the changes. We walked them through, took them upstairs, showed them the changes that happened on the winch.
“One final change was with the pulley that collapsed. It is no longer in the system. The winches themselves have always been inverted opposite to the ceiling to keep tension on them. Without tension, the cable could jump off the front. So what we did was added in framing so the winches are still bolted to the ceiling, but they’re now lower.
“So all those changes together ensure that none of the circumstances that happened that night can ever happen again. We asked the artistic team to evaluate, validate and let us know if they were comfortable and then get back on the wall.
“It’s humbling sitting here because seeing the courage and tenacity of all these guys who came, the way they came together the first day after the accident when they arrived back in the room and just got on the single point lines, I will never be prouder in my life to see this group come together and talk each other through it and just join together as a family, as a team, and say, ‘Yes, this is important. It’s important for us, and it’s also important to Sarah.’ ”
The Cirque team used multiple ways to validate the changed systems. Loads were applied gradually and then went from gentle shock to violent shock. They used sandbags to test weights. They performed destruction tests on every aspect of the rigging and then tested the extremities of weights and speeds to the point of power outage. Cirque insisted that they were far in excess of manufacturers’ recommended figures for working loads until they were wholly satisfied.
I talked one-on-one with Calum and asked first why the need to bring back the act that caused the death of one of the artists:
Q. Why even bring it back after what happened? We know it is highly dangerous.
The first reason was closing the story out. The whole show is about the dichotomy of these two tribes and their unpleasantness to each other and their final confrontation, so it is important the story had to close out with a final battle of good over evil. The second is the visual majesty of the size and scale of what we do in battle. It was the original director’s vision, and there’s nothing that we could conceive of that would replace it for the thrill of the audience and for being true to the story. Thirdly, it was important to the team here at the show.
Everybody on the show loves the battle. It’s a badge of honor for them. Everybody strives and works hard to be in that act and, knowing that this was Sarah’s favorite act, everyone has pushed very hard to ensure that this particular scene made it back into “Ka.”
Q. Did you try to think of another way to close the show?
We did, actually. One of the first thoughts was that the battle act would move out into the theater to the posts and beams around the audience. When we originally built this theater, we spent an extra $15 million making the structural so we could have people swinging out and off everything else, but at the end of the day that was duplicating the animation in the show earlier.
You first introduced the bad guys, they are swinging around and they are doing the upside down repels. To have it just replicated for the closing of the show, even though we could have done a lot with this, it wasn’t the same as what we’ve done.
Q. Do you think Sarah and her family would be pleased that this battle scene is back?
Yes, I guarantee it. This was her favorite part of “Ka.” Sarah was a forest creature originally in this act. We originally started with 16 lines on the battle, and it slowly moved down to 13 that was a case of maintaining. Thirteen was the number we could maintain with the number of artists we had if someone was out hurt or out sick. We could always maintain 13 lines, whereas 16 lines was somewhat of a stretch. So her line had been cut, and when she found that out, she was insistent that she learn other roles so that she could stay in the act.
Q. So in a sense, it honors her legacy. Forgive this difficult question, but when somebody has died in a theatrical performance, there has to be a level of apprehension when performing it again for the first time after a long absence. How do you get performers past that apprehension?
Reminding them that this is for them as much as anybody else and for them to remind each other. I’d say the biggest part here was seeing them come together. Their apprehension started long before setting foot back on the battle wall because we have a lot of other single-point winches in the show. One of which, the deep, where they come down and there’s the bubble, I mean that’s actually a double line, but it’s from the same height. All the swing out that you see from the start of the show, during the forest scene, those are all single lines.
They had to go back on those lines a year and a half ago. By the time we were coming back to battle itself, the first couple of rehearsals were a little hesitant. When they got up to that element just before the fly-out, they quickly moved past that because they’d done the last year and a half of being back on the lines themselves without being in that particular act. They weren’t on those winches, they were on different winches, but they were on the same mechanisms.
Q. But it wasn’t on the vertical wall?
It wasn’t the wall, no, but that helped having them do all the other swings during the show and also having the simulation wall in the training room. So it was a gradual step getting back up, a year and a half gradual step up to getting back on the wall.
Q. The choreography, complicated to anybody who watches, looks simpler and cleaner to what I remember. Am I correct?
It’s cleaner, for sure. I wouldn’t say it’s simpler. Actually, they’ve added several elements that weren’t there at the very beginning. There are a couple of scenes where the forest creatures come face down, and you have the spearman surfing on top of them. That was never in there before. There are a couple of double interactions where they lift them overhead and then spin them around, and they come back. That was never in the original.
So the choreography in a sense got more complicated, but it’s much cleaner because now instead of it all happening at once, it’s a “look at this now,” then “look at this now” in steps instead of looking at everything the whole time. Before, there was a lot of movement happening that you never really noticed because you were looking at this up here because that was where our eye took you. Our coaching team has done a really good job of creating pockets of focus throughout the act so that when you look at them it’s like, wow, that’s really hard, but it’s not as confusing as it was before.
Q. Some people say that “Ka’s” Wheel of Death is the most dangerous act in a Cirque show in Las Vegas and yet this vertical wall was the one that caused the tragic fatality. This reinstated act, though, is still highly dangerous?
It is, yes, and it requires a lot of the human body. The training that goes into the athlete’s core building this act is intense. You don’t just set foot on the wall and be able to go. It takes months of strength training As far as the danger itself, as I said, none of the rigging is ever designed to see more than 10 percent of what it is rated for.
Even prior to the accident, our philosophy has always been a 10:1 safety ratio. In these particular cases, the lines that we use, which is 3800-pounds rated, were putting 150 pounds at most with the girls and maybe 190 pounds with the guys. So you are close to a 20:1 safety ratio.
Q. That’s only for cable failure?
That’s for cable fail, but it’s what it’s rated for.
Q. Let’s remember that this tragedy was not from cable failure.
No, it wasn’t cable failure. We tried to replicate the same with the other winches in the line and weren’t able to have another pulley wheel collapse in the same way. It’s still hard that we weren’t able to fully say 100 percent why that collapsed forward. We know the forces that the cable saw and that torque clamping should have been easily able to hold that.
Q. But what actually cut the cable?
It was the frame. The pulley wheel itself was in a little box frame. It was clamped on top of the winch frame. When that pulley wheel collapsed forward, the cable jumped out. Where the pulley wheel frame had slammed into the winch frame, it created a sharp edge so it actually cut between the two frames on the sharp edge.
Q. Why didn’t the computer system catch that?
Because it never saw it. Basically it was through the pulley wheel before it goes down to the winch. So when it pulled forward, that all happened faster than the load was able to be applied to the winch. At that point, even if the winch would have stopped, once it started going forward, the result was going to happen.
Q. How do you validate all the redundancies you now have in place? Obviously nobody ever thought that the cable would collapse through it?
The redundancies are there. There’s no more torque clamping. The new pulley wheel is now bolted into the I beam of the ceiling itself. So now you have four 50,000-pound bolts that are holding it in place vs. torque clamping. Secondly, the winches are cycled backward, forward, backward, forward under tension, gradually applying tension. That’s part of the factory acceptance testing. Once they are brought in here, they are applied under normal load with sandbags.
You cycle them X number of times until the engineers are happy that under normal work load, it’s doing everything that it’s supposed to, and then you start shock loading the system with the sandbags. You drop them, you run them, you shut power off, you run them and slam the sandbags into something and all those other things.
Q. Now heaven forbid but if somebody fell now, are there air bags or safety nets?
No. There still isn’t because when we talked with the manufacturers, the reality is that an air bag is designed to prevent an injury in a controlled fall. None of them will certify them as use for fall protection. They are designed for controlled falls.
Q. What do firefighters use for people jumping from tall buildings?
Well, again, it’s a controlled fall where they jump out and they spread. We do training for air bags, people jumping off that level and practicing on how to cross their arms or spread their weight, and things like that. So, yes, we could have put an airbag down there, but the way the stages are set down there, in an uncontrolled fall they could still hit that airbag and bounce out, and it’s offering a false sense of security.
Our whole thing was to make sure that what happened that night couldn’t be replicated. To make sure that the connections we were using didn’t fail under the loads that they saw. That the load that they were seeing was consistently under the 10:1 safety ratio. That it was validated by REI, by Exponent, that it met all the OSHA recommendations that were in their report and under that satisfaction and then adding in the slow zone.
Adding in the secondary monitoring software to make sure that if the first software failed, the second one would kick in to stop it. Not taking the human element away. We still have the guys on the lines. Also before in their exit, they always used to go up backward, but now as they leave the battlefield, they spin around and they face and make eye contact with their technician to make sure that they are both together there
We also have two people on the level below, and if they see anything they don’t like, they will shut the whole thing down. So there’s a lot of extra redundancies in there.
Q. I’m still baffled as to why you couldn’t put in netting instead of an air bag.
Well, the nets again, a 94-foot fall into a net, the net isn’t designed to catch a 94-foot fall. To set the net, we are taking resources away from where we need them up there because to set the nets down there takes about 16 people whereas the riggers are better set on those safety buttons and on those lines above. I’d rather have the resources around what we know is fall protection vs. what we hope will work in the case of an accident.
What did you do in the show when this battle sequence was shut down? What took its place?
The very first few weeks we used the ceremonial dressing ceremony where the twin brother and the twin sister were awarded royal robes. That was while we trained a hand-balancing act that then came in and took part of it for a while. Then we had a couple of films that been done of the battle in the old days, one for German TV and one for Korean TV, that were both shot in high definition. We recovered those videos, rescaled them, readapted them to project onto the wall. We ran the video act on the wall for the last year.
Q. That must have frustrated the dancers and acrobats because they said we can do this for real.
Yes, but my job is to make sure they can do it for real every single day with no risks.
{ SOURCE: The Las Vegas Sun; Vegas Deluxe; Robin Leach | http://goo.gl/rcgBsR }
