Karina Silva Poirier has spent years dazzling audiences with acrobatic feats, swinging and spinning high above the ground supported by long, thick ribbons of fabric.
Poirier, 39, put her aerial performances for Cirque du Soleil’s La Nouba on hiatus last year during her pregnancy and after the birth of her 7-month-old son Kyle. Just a couple months after returning to the avant-garde circus at Disney Springs, something went horribly wrong.
Pictures: Cirque du Soleil La Nouba at Downtown Disney
Poirier somehow came loose from the fabric while rehearsing Oct. 20 for a special event. She plunged head first, almost 40 feet, to the stage. She was still in the hospital last week after suffering fractures to her skull and face and swelling in her brain. A video posted on Facebook from her brother last week said she was in a coma.
“Thankfully, every day what we’re hearing is, it’s slight improvements on a daily basis,” said Calum Pearson, vice president of Cirque’s resident shows division. “It’s going to be a long road.”
Her family would not comment. Her husband David, a Cirque employee, said he’s “not really allowed” to share details. Profiles show that Karina Silva Poirier, a Brazilian native, was a sixth-generation circus performer who started appearing in shows at 4 years old.
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating the accident, one of the more serious ones related to Cirque du Soleil shows around North America.
Cirque du Soleil is known for its fantastical performances blending traditional circus acts, such as the flying trapeze, with theatrical music and artistry. It has done both traveling shows and permanent ones, such La Nouba, which opened at Disney in 1998.
Circus stunts are inherently risky.
“What we do is, we put our life at risk for your entertainment,” Poirier’s brother Alfredo Silva, also a performer who has appeared on America’s Got Talent, said on a Facebook Live video trying to raise money for his sister.
Cirque’s Pearson said his company takes many steps to mitigate that danger. “I think we’re incredibly strong on our safety record and our protocols,” he said. Others in the industry agree.
Still, there have been injuries, and records show Cirque has been fined several times for serious safety violations over the past decade.
In 2007, two aerial silk performers in Cirque’s “Zumanity” Las Vegas show were injured in falls. Pearson described the incident as the result of artist error. OSHA records do not indicate any fines stemming from that incident.
OSHA fined Cirque $7,000 after another aerialist, Sarah Guyard-Guillot, plunged almost 100 feet to her death during a 2013 performance of the “Ka” show in Vegas. A wire rope attached to her harness came off its pulley, then scraped against a sharp edge until it broke, after she had risen faster than usual. Pearson said the system was redesigned afterward, and it now stops a performer who is lifting too quickly.
In 2009, a performer died of head injuries after falling off a trampoline during training in Montreal, where OSHA does not have jurisdiction.
In Orlando, a Cirque subcontractor died after lighting trusses being loaded onto a forklift fell on her at the Amway Center in 2011. Records show OSHA cited Cirque in that death and issued a $10,000 fine for not providing required forklift-operator training and because the trusses were not stable or safely arranged. Cirque said its policies required adequate training and that the company made sure those were reinforced after the accident.
In Las Vegas, Cirque has also been fined by OSHA for improperly storing pyrotechnics and for an accident involving a third-party contractor who fell into an open area.
For its aerialists, Cirque requires lengthy strength training and conditioning. Some employees are trained as emergency responders. Rescue plans are devised for each act. Cirque also builds in layers of safety to its equipment, which undergoes tests of various dangerous scenarios before artists can use it.
Aerial silk artists such as Poirier, though, don’t generally have backups, such as safety harnesses, because it would become tangled in the fabrics.
“A normal aerial silk, there’s no safety wire,” said Bill Sapsis, whose rigging company has worked with Cirque shows. “You really can’t do that and perform.”
Instead, the aerialists wrap the fabrics around their legs and backs as they ascend and descend them. The maneuvers — known as locks — help keep them aloft.
“You’re relying on the artist’s expertise in creating those locks,” Pearson said.
Poirier had plenty of that expertise, Pearson said. He described her as “one of the best in the world.”
She had been on leave almost a year, returning in August, Pearson said. Acrobats who take a leave from Cirque must be reintroduced to performing over a period of weeks or months, he said. They gradually edge higher, with coaches signing off to make sure they’ve mastered different levels.
They work first in a training room with foam matting underneath. Then they graduate to the stage, where there is no matting because it would hinder them from performing other moves. Poirier had recently completed the process, called “integration,” during a two-month span.
Pearson said Cirque still doesn’t know why Poirier fell. “We really need to be able to talk to her” to be able to understand what happened, he said.
A fundraising page online has described her injuries: swelling in her brain and fractures in her head. Last week, she underwent unplanned surgery to drain fluid that had built up around her heart and lungs.
{ SOURCE: Orlando Sentinel | https://goo.gl/UYPdQj }
