“Life and Death at Cirque du Soleil
By Michael Joseph Gross
for Vanity Fair
The Fall
The Cirque du Soleil show called Kà opened in 2005 at the MGM Grand, in Las Vegas, as the most expensive theatrical production in history. Much of the show’s budget of at least $165 million—more than double the cost of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the most expensive Broadway production ever mounted—was spent on technology to produce astonishing visual effects.
In the show’s climactic battle scene, two groups of warriors—the Forest People (good guys) and the Spearmen (bad guys)—face off on a stage that slowly tilts from horizontal to almost vertical, which allows the audience to see the fight as if from above. Each warrior is played by an acrobat who wears a harness attached to a wire rope. The wire runs up to a complex configuration of equipment that enables the performer to leap, twist, flip, and fly while chasing others back and forth—that is, up and down the length of the vertical stage. The fight ends when the Forest People, at the bottom of the stage, hurl the Spearmen, at the top of the stage, off the battlefield. As one, the Spearmen, all of them, fall upward. For the audience, it is a wonder, as if the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon had come to life before their eyes. For the performers, it is a job, and they do it like troupers, twice a night, five nights a week.
On the evening of June 29, 2013, when Sarah Guillot-Guyard, 31, an acrobat who was playing one of the Spearmen, fell upward at the end of the battle, several things went wrong. It would take a long time before anyone began to assemble a full picture of what those several things were. But as she was making her exit, at 10:59 P.M., the wire rope that kept her safe was severed.
In the next couple of seconds, Sarah Guillot-Guyard—who was born in Paris and was a graduate of the Fratellini Academy, a circus-arts school in Saint-Denis; who had been married to another Kà acrobat, named Mathieu Guyard, and with him had a daughter and a son; who, in her off-hours, taught circus acrobatics to children in a Vegas strip mall; and who, being French, would sneak cigarettes outside the stage door sometimes, and mistranslate English phrases sometimes (“little by little,” to her, was “small by small”)—in those few seconds, Guillot-Guyard fell to her death from a height of 94 feet.
She fell face downward, in full sight of several fellow performers, who were stranded in midair, hanging by their wires, and in full sight of the audience, some of whom had no idea, at first, that they were witnessing an actual accident—because it is the nature of a Cirque du Soleil spectacle to make audiences believe that anything is possible. Even the laws of gravity can seem to have no meaning. The performers were sheltered by no such illusions. One of them lunged toward Guillot-Guyard, reaching out his hands to try to catch her. But she was too far away, and falling too fast.
“We Lost Somebody”
That same night, two blocks south of Kà’s stage, Cirque opened its eighth and newest show on the Strip, at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. Michael Jackson One, a clamorous, laser- and video-laced tribute to the King of Pop featuring street dancers from seven nations, played to a premiere audience packed with celebrities ranging from Justin Bieber to Spike Lee. The audience gave the show a standing ovation. Cirque’s founder, Guy Laliberté—once a busker, now the billionaire head of the world’s largest theatrical-production company—was elated and relieved.
It had been a tough couple of years. Dwindling ticket sales and attenuated performance schedules following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami had forced the company to close its Tokyo Disney show, Zed, on the last day of 2011. Another show, Zaia, in Macau, closed less than two months later. The next show to go dark was in Cirque’s Las Vegas stronghold that August: Viva Elvis, a tribute to the King at the Aria Resort & Casino, made so little money that the hotel’s owner asked Cirque to pull the plug. Then Worlds Away, Cirque’s first feature film, opened to lackluster reviews and a paltry domestic box office, just a month before another show got axed—Iris, in Los Angeles. The most demoralizing episode of all: a re-structuring known to employees as “the revamp” that involved laying off some 400 of Cirque’s 5,000 personnel.
Five months later, with all this barely behind him, Laliberté walked into the after-party for Michael Jackson One in very good spirits. Cirque was getting its game back, just in time for the company’s 30th anniversary, which it would celebrate in 2014. No sooner had he arrived than Cirque’s longtime head of public relations, Renée-Claude Ménard, discreetly pulled him aside and told him what had happened down the street. Laliberté turned to an old friend who was with him that night—Nicky Dewhurst, a veteran Cirque performer who was a tightrope artist until age 30, when he became a clown—and gave him the terrible news. “We lost somebody,” said Laliberté, barely getting out the words. “We lost somebody at Kà.”
The circus is a risky business. Injuries come with the territory. Cirque has an outstanding reputation for safety, even though the cast and crew of its shows are so frequently hurt while training, rehearsing, or performing that compensation is a topic of black humor. “The bad part is, you break your legs,” one performer told me. “The good part is, you get a Mercedes.” In 2012, in Las Vegas alone, 53 performers in Cirque shows were injured, causing a total of 918 missed workdays. (Many more minor injuries are not required to be reported to the government.) Just a few days before the official opening of Michael Jackson One, an aerialist slipped through a slack rope during a preview performance and fell headfirst onto the stage, causing him to suffer what a company official described as a “mild concussion.” A few years earlier, offstage, there had even been a death: in 2009, the acrobat Oleksandr Zhurov died after he fell off a trampoline while training in Montreal.
The accident at Kà was the first onstage fatality in Cirque history. Grief for Guillot-Guyard spread through the Cirque subculture in Las Vegas and beyond. Kà halted performances for two weeks and then resumed without the battle scene, for the moment. Cirque executives and company managers visited Cirque shows around the world for cast meetings, to provide basic information about the accident. But there was little they could say: most of the story remained under wraps until November 2013, when the state of Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) completed its investigation of the death.
Right away, though, in Washington State, a thousand miles from the scene of the tragedy, a man named James Heath, a former rigger for Cirque, feared he knew what had happened. In 2006, while working on another Cirque show, Heath had discovered that Kà was using a certain kind of wire rope to lift people—despite the fact that several manufacturers explicitly warned against using it for such a purpose. This knowledge tortured Heath. He had spent years waging a lonely battle to persuade Cirque, without success, to use a different rope. He finally gave up and left the company.
It all came rushing back when Heath heard about the death at Kà. “Ninety feet and it’s done,” he said when I visited him at his home in Seattle. “The story is over by the time that happened. The decisions were made. The story is: How did we get here?”
The Magic Tools
The story, like so many circus stories, starts with a runaway. In the early 1970s, in Saint-Bruno, a suburb of Montreal, a troubled boy, 14 years old, left home and wound up sleeping under a bridge. On one occasion, some thug stuck a gun in the kid’s face. Drugs—he did a lot of them. Did he sell drugs, too? In his office at Cirque du Soleil’s international headquarters, in Montreal, the man who was that boy, Guy Laliberté, stuck out his sinewy neck, squinted through jumpy eyes, and let a sly smirk curl his thin lips. “Streets are streets, O.K.?” he said in a thick French-Canadian accent. “So whatever happen in those place, I went through it, you know?”
Laliberté had settled himself behind a giant desk and had lit a cigarette. Containers of toxin-scrubbing elixirs (“Liquid Liver Cleanse,” “Cardio Cleanse”) stood patiently atop the desk as if waiting for a chance to infiltrate the Gauloises-occupied territory of his body. All the details of Laliberté’s early life are in his autobiography, which we will not soon be reading. The book is written but unpublished and unpublishable, because “my lawyer wanted to change so many things, and I said I’m not releasing it.”
What Laliberté called his “true book,” the candid story of personal darkness from which emerged Cirque du Soleil’s bright light, is locked in a safe. Like many stories that are not “family-friendly,” this, he said, is just for family—“for my kids”: his five children, born to two mothers. For now, curious readers must content themselves with an unauthorized biography, Guy Laliberté: The Fabulous Story of the Creator of Cirque du Soleil, a fire-hose blast of decadence, with hookers, orgies, benders, or betrayals on almost every page. When the book was published, in 2009, Laliberté threatened to sue, but then he didn’t.
On the matter of his memoirs, as in many aspects of his life, Laliberté’s boldness is more than matched by his pragmatism. His comfort with uncertainty and his fierce survival instinct were honed while drifting as a teenager through Britain and France, where he learned to breathe fire as a street performer. By age 20 he was back in Canada, in the artists’ colony of Baie-Saint-Paul, on the St. Lawrence River. There he formed the first of several small groups of performers that led to Cirque du Soleil’s founding, as a nonprofit organization, in 1984.
Cirque’s genesis involved sporadic tension among its leaders—besides Laliberté, they included his high-school friend Daniel Gauthier and the stilt-walker Gilles Ste-Croix—over whether the company should be guided more by artistic or commercial goals. Laliberté’s brand of artistry is inflected by his essential nature as a “wheeler-dealer,” and as he consolidated his power in the company, he burnished a sturdy creation myth that every Cirque employee knows. As Athena sprang from Zeus’s forehead, Le Cirque du Soleil—the circus of the sun—leapt from Laliberté’s mind while he was on a beach in Hawaii. The Ringling Brothers’ circus aesthetic had “gotten dusty,” as Laliberté explained to me. His freshening up of the tradition may have borrowed heavily from the cirque nouveau movement, which had originated in France in the 1970s, but Cirque struck the general public in North America with the force of a revelation. Its breakthrough show and first performance outside Canada, at the Los Angeles Festival, was the hottest ticket in Hollywood in 1987—the year that Cirque also became a for-profit company.
Cirque stripped away traditional American circus clichés and replaced them with a new formula. Instead of three rings, Cirque had one. No more brass bands or calliopes; Cirque struck up the synthesizers and cued a twilit realm of rainbows, backlighting, and fog. Cirque banished animals, too—except for Homo sapiens. The human bodies at Cirque—beautiful, strong, exotically skilled—were different from those seen at other circuses in one crucial respect: they came with no names, as far as any audience member knew. Banishing fame was Cirque’s most fateful innovation. The average Cirque performer is an extraordinary physical specimen performing extraordinary feats, but someone who works behind a veil of anonymity—which tends to make all the performers, in the eyes of the audience, a little more than human, but a little less than people.
For the next few years, Cirque refined its formula in several touring shows. The company’s first permanent theatrical production, in Las Vegas, was Mystère, at Treasure Island, in 1993. But Cirque did not become a household name until 1998, when it colonized two American entertainment empires almost simultaneously. First, the spectacular O, staged in and around a 1.5-million-gallon water tank, premiered to critical acclaim, at the opening of the Bellagio, which was then the most expensive hotel in the world. Two months later, the Cirque show La Nouba premiered near Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Florida. Both of these productions, as well as Mystère, have been printing money ever since.
“After that, the management of the success, it becomes different than just managing the artistic success. It becomes the management of the economic success,” Gilles Ste-Croix told me in Montreal in December 2013. Ste-Croix retired in June 2014 with the company title “creative guide and grand saltimbanque,” and for many years he functioned as the in-house Wise Old Man. (Cirque’s publicists described the company as a “family” headed by “Papa Guy” and “Grandpapa Gilles.”) When Ste-Croix added, “You start to talk in meetings about EBITDA,” it raised the question of how many stilt-walkers, of all the stilt-walkers who have ever lived, have had occasion to deploy the acronym for “earning before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.”
As Cirque got rich, Ste-Croix went on to say, “we invented, as we went along, better tools”—that is, better technology to create more outlandish theatrical effects. In O’s huge aquatic tank, submerged machinery, invisible to the audience, performs a feat akin to what Moses did at the Red Sea—so that clowns can do what Jesus did at the Sea of Galilee. The machinery achieves what is basically a parting of the waters—adjusting the pool’s depth from 24 feet to a few inches in a matter of seconds. The audience has no idea that this has happened until a pair of clowns go skipping across the surface at the very spot where, a moment earlier, a high diver had plunged into the depths.
Starting with O, Cirque became as well known for incredible effects as it was for its performers’ physical prowess. Gilles Ste-Croix’s pale eyes warmed noticeably as he recalled the transformation: “Once you touch the magic tools, you cannot do without. You know, suddenly—the wizard who discovered le Graal, almost! And that’s what I think O did to us. It became, like, everything was possible.”
Fly by Wire
Backstage at O, on a Wednesday afternoon in January of 2002, an electrician on the show’s crew was working on some wiring when he seemed to hear a shotgun go off right by his head. Weeks later, when he regained full consciousness, Mark Brown could not move, could not speak, and could barely see or hear.
O’s elaborate props included one that resembled an alligator’s head. It weighed a thousand pounds and it was hung in the backstage fly space on a wire rope.
Mark Brown had been sitting on a bench beneath the alligator head when it came loose. The falling prop shaved off one quarter of his skull and crushed his lower trunk, pushing his pancreas and most of his intestines temporarily up into his chest. The accident left him permanently paralyzed from the waist down.
Sudden, unexpected, tragic turns of fate like Brown’s cast long shadows in small communities. At the time, the Cirque subculture in Las Vegas was basically a frontier village. It was a tight-knit group of almost 300 who had left behind their friends and families in faraway countries and come to the desert for the chance to practice the exotic skills they loved. For the whole company, Brown’s injury was an unsettling reminder of how fragile fate can be.
Five months after the accident at O, Cirque joined the corporate big leagues by signing a contract with the publicly traded entertainment company MGM Mirage (now MGM Resorts International), for whom it has been the “preferred entertainment content provider” ever since. In Laliberté’s version of the history, Cirque had been a company run by “old friends.” Now it would be “entrepreneurial,” a proliferating bureaucracy developing a roster of touring shows from its gleaming glass-and-steel headquarters.
The deal with MGM produced the immensely ambitious Kà, whose avant-garde director, Robert Lepage, once described the project as his effort to realize a dream of “blending the ‘live’ world” with “the ‘taped’ world” to create a “theatrical-cinematographical experience.” That experience would take place in a 1,950-seat theater designed, LePage said at the time, “like a cathedral” in order to make people feel “they are coming into something which is slightly religious.” What was being worshiped? Lepage didn’t say, but one answer could be inferred from the raptures of Kà’s choreographer Jacques Heim, who exclaimed before the show opened: “There’s so much technology, there’s so much rigging, there’s so much complexity of things. It’s so huge. So huge!”
The shiniest of Kà’s new toys was the “Sand Cliff Deck,” the hydraulic-powered stage weighing 100,000 pounds that tilts to nearly 90 degrees for the battle scene. For other scenes, the deck can tilt and twirl 360 degrees in a radial space that Lepage likes to call “the void.” Above the void, higher than catwalk height, is “the grid,” the metal support structure for the winches, pulleys, and dozens of people required to fly the performers. Kà also had the kind of computerized rigging system that altered duties for Cirque performers and stage techs in something like the same way fly-by-wire technology had changed the job of being a jet pilot.
In Cirque’s earliest Vegas shows, acrobatic and aerial performers who wore wires would set their own rigging, following longtime circus tradition. During performances, technicians—or other performers, on their backstage breaks—would adjust the lines and mechanisms in concert with acrobatic moves as they occurred. The give-and-take of rigger and performer had always been part dance and part puppetry, involving constant mutual awareness. By the time of Kà, aerial cues were increasingly controlled by computer-automated systems. And performers themselves would take over some duties that specialized riggers used to perform—as in Kà’s battle scene, where performers manipulate joysticks on their harnesses to help control the speed of their own ascents and descents.
As Cirque’s stage technology grew more sophisticated, its safety protocols grew more formal. Matthew Whelan, Cirque’s technical director, told me that the elaborate safety checks involved in O’s use of scuba divers as underwater stagehands, underwater carpenters, and underwater electricians helped Cirque refine a system of risk analysis applied to each act in every show. Performers sometimes complain about the intrusiveness of Cirque’s safety systems, which several described to me as “annoying.”
But no system can eradicate the element of risk from aerial performance, and most acrobats would not eliminate it even if they could. As Kati Renaud, a former Cirque dancer who now serves as Cirque’s senior director of show quality and integrity, explained it, a Cirque du Soleil show is “a risky environment.” Renaud said that acrobats in particular “love adrenaline—they love adrenaline—and we hire them based on their love for adrenaline . . .” The sentence trailed off, and Renaud shook her head, laughing mock-hysterically at the adrenaline-feedback loop she had just described.
In 2005, when Cirque settled Mark Brown’s personal-injury lawsuit for an undisclosed sum—just moments before a jury was reportedly set to award him more than $40 million—the population of Cirque’s Vegas subculture was close to double what it had been when his accident occurred. The frontier village was now an industrial boomtown, becoming the kind of place where no one person could know the names and faces of every other. Cirque was growing into such a large institution that many people now being hired would never have reason to learn Mark Brown’s name at all—unless, for some unforeseeable motivation, they felt driven to search for it.
Breaking Strength
James Heath was one of those people. In the summer of 2006, Matthew Whelan hired Heath to be the rigging project manager for a show being developed at Cirque’s Montreal headquarters. Years earlier, Heath had worked as a rigger on two Cirque touring shows. He left in 1996 to start a family and get an education. After the marriage fell apart and he left law school, Heath rejoined the circus. Now back at Cirque, Heath focused on a show called Zaia, which was to establish a permanent presence in China’s lucrative market.
Zaia would feature a lot of aerial acrobatics—a phrase that, to most people, connotes backflips. To a rigger, “a lot of aerial acrobatics” could connote much more: people wearing harnesses, with small fittings called swivels, which are points of attachment for the wire ropes that run up across pulleys before being threaded down through smaller pulleys, called diverters, onto the cylinder-shaped drums of motorized winches.
Part of Heath’s job was to choose the wire rope to use with Zaia’s winches. The winches themselves had been chosen, based on specifications given by Cirque, by a subcontractor that Cirque often hires, a theatrical manufacturing company called Stage Technologies. Since the winches came from the same company that provided winches for a number of Cirque’s Vegas shows, including Kà, Heath asked Whelan what kind of rope Kà used, thinking the answer might save him some time. But the answer Whelan gave was troubling to Heath. As it turned out, Kà and other Cirque shows were relying on a kind of wire rope that some manufacturers recommended against using if a swivel was attached. And aerial acrobats, more or less always, use swivels.
Wire rope is wound like a helix—up close, or under a microscope, it looks like a spiral—so when you put a load on the end of it, the wire naturally tries to straighten out. Kà used a wire rope that’s known as “19×7” because it consists of 19 strands of seven wires each. The strands are laid in two layers of slightly unequal size. The outside layer of the rope consists of 12 strands and the inside layer of 6. One last strand forms the core, around which the rest of them are wound. Because the layers are put down in opposite directions—strands spiraling to the right in one layer and to the left in the next—they counteract each other as the rope unlays, which makes the rope “rotation-resistant.” When 19×7 is attached to a swivel, nothing inhibits the rotation of the rope except its own internal structure. However, the use of a swivel also makes the rope more susceptible to internal wear and deformation. With the torque unevenly distributed, the smaller inner layer absorbs the rotation from the larger outer one—and, overall, the rope loses some portion of its strength.
The rope is very strong: the 19×7 that was used at Kà can hold a static load of 3,300 pounds, which is the weight of a Corvette or a black rhinoceros. But as it was used at Kà, on a swivel with a winch, it’s weaker, though opinions vary as to its exact strength. Cirque du Soleil’s outstanding reputation for safety is based in good part on design standards that can seem, to an outsider, absurdly conservative. In rigging design, Cirque says it observes an unwritten but sacrosanct standard that a wire rope, when connected to a winch, should have a breaking strength that is 10 times greater than the weight of the load on the wire. At Cirque, in most circumstances, the actual load is simply the weight of the performer hanging from the wire. In some circumstances—for instance, if the wire were to become caught—the load becomes the pulling power of the winch at the other end, which can be many times the weight of the performer. Cirque maintains that the calculations of its 10:1 design factor “include the most extreme condition we can anticipate such as a hard stop or total loss of power, which would exert more forces than just the body weight of the performer.” At the end of the day, a 10:1 design factor is a somewhat arbitrary number, meant more as a lavish expression of fealty to safety than as a precisely engineered solution to the problem of how to keep a person safe. (In old-school theatrical rigging, a standard of 8:1 was considered fine.)
Heath was concerned that 19×7 wire as used on winches to lift performers wearing swivels fell short of the 10:1 ratio. Looking for a more conservative option for use in Zaia, he found a rope designed specifically to lift people who were wearing harnesses with swivels. The rope, called XLT4—“XLT” because it has extremely low torque, and “4” because it’s made of four strands—was made for helicopter rescues. With swivels, XLT4 is stronger than equivalent-size 19×7. When Heath found XLT4, he was so excited that he started telling his fellow rigging designers, imagining that every Cirque du Soleil show might switch to this stronger wire rope.
That’s when his problems started. Heath described to me a saga of intimidation, sideswiping, and sandbagging by his bosses—and a lot of simply being ignored, as if the supervisors just didn’t want to hear what he was saying—as he tried to get XLT4 tested and approved for use at Cirque. To Heath, none of these reactions added up. He thought his bosses would be happy that he’d found a potential problem and headed it off. Instead, he recalled, “they totally cut my legs off.” He became increasingly preoccupied and discouraged. Eventually, he concluded that “Cirque, through its staff,” had chosen, for reasons he could not fathom, “to suppress the new product and accept the liability that results from using an inferior product when a safer product is known to be available.” That’s what he wrote in a long e-mail that he sent to Zaia’s production manager in June of 2007, around the time he resigned from his job.
While declining to comment on “Mr. Heath’s personal interpretations,” Cirque takes issue with many elements of his account. The company maintains that “Cirque is committed 100% to the safety of its employees, and as such, when Mr. Heath presented his finding on XLT4, studies were done as to its feasibility for use in a human acrobatic rigging system.” The XLT4 wire “did not at that time meet all of the design criteria,” according to Cirque, but eventually XLT4 was certified for use. It is today employed in several Cirque shows, in Las Vegas, and on tour. The company also maintains that the wire cables it uses meet the safety requirement for its 10:1 design factor—“our company standard”—and have been “validated with designers, manufacturers, and engineers prior to use of the system for human acrobatics.”
Back in Vegas, the industrial boomtown had morphed into an enclave of the world’s most limber soccer moms. For tumblers in Rio and contortionists in Ulaanbaatar who dreamed of white-picket-fence domesticity, Cirque had made Las Vegas the promised land—a place where you could live the kind of year-round, rooted, conventional existence that had always been beyond the reach of circus folk. “It’s a very normal life, which is unheard of for what we do,” Nicky Dewhurst told me. As in any group that quickly transforms from bohemian to bourgeois, some of Cirque’s desert dwellers were unsettled by the compromises that the transition entailed. But most viewed the trade-offs with brisker pragmatism. When I asked one dancer if he had any ambivalence about Cirque’s evolution from artistic pioneer to global brand leader, the man shot back in withering deadpan, “No—I bought a house.”
The financial crisis of 2008, which showed the world that mortgages aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be, hit Cirque hard. When the credit markets seized up, and even rich people started thinking twice about dropping $100 to see a show, Cirque had too many active productions in too many places around the world—18, on four continents. Laliberté was then Cirque’s sole owner, and in search of strategic partners, so he sold 20 percent of the company to two subsidiaries of Dubai World.
Then he flew into space. It was around this time, as Gilles Ste-Croix and others recalled, that Laliberté unplugged from Cirque’s day-to-day operations. Many pointed to Laliberté’s purchase of a reported $35 million ticket to board a Russian Soyuz capsule, which he rode to the International Space Station, where he spent more than a week in 2009. “That’s normally what you would say metaphorically: you would say he got all this money, and he went off to space,” said one Cirque employee. “But Guy literally did that.” Daniel Lamarre, Cirque’s president and C.E.O., made a point of telling me that Laliberté did call from orbit to check in.
The Revamp
James Heath had quit Zaia, but he couldn’t quit Cirque. After turning in his resignation, Heath had hit the road with a touring show called Saltimbanco, which had no winches or swivels and gave him a break from worrying so much about wire rope. That job had led him back to Montreal, in 2008, ultimately for a desk job at Cirque, where a chance encounter with the head rigger on another touring show, Corteo, resulted in Corteo’s adopting XLT4.
Heath, who like many technicians is rightly given to calling himself “obsessive,” took little satisfaction from Corteo’s conversion. Now that at least one Cirque show was using the stronger wire rope, it only intensified his worries that, if there were an accident at Kà or some other show that still used 19×7, Cirque could be exposed for using the weaker one. In a letter addressed to a supervisor and upper management in December 2008, Heath wrote, “In case of an accident a plaintiff could prove that we have knowingly been using inferior rope even though a much safer, approved product has been available for two years…. I am giving you the information to do with as you see fit: to bury it, or to take it to the top, as you prefer.” As he searched the Web for anything that could help him make sense of the situation, Heath came across news stories about the Mark Brown case, which he had known nothing about.
Piecing together the chronology, Heath came to believe that the issue of wire-rope rotation had been highly charged for Cirque du Soleil not long before he began promoting XLT4. Cirque’s defense in the Mark Brown trial had centered on the rope used to hang the prop, according to the Associated Press. The AP’s report on the lawsuit’s settlement explained that “Lawyers for Cirque blamed the Bellagio for the accident, saying the prop was hung from the ceiling with the wrong type of cable, causing the rigging to unscrew.”
In quiet moments, Heath sometimes knew that his fixation wasn’t completely rational—he knew that in the long-term Cirque had more to gain by making the safest choice. And some colleagues did listen to him. Moving from show to show, Heath directly or indirectly converted more productions to using XLT4—Zed in 2008, Alegrìa in 2009, Dralion in 2010, and Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour in 2011. Even a rigging designer who replaced Heath on Zaia, in Macau, converted to the new wire rope. The resistance to using it in Las Vegas, though, seemed to Heath impossible to overcome.
In the spring of 2012, Heath finally left Cirque for good. Six months earlier, he had carpet-bombed the tech side of the company with a Jerry Maguire memo, copying more than a dozen Cirque riggers, accusing some company employees of “malfeasance” by holding on to 19×7 when a stronger rope was available.
Cirque’s late-empire devolution into bloated fiefdoms had meanwhile reached a danger point. Laliberté himself told me, “When you’re focused just to growth and forget about the basic—little castle are being built in the big castle! And eventually get chubby!” Gilles Ste-Croix eventually took his boss in hand, and Laliberté began the long series of tough choices that led to Cirque’s drastic revamp—restructuring and eliminating hundreds of jobs. The revamp was a rude awakening. After the cutbacks, those who have gone on living the very normal life that Cirque affords its Vegas employees have done so in the knowledge that, even in this circus “family,” everyone is fungible. They know, too, that Cirque reserves the right to act according to a set of values that are indistinguishable from those of any other big corporation. With bemused embarrassment, Cirque’s Daniel Lamarre said that, as Cirque struggled through the revamp, his peers “from Disney and MGM and all the others, they were looking at us, saying, ‘What’s your issue?’ For them, it’s business as usual that you do layoffs and you do cost-cutting. For them, that was nothing to talk about, you know? But for us, it was almost a drama, because we were not used to that.”
Yet Cirque, as a corporate enterprise, is very different from Disney or MGM. Because it is a circus, the viability of its business is rooted in the willingness of a core group of performers to risk their lives on a daily basis. At the opera, the ballet, or the theater, the audience rarely wonders if performers will live to see the final curtain. At the circus, the audience always wonders.
The OSHA Files
In the mind of Guy Laliberté, the premiere of Michael Jackson One marked the end of the company’s troubled period. The show’s success, he told me, “was so important for the pride and the reboot and the reboost” of the company. For him, the death at Kà was a “devastating moment” that halted “all this night of hype.” As he said, “At the end, you know, those extreme moment within the same day just make you realize how privileged and how fragile life is. And you know, you go through pain, mourning moment, but on the other side—the cycle in life.”
For other people, the death at Kà raised a new set of questions—about safety in general, and about what had happened on the night of June 29. Cirque employees were asked not to publicly discuss what had happened to Sarah Guillot-Guyard until the results of OSHA’s investigation were complete. After that, Calum Pearson, vice president of Cirque’s Resident Shows Worldwide, spoke to me at length. As Pearson told the story, Guillot-Guyard’s death was a “million-to-one” freak accident involving human errors, mostly on the part of both the acrobat and her rigger.
Hundreds of pages of background documents from the state agency, including verbatim accounts of witnesses to the tragedy, tell a more detailed and more ambiguous story. They certainly do offer a vivid and unsettling description of the human errors that Cirque described.
To read through the OSHA files is to encounter a sad and tangled catalogue of missteps and what-ifs. Although Guillot-Guyard had been performing various roles in Kà since 2006, on the night she died she was playing a part that she had never played before. (She had received training for the role beginning at least a month earlier.) On June 29, during the first of Kà’s two evening performances, Guillot-Guyard was “slower than anyone else and had to be helped up and over the rail,” according to Pearson, which seemed to upset her.
Pearson said that Guillot-Guyard’s long experience in similar roles requiring similar skills ensured that she was adequately prepared to play this new one, despite what may appear to an outsider to be scant preparation. “Sarah was never shy about saying if she was uncomfortable with something,” Pearson explained to me. “She would be very vocal about ‘I’m not ready for this. I need more training.’?” Accident reports found in the OSHA files depict her differently. On the night of Guillot-Guyard’s death, some of Kà’s riggers noticed—and told one another—that the acrobat was obviously struggling to do her job correctly. When Guillot-Guyard stopped “really low” on her fly out during the first show, a nearby crew member noticed that “she was choppy and sloppy. I looked at the rigger and just shook my head like ‘Oh my God,’ because of how rough it was.”
Another rigger recalled playing a game of Ping-Pong between shows with Guillot-Guyard’s rigger, who “told me that during the first show, the artist on his line was ‘a mess’ coming out of the battle scene. He said she was really slow and jerky.” In his own recollection, Guillot-Guyard’s rigger testified, “I talked about how I thought [she] needed more work on the fly outs. I didn’t think she was ready.”
According to the OSHA files, there had been earlier concerns about Guillot-Guyard. “[She] has historically had trouble with things like unhooking carabieeners [sic],” one rigger testified in his account. “She seemed very nervous about things, and was stubborn about things,” he added. That night, even Guillot-Guyard seemed frustrated with her performance. During the break between shows, this same crew member recalled, the acrobat said, “‘I just don’t know what I’m doing, I guess, but I never do,’ in a dig on herself.” According to OSHA testimony, “She didn’t come off as nervous or scared, just slightly insecure about herself in the battle scene.”
Almost two hours later, near the end of the second show, the moment in the battle scene arrived when six of the Spearmen were to “fly up and off the top of the Sand Cliff Deck backwards to an overhead Forest Grid catwalk,” according to OSHA. Seeing them line up, the rigger on No. 15—Guillot-Guyard’s line—moved to tie off to a “self-retracting lifeline,” or S.R.L. He needed to strap in so he could stand on the railing and lean forward, in order to “breast out” the wire rope on which Guillot-Guyard was hanging—that is, to push the line outward, so the acrobat wouldn’t hit the grid.
On this particular night, Guillot-Guyard’s rigger “had some trouble hooking into [his] S.R.L.,” he testified to OSHA, and while he was getting secure there was a very loud bang—something heavy, crashing into the grid from below. He immediately “turned around and grabbed the line,” to push Guillot-Guyard away from the grid, but by then her whole lower half—from the back of her legs to her waist—had already struck the bottom of the structure.
According to OSHA, it seemed as if she “flew up at a higher rate of speed than normal toward the grid without tucking in her feet or legs.” The impact of this collision then caused a series of system shocks, ultimately severing the wire rope. Later that night, according to the OSHA files, Kà’s assistant head rigger found the rigger who had been on Guillot-Guyard’s line curled in a ball and crying. He was saying, “I felt the rope go through my hand.”
There may have been nothing he could have done. Ascending with her legs extended, instead of in a tuck—as witnesses testified—Guillot-Guyard collided with the grid. According to the OSHA report, “This collision caused a shock load to the winch; the wire rope came out of the sheave/pulley and scraped against a shear point cutting numerous wires in the wire rope. The wire rope broke apart.” Or as Pearson explained, “The cable jumped out of the pulley wheel and was exposed to the sharp edges of the mounting frame. This happened in a split second, almost instantaneously with the moment of impact. [The] cable got slammed against the edge of the wheel and into the sharp edge of the plate that was behind it, and that cut the cable.”
Both OSHA and Cirque agree that speed was somehow a factor. Pearson stated, though, that Guillot-Guyard “wasn’t traveling overspeed” at the moment of impact and that her speed was always within the allowable limits—limits that have since been reduced for the exit of the act. He acknowledged that “some people have said she was going faster than normal. But there were two Spearmen above her at the time of the accident. That would indicate that she wasn’t going at full speed.” But Pearson also added that “this is nothing we can 100 percent validate, because it’s impossible to know the exact speed she was going.” OSHA’S report deemed “the rapid ascent of the performer” to have been a critical factor and quoted numerous witnesses as observing that Guillot-Guyard seemed to be ascending at an unusually rapid rate.
OSHA also summarized the testimony of several witnesses that the acrobat “did not attempt to stop, slow down, or tuck her feet and legs close to her body” as she approached the grid. (“She struck the bottom of the Forest Grid from her waist down. It wasn’t just her feet,” one rigger testified.) The simplest, most commonsense explanation of the posture in which she struck the grid is that Guillot-Guyard did not know how high she was, “almost as if she was disoriented or lost track of her positioning,” according to OSHA testimony. Pearson added that she was “facing down, so probably wouldn’t have even known her proximity to the grid.” (Twice before, Cirque’s performance-medicine department had received reports of Spearmen colliding with the grid, causing a bruised coccyx in one case, and a bruised lower back in the other.) Regarding her ascent, Pearson said that “she was pressing and holding” her joystick “all the way to the end, or else she double-clicked it to go to the highest speed. Can’t say for certain.” In October 2013, the Nevada investigators initially concluded that Guillot-Guyard “had not been properly trained” in “using the hand-held controller” and “how to exit the scene safely.” Cirque appealed that citation, and the following month it was withdrawn.
In the sequence of events that led to Guillot-Guyard’s death, the final, decisive occurrence was the failure of the wire. Was this accident the terrible event that Heath had been warning about? In OSHA’s view of the accident, the key event was the wire escaping the pulley groove—whatever the reason—and finding itself against a sharp edge that instantly served as a knife. In this view, the operative word would be “cut” rather than “snap,” and could well have proved catastrophic regardless of the relative breaking strength of various types of wire. For his part, Heath is not persuaded by the “shock load to the winch” theory. That aside, and acknowledging that the sharp edge played an instrumental role, he argues that the powerful pull of the winch on a damaged wire could just as well have been the decisive factor. A stronger rope, in his view, might have stalled the winch.
Pearson dismissed concern about the rope—the 19×7 steel wire product, attached to a swivel—as a red herring, asserting that wire-rope manufacturers “don’t have a position anymore on the use of swivels” with 19×7. A spokesman for Loos & Co., which makes the 19×7 wire used by Cirque, stated that, “Our official position is that we don’t have a position because we’re unfamiliar with the design and technical situation of personnel lifts. We’ve never spoken to Cirque.” He added, “We have no idea of the particulars of this particular incident.” That said, some major American wire-rope manufacturers do still explicitly warn against the use of 19×7 with swivels. Pearson granted that XLT4 is stronger, but asserted that it is less flexible and therefore not as well suited to the acrobatic work at Kà. As to Heath’s argument that XLT4 should be the companywide standard at Cirque for aerial acrobatics, Pearson said, “That’s a little bit like saying that every building in America should be built of steel instead of being built of wood.” In a later communication Pearson noted that Cirque had “sought the expert opinion of the cable manufacturers and the winch manufacturers” and that both had “validated the use of 19×7 in our systems.” He added that the notion that the cable choice may have contributed to the accident “has not been suggested by any investigation.”
The OSHA files contain testimony from some Cirque technicians who went out of their way to state that they personally were aware of some question about the use of 19×7 on a swivel. These people also made a point of disclaiming personal responsibility for using that rope, and distancing themselves from the process by which that rope was chosen for use at Kà. “We’ve been using 19×7 since the show started,” said an assistant head rigger. “I’ve heard that’s O.K. to put a swivel on 19×7, but I’ve also heard that it’s not recommended. I think that was somebody’s opinion. I only maintain the system that is designed by somebody else.” “I didn’t specify a wire rope for use in this application,” said another technician, who was involved in Kà’s design. “The conversations about the appropriate use of rope would have been left to other people.” The words are those of Jeremy Hodgson, a technical manager of automation at Kà and other Cirque shows. In his same testimony, Hodgson referred to some concerns about “the use of 19×7 with single point swivels” raised by a “rigging project manager in Macau, James Heath.”
A rigger who still works for Cirque and thinks highly of Heath’s work told me that he does not share Heath’s interest in the retrospective hypothetical of what might have happened at Kà if Guillot-Guyard had been flown on something stronger. This rigger said, “I don’t think anybody can ever say, with all the variables involved, whether the same thing would have happened if a different cable had been on that winch.”
Yes, you can make a case, maybe even a strong case, that XLT4 might have provided a bit more precious time. But you can also make a case, and maybe a stronger case, that the tragedy in Las Vegas was what analysts call a “system accident.” A system accident is one that requires many things to go wrong in a cascade. Change any element of the cascade and the accident may well not occur, but every element shares the blame. What if Guillot-Guyard had been more experienced in her role? What if she had not ascended so quickly, or had been in a fetal tuck? What if the rigger on the grid hadn’t had trouble hooking into his S.R.L.? What if the wire had not jumped the pulley wheel? What if the wire had been stronger? System accidents are an inevitability when human beings interface with increasingly complex technology. The only way to minimize them is to look hard in advance at every factor and make improvements where you can. And then to look again when the next system accident occurs—as it will.
“I think the best course of action,” the rigger who spoke about variables told me, “is for Cirque du Soleil to do the right thing for the interests of future performers [and] adopt this cable on all shows. A lot of Cirque shows are already using it.”
Last December, the battle scene was restored to Kà.
Gravity
Perhaps appropriately, one of the themes of Kurios, Cirque’s 30th-anniversary show, is the complicated relationship between people and their machines. At Cirque’s Montreal headquarters in December of 2013, in a room with a 75-foot ceiling, I watched a pair of gymnasts, brothers named Roman and Vitali Tomanov, rehearse an aerial number for the show. When the music started, they were Siamese twins. Then the two parts of this creature were separated, and they attached themselves to wires so they could fly free around the circus tent. The flights were so powerful and strong that it felt like being in the room with Superman. Make that two of him.
When the brothers flew toward each other from opposite sides of the room in a choreographed high-speed near miss, even Cirque’s own head of public relations turned away. “I know they’re safe,” she said, covering her eyes. “I just . . . ”
When a technical glitch caused delays in the rehearsal, their coach said, “As you become more sophisticated, you become more imprisoned.”
Cirque’s own corporate circumstances have changed considerably. In April, the company announced that it would be selling a controlling interest to the American private-equity firm TPG, with the Chinese conglomerate Fosun and the Canadian pension fund Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, in Montreal, also acquiring a stake.
Cirque’s forthcoming projects testify to undiminished ambition. A new touring arena show, Toruk, inspired by the film Avatar and developed in collaboration with director James Cameron, will have its premiere this fall. Soon afterward, Cirque will work with NBC on a live television broadcast of The Wiz, before eventually staging the show’s upcoming Broadway revival. As for Laliberté himself, he contemplates a “personal crazy project” that would apply his distinctive sense of pizzazz to a universal human experience. “I want to get in the cemetery business,” he told me, describing a venture that could possibly include the option of having one’s ashes sent aloft among fireworks. He made it clear that, for now, this is only a “very big dream.”
During the Kurios rehearsal at Cirque’s headquarters, at the end, I asked the performers what it feels like to be in their bodies when they fly through the air. One of the brothers rushed to answer, leaving Descartes in the dust: “We don’t think—and then do,” he said. “You feel—energy! And you don’t think how you tired. More energy! Shaking, shaking, the energy!” His hand was in front of his chest, vibrating with energy. “And getting back!” He extended his hand, making me the audience, his hand still vibrating. “And then the audience is with us, and we—Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!” He flipped up his thumb, extended his pointer finger to make an energy gun, and Boom!’d it all over the place, from the imaginary audience to himself to the coach to the publicist to his brother, who, still catching his breath from flying, interrupted the energy-gun massacre to exclaim, “In case you didn’t know, we’re reversing the gravity!”
Except when they’re not.
{ SOURCE: Vanity Fair | http://goo.gl/9DyDJ2 }
