It’s not the kind of phone call anyone wants to have to make.
In his car on the way home from the premiere of the Cirque du Soleil touring show Ovo at the Bell Centre Tuesday night, Cirque chief executive officer Daniel Lamarre learned that Olivier Rochette, a technician working on the show Luzia in San Francisco, had been killed that night. He was struck by a telescopic lift as it was being taken off stage before the show.
Rochette’s father is Gilles Ste-Croix, one of the founders of the Quebec circus and someone Lamarre has worked closely with for more than a decade. Lamarre’s next call that night was to Ste-Croix, who was at his winter home in Mexico.
“That was me calling my friend in Mexico and saying, ‘Have you heard anything?’, because I wasn’t sure if someone had got to him before,” said Lamarre, in a phone interview Thursday afternoon from San Francisco. “He said: ‘You sound bizarre. What are you talking about?’ I said: ‘Please, are you seated?’ And I told him. ‘Your son just died. There was a big accident and it was horrible.’ And we both (began) crying.”
The death was one of three accidents involving Cirque du Soleil personnel this week. Acrobat Lisa Skinner fractured a vertebra after falling while performing in the Kooza show in Brisbane, Australia, on Sunday. On Wednesday, Weiliang Sky Wu, a Cirque artist in the Ovo show, fell during what is called the trampo-wall act, in which the performers climb up a wall at the back of the stage. He fell on to a trampoline. Though he appeared not to be badly hurt, the show was stopped and he was taken to a hospital. He was released from the hospital a half hour after his arrival and had only minor injuries.
“If you look at what happened at Ovo (Wednesday) night, that was a great illustration of how well our (health and safety) protocol works,” Lamarre said. “This guy fell, he was not that injured, but the protocol says if an artist falls, automatically you immobilize the artist and that’s what we did. When something like that happens, it’s not the commercial angle of Cirque that takes priority. It’s the human values. So yesterday it would’ve been easy for us to pull the guy off the stage and just finish the show, but the protocol says if something like this happens, you shut down the show, and that’s what we did. As the employer of that employee, I feel good that we did the right thing.”
Rochette’s is the third death of a Cirque du Soleil staffer working on a show in the company’s 32-year history. Cirque performer Oleksandr Zhurov died in 2010 after falling off a device called the Russian swing during a training session in Montreal. In 2013, acrobat Sarah Guillot-Guyard died when she fell 30 metres to the floor during the show Ka in Las Vegas.
Lamarre said his company does everything it can to make the performers and technicians as safe as possible, but accidents still happen.
“It’s like asking the police to prevent a car accident,” Lamarre said. “It’s happened three time in 32 years of Cirque history. We have a long list of protocols of what we should be doing. In this situation (in San Francisco this week), we had two very experienced technicians (operating the telescopic lift) and Olivier himself who has been with us for 20 years. So you have probably the best technicians and they were doing what they do every day.”
The Cirque du Soleil has 11 touring shows and nine permanent shows, with approximately 1,500 artists performing in these shows, but Lamarre insisted that the performers aren’t more at risk just because the Cirque is so much busier. He also denied there have been any reductions in security measures since the company was sold to an American equity firm and its Chinese partners last year.
But the bottom line is that there are risks associated with performing in a circus.
“For sure, there’s always a risk factor,” said Éric Langlois, director general of Montreal’s École nationale de cirque. “The circus performer’s craft is second nature to him or her and the artist has to make sure they’re in physical shape to do the act. But you also have to be psychologically prepared.”
Still even the best-prepared performer can have an accident.
“There are incidents that happen due to people not paying attention,” Langlois said. “You’ve done something 100 times, but it’s like crossing the street. You suddenly realize you didn’t even check if the traffic light was green or red. So you have a mistake in the routine. There is no recipe. It’s a matter of being a professional. But it could also be the people around you. Maybe the person beside doesn’t put his or her foot in the right place and it destabilizes you. All we can do, and we do that in our training and teaching here, we try to make the artist conscious of the whole process.”
But in a high-wire act or even preparing a circus show, one wrong move can cause an accident.
“For sure there can be a human error,” said Maxime Charbonneau, director of business affairs at the Montreal circus Cirque Éloize. “A trapeze artist can miss one move and they need to be able to react.”
{ SOURCE: Montreal Gazette | https://goo.gl/HYqsEm }
