To quote the next day's report in the Las Vegas Sun, on Saturday, June 9, "Sarah Guyard-Guillot, a mother of two children ages 8 and 5, was performing in the 7 p.m. show ... at MGM Grand when she fell an estimated 50 feet to a pit below the stage and out of the audience's view. Her anguished cries and moans were heard throughout the hushed theater as the performance was halted. Fellow performers watched helplessly from above before being lowered to the ground, and the audience was ushered out. She was pronounced dead at 11:43 p.m. at University Medical Center.
Tonight marks the first performance of the show since that fatal night, which is being dedicated to Sarah's memory, and the battle-scene finale has been replaced by a less dangerous transitional scene, at least for the time being, while the investigation into what happened remains ongoing.
KÀ, one of Cirque du Soleil's Las Vegas shows, which is particularly known for its gravity-defying staging, was immediately announced "dark" for an indefinite period as OSHA examines the circumstances and fellow cast and crew members came to terms with their colleagues tragic death.
Cirque's shows are legendarily athletic, with their array of aerialists, acrobats, and divers, hence the company performs risk assessments of every potential peril in its shows and imposes safety procedures accordingly. In the case of KÀ, which makes extensive use of falls onto (unseen) airbags, all artists and technicians are required to undergo regular airbag training, so that they fall properly. In general, safety protocols include security fencing in the stage area and color-coding of the grid above the stage.
Still, Guyard-Guillot is far from the first performer to have suffered an accident, although to date hers is the only fatality among the Las Vegas Cirque productions, although a performer at company HQ in Montreal suffered a fatal accident in 2009. The following year, we actually tackled a QoD on this very subject, submitted by a member of the audience who witnessed a performer accident prior to the start of the show on the night of January 28, in which a man fell about two stories when the cable holding him broke. Our eye witness described how he landed on his back in the aisle and was heard to be moaning as he was carried out on a board. The broken cable fell on the seat next the reader's husband, which fortunately happened to be empty at the time.
When there was no report of the incident on the local news, this lady wrote to us asking how many accidents happen in shows that injure performers and audience members and whether they're "hushed up," to which we would respond that from our experience, it's impossible to cover up an accident that's been witnessed by a theater full of audience members, but that both out of respect for performers and their families, and to avoid putting an unnecessary "downer" on the entertainment scene, there's little point in making a huge song and dance about those unfortunate accidents that do take place, unless there's a case of negligence or some other reason to warrant further inquiry.
We asked a few entertainment journalists around town for their take on show safety, and were told that although there have been some notable accidents that have made the news, especially when it comes to the very physical Cirque shows, less significant mishaps are considered a part of the risk of doing the job and generally aren't evident to the audience. Sprains and bruises are standard not just for Cirque, but many productions, with one writer we spoke with confiding that it was not unusual for cast members he knew in Jersey Boys and the former Phantom spectacular to be out with work-related leg injuries brought on by an unfortunate twist while dancing or running into a misplaced prop.
As far as Cirque's concerned, its most notorious Vegas accident occurred during a mid-November 2007 performance of Zumanity, when two performers fell from an aerial silk, plummeting as many as 35 feet to the stage (eyewitness accounts differed). The Las Vegas Review-Journal's David Kihara reported that "[b]oth hit the stage with a resounding thud and bounced several inches into the air." One of the aerialists escaped with minor injuries but the other, a Bulgarian woman, was placed in a local ICU in critical condition.
Five years earlier, a Bellagio electrician suffered severe skull trauma and lost the use of his legs after being struck by a half-ton O prop: By settling with Cirque in 2005, he missed out on the $42 million in damages the jury in the subsequent lawsuit agreed to award him. It would have been the biggest such verdict rendered in Nevada up to that time.
Of course, no Las Vegas showbiz accident has garnered more headlines than that on the night of October 3, 2003, when Roy Horn was critically injured by a tiger during a performance of his and Siegfried Fischbacher's magic show at The Mirage. Horn was critically injured and suffered severe blood loss when he was bitten on the neck by a seven-year-old male tiger named Montecore. Crew members separated Horn from the tiger and rushed him to the only Level I trauma center in Nevada, University Medical Center, where he remained in critical condition for several weeks, having said to have suffered a stroke and and undergoing a decompressive craniectomy -- the removal of part of his skull to remove pressure on the brain.
When a production show in which athletes -- and Cirque performers in particular are athletes -- hurt themselves or their usual precision is off, it tends to disturb the fantasy that they're superhuman and flawless. We deliberately suspend our disbelief and reality's no longer meant to apply when we enter the theater, so somehow it's more traumatizing to see an actor hurt themselves than to see a hockey player lose consciousness in a pool of blood, but accidents do happen. Hence, not unlike a sports franchise, Cirque employs in-house "performance medicine," which includes strength-and-conditioning coaching, injury-prevention counseling, Pilates, yoga, massage and physical therapy. "It's something that Cirque is very, very particular about," we were informed by another journalist, and considering the number of performances -- there are currently no less than seven Cirque shows in Las Vegas -- and their large casts, we're happy to report that the accident rate is remarkably low.
