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.