IN SHOW BUSINESS, THE TERM death defying is most often used in description and promotion of circus stunt artists who work above the crowd, often without a net, in routines that at the least appear to be a step away from disaster. Circus performers are, for the most part, professionals who know the dangers and the safety precautions to avoid them, but there are some who might be better described not as “death defying,” but “death inviting.”
On January 4, 1872, the Bolton correspondent for the London Daily Echo tapped out this dispatch, which was picked up and carried in the weeks to come by newspapers around the world: “Last night, Massarti, the lion tamer at Manders’ Menagerie, now exhibiting in this town, was torn to pieces by the lions with whom he was performing.” That didn’t tell the half of it.
Thomas Maccarte, better known as Massarti the Lion Tamer, was no ordinary animal trainer. He was one of the rare one-armed lion tamers. He lost the appendage ten years earlier, when he was mauled while working with the Bell and Myers Circus in Liverpool. Sarah Manders, who ran the traveling show, was herself a former “lion queen.” She hired Maccarte to replace Maccomo, “the negro lion tamer” who died in January 1871, to star along with the most grand traveling collection of wild and exotic animals in the United Kingdom. She hired him although she’d been warned that Maccarte was a bit of a loose cannon, with a reputation for not only being bold and adventurous but also taking too many unnecessary risks.
On this January 3 in Bolton, the traveling troupe was performing an extra, unscheduled 10:30 PM show as a farewell to the folks in the town outside Manchester before pulling up stakes and moving six miles down the road for a stand in Bury.
There were five hundred spectators in the stands and five lions in a cage waiting for Massarti to make his entrance. Usually, the keepers and workers had red-hot iron rods and scrapers fired up to use on the animals if they got out of hand, but since this show was not on the schedule, the usual safety precautions weren’t in place.
Massarti himself may not have been in the best condition to face down the wild beasts. Two nights earlier, one of the lions, an African with a black mane, bit him on his surviving hand, and he told his wife he was afraid of the cat. So before he made his way into their den, he fortified himself with some hefty shots of liquor. One witness said he wasn’t exactly drunk, but had downed enough alcohol to be foolhardy.
Massarti was dressed as a one-armed Roman when he entered the lion’s den. Waving his Roman falchion—a one-handed sword, of course—he put the giant cats through their motions, to the delight of the audience. He kept the lions in their corners, careful not to cross what the animals were trained to recognize as the imaginary line that separates their space from the tamer’s “office.”
Maccarte noticed that the African, the one who’d bitten him, was getting uppity and insubordinate. He stared the lion down, and in doing so, took his eyes off an Asiatic lion named Tyrant. Still staring intensely, Maccarte moved to slide his sword back into its sheath. That’s when he slipped and fell on his one arm.
He must have crossed that imaginary line when he hit the ground. Tyrant pounced and bit into Maccarte’s haunches. The African hopped down and chomped down on his armless shoulder. Blood spurted. Maccarte screamed for help, for the hot iron rods, for the guns, all the while stabbing at Tyrant’s eyes, nose, and mouth with his tiny sword.
The crowd was in a panic. The animal keepers scrambled to get metal partitions in place in the cage to separate the lions from the tamer, but audience members were jammed up against the cage and in their way. The keepers fired guns, but they were blanks. One of them began slamming the iron rods and scrapers into the fire, heating and weaponizing them.
The uproar and the blood pouring out of Maccarte incited the other lions. Now a third lion, an Abyssinian, chomped onto his ribs. A five-year-old lion, Maccarte’s favorite of them all, scampered down from its perch, put its big jaws around the tamer’s head, and chewed down, scalping him. The flesh hung down his neck. The tamer’s pet returned to his corner.
There was more gunfire, and the lions began to back away. Two of the keepers entered the cage with the hot rods. They beat back the lions, and just as they were getting the attackers under control, the fifth, last lion, decided to have one last bite of the body in the dirt. The divider was in place, and three of the lions were separated thanks to the hot irons. The black-maned African was edged into a corner. It seemed the fifteen-minute attack was over.
It wasn’t. The remaining lion grabbed Maccarte by his leg, just above the boot, and dragged him toward the others. The mauling and flesh feast went on for another five horrific minutes, until more men with more hot iron rods got into the cage. They finally forced all the lions to the other side of the divider and were able to carry out the destroyed body. Maccarte uttered a few incoherent words. A coworker said he asked to forget about getting him to a doctor; he knew he was a goner.
They set him down in the infirmary. He died minutes later. Maccarte was thirty-four. A reporter for the Bolton Evening News listed an inventory of his wounds:
The only arm the deceased had was streaked with deep gashes from the shoulder to the hand; the scalp was torn right back, and from the hips to the knees, where he was seized from behind, the muscles are completely torn out. There are pieces of flesh gone from the ribs, and the bones of the pelvis, which are the strongest in the human frame, have had pieces bitten clean out.
At the inquest, the coroner placed no blame on anyone, and even stated that Maccarte’s drinking wasn’t a factor, because once he was down, he defended himself as a sober person would. The jury returned a verdict of death by misadventure but showed themselves to be far ahead of their time when they added this statement: “The jury feel it to be their bounden duty to express their entire disapprobation of the reckless custom of so-called lion tamers performing in dens where ferocious animals are caged.”
A statistically hazardous performing occupation is that of the human cannonball, the individual as projectile, fired from a cannon into the air toward a net, airbag, or body of water—anything that will provide a survivable impact upon landing. The “cannon,” of course, does not operate like a regular cannon, which would blast a human body to smithereens. Fireworks, gunpowder, or smoke might be added to simulate the firing of an actual weapon, but the launch mechanism is actually compressed air or a simple spring that propels the human cannonball through the cylinder toward the target. The “cannonball” can travel up to seventy miles per hour, to an altitude of seventy feet, as far as two hundred feet—and of course, it’s not the flight but the landing that can hurt the most.
The first recorded human cannonball was a fourteen-year-old girl. Rossa Matilda Richter, known professionally as Zazel, was launched about thirty feet at the Royal Westminster Aquarium in London on April 2, 1877. Judging by photographs at the time, a key to Zazel’s popularity and the popularization of the human cannonball stunt was the fact that “she had to shed most of her Victorian clothing” to fit into the cannon barrel. Zazel went on to a career with P. T. Barnum’s circus until, according to one report, she was launched into a “rotten net” and broke her back.
Zazel was a lucky one. Human cannonball historians have counted upward of thirty deaths of human cannonballs since that first flight—including two Cliff Greggs.
Now what are the odds that there were two Cliff Greggs who were human cannonballs, both killed in a human cannonball stunt, not related by birth or marriage, with deaths separated by four years?
There is a very logical answer, and it begins with Cliff Aeros, a well-known German acrobat who, between 1926 and 1929, built and owned three human cannonball cannons. In 1930, one of the Aeros cannons was sold to Fred O. “Fearless” Gregg, a circus performer famous for his loop-the-loop double auto act (the type of mechanical thrill act that until then had replaced the human cannonball in the United States).
Fearless Gregg booked his human cannonball act into the Robbins Brothers Circus. He wasn’t about to have himself shot out of the cannon, so he hired men to do it for him—roustabouts, thrill seekers, and desperate types who could use the money. Each of them took the name Gregg.
On Monday, September 28, 1931, the Robbins Circus had set up camp at the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds in Oklahoma City. That afternoon, Fearless Gregg’s Aeros cannon was mounted on a large truck. A human cannon fodder calling himself “Major” Will Gregg was fired toward the large net, ninety feet from the cannon’s mouth. He landed just short of the net.
Will Gregg escaped with minor injuries but had to sit out the next show. The following afternoon, a German immigrant named Wladyslaus Kruck, who’d taken the name “Captain” Cliff Gregg and was advertised as Will’s older brother, was launched by the same cannon. This time, this Gregg flew high into the air, with tremendous velocity. There was not enough velocity, unfortunately, to reach the net. Cliff Gregg landed four feet short. He landed on his head, breaking his neck and dying.
As the Associated Press would report, “‘The show must go on,’ the old adage of show people, was demonstrated very forcibly”—as was the notion that human cannonballs can’t take a hint—when, twenty-four hours later, Will Gregg donned a leather helmet and slid feet-first back into the cannon, despite its obvious faulty firing mechanism. This time, he was launched, flew the entire ninety feet, and landed safely in the net.
Two hundred performers filed into the Hahn Funeral Chapel in Oklahoma City on Friday morning to pay tribute to the twenty-five-year-old German Cliff Gregg. His pallbearers were members of the Hamid Troupe of Arabs (“the Whirlwind Acrobatic Sons of the Desert”) in full stage costume.
At the time of his death, Cliff Gregg had been scheduled to perform the human cannonball act twice daily at the Louisiana State Fair, beginning October 24. The fair’s booking agent assured everyone that the show would go on, with Will Gregg or another Cliff Gregg ready to give one last wave to the crowd before sliding feet first into the mouth of a cannon and being blasted off into the unknown.
An altogether different Cliff Gregg was shot from a cannon at the Ocean Park Pier in Santa Monica, California, on July 26, 1935. A huge and boisterous crowd watched as Cliff Aeros’s cannon catapulted the human cannonball into the sky and over the Pacific Ocean in what seemed to be a perfect 125-foot arc toward the water—perfect, until he hit the water.
Crew members said other Cliff Greggs usually straightened out at the end of their flights, but a slight wind blowing that day made it difficult to do so. That may be why, according to witnesses, instead of striking the water in a diving position, this Cliff Gregg kept his body rigid. He slammed into the surf at the exact moment a comber—a long, curling wave—roared in. He hit the comber, face first, and was knocked unconscious. His body rose to the surface once, then disappeared.
Ed Unger was in a boat offshore, waiting to fish the cannonball out of the drink and take him back to the pier. “I could see him under the water, still not moving,” Unger told a reporter for United Press. “I grabbed at his hair, but lost hold. Then I dived after him, but he was gone.”
This Cliff Gregg’s body was found under the pier the following day. His identity was confirmed on that Saturday as well. He was William C. Miller, a twenty-two-year-old from Newtonville, Massachusetts, and New York City. Miller didn’t work for the Fearless Gregg show. Pier attendants said he’d simply showed up at the pier that Friday. Appearing to be out of work, he volunteered to be shot from the cannon.
The manager of the show, who also called himself “Captain Cliff Gregg,” said Miller had claimed to be an experienced diver and to have performed as a human cannonball back East. Miller’s friends, though, said he was just looking for a thrill. Will Miller died on his first-ever attempt.
With its mix of acrobatics, music, character-driven plots, fantastical costumes, and advanced technical innovations—and lack of animals—Cirque du Soleil offers far more than the “nouveau cirque” it represents. The entertainment company, based in Montreal and founded in 1984, has expanded through every continent except Antarctica, with more than twenty productions touring, playing Broadway, or settled permanently in Las Vegas. Each show presents a mash-up of circus styles and performers from around the world, synthesized into a theatrical experience very different and far more refined and awe-inspiring than the traditional sawdust three-ringers.
Volta was Cirque’s forty-first production. Billed as “a story of transformation . . . inspired in part by the adventurous spirit that fuels the culture of action sports,” the show opened in April 2017 in a new, environmentally correct Big Top in Montreal and went on to engagements in Gatineau, Toronto, Miami, and, on Valentine’s Day 2018, the parking lot of the Tampa Greyhound Track in Tampa, Florida.
Yann Arnaud was among the cast. The thirty-eight-year-old French aerialist had been with Cirque for more than fifteen years and was featured in Le Rêve, its long-running spectacle at the Wynn resort in Las Vegas. Four days into the Tampa run, Arnaud posted on his Instagram account that he was ready to unveil an intricate new routine that evening: “After so much work and training and staging, our straps duo act is finally in the show tonight. It’s time to go for it.”
A “straps duo act” is a complicated specialty in which two aerialists perform muscular acrobatics while hanging from long leather straps. Arnaud and Pawel Walczewski “went for it” around 9:52 PM that Saturday night for the crowd that filled the twenty-six-hundred-seat tent. While a line of drummers banged out a beat below them, the men performed spins and aerobatics, each clutching a long red strap. When the straps were raised, Arnaud and Walczewski linked their free arms and performed in tandem, then separated, flying off in opposite directions above the crowd. As gravity swung him back toward the center of the circular stage, Arnaud lost his grip. He flew into the air and then dropped thirty feet, smashing to the stage, on his head.
There was a collective gasp from audience. Someone shouted, “Oh, Lord!” Several Cirque crew members rushed to the stage where, according to audience member Ben Ritter (a former US marine confined to a wheelchair), Arnaud was “out cold and not moving.” As Walczewski dangled above, watching helplessly, an announcer noted that “the show has been temporarily interrupted.” By the time paramedics got to him around 10:00 PM, Arnaud was unresponsive and in a coma. He had fractured his skull and suffered severe brain damage.
The audience was asked to leave—the show did not go on. Around 3:30 AM on March 18, during surgery at Tampa General Hospital, Yann Arnaud was pronounced dead. Two more performances of Volta had been scheduled for that Sunday before the troupe moved on from Tampa. Those final shows did not go on either.
The tragedy of Yann Arnaud, the second onstage death of a Cirque performer, was horrifying, but not as shocking, or with effects as far reaching, as what had happened in Las Vegas during Cirque du Soleil’s performance of Kà.
From its first preview at the MGM Grand Resort and Casino on November 12, 2004, the show Kà was by all measures the most elaborate and technologically sophisticated Cirque production yet. The title was “inspired by the ancient Egyptian belief in the ‘ka,’ an invisible spiritual duplicate of the body that accompanies every human being throughout this life and into the next.” The plot (Kà was the first Cirque show with a storyline) about imperial twins—a boy and a girl—on a quest to reclaim their Far East palace from evil warriors, played a distant second to the $165 million production. Kà was an awe-inspiring presentation that included pyrotechnics, puppetry, martial arts, multimedia, a digital audio system that included a pair of ear-level speakers in each of the 1,950 seats, and a performance space unlike any before.
Where there should have been a stage was an abyss, a pit, fifty-one-feet deep, with a series of moving decks, platforms, and lifts that seemed to float above and through a bottomless void. The decks could move in front of, behind, above, and below each other. Above the stage level, a performance grid turned nearly vertical, extending ninety-eight feet. In all, there was a total of fifteen stories of performance space.
“Indeed, this show, which is also said to need around $1 million weekly to operate, may well be the most lavish production in the history of Western theater,” wrote Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times. “It is surely the most technologically advanced.”
That didn’t mean that Kà lacked the human component. The crew numbered three hundred; eighty were cast members.
Sarah Guyard-Guillot was among the cast. A veteran acrobat and aerialist who was born in Paris and graduated from the famed Annie Fratellini Art & Circus Academy in Saint-Denis, she joined Kà in 2006. She was known by her stage name, Sasoun.
Seven years later, she was still with the show, while also running a children’s acrobatic fitness school on West Flamingo Road called Cirquefit. She was divorced, with two daughters, aged five and eight, and involved in an unusual yet comfortable backstage triangle. Her ex-husband Mathieu Guyard, the girls’ father, was also a Kà performer. So was his new wife, Kelly Tucker Guyard.
There were two performances on Saturday night, June 29, 2013, both bound to be overshadowed by the official premier of Cirque’s latest concoction, Michael Jackson ONE, two blocks south at the Mandalay Bay. Kà’s final scene in the second show disrupted those assumptions.
Everything in Kà led to this, a battle in which the forces of good and evil squared off as the stage platform slowly tilted until it was almost vertical and the audience viewed the action as if from above. The warriors, flying, flipping, and fighting close to the spectators, were all acrobats, wearing harnesses attached to thin cables that allowed them to move in all directions.
Sasoun was playing one of the bad guys, a Spearman warrior. She was hoisted up the side of the vertical stage to a height of at least ninety-four feet (some eyewitnesses said it may have been over a hundred feet), when her harness apparently slipped from its safety wire and she fell. One of the other acrobats reached out to catch her, but just missed. She was too far away and dropped too quickly, like a stone into the abyss below the stage. It was a ten-story fall that ended in a landing out of the audience’s view—but not earshot.
If anyone in the crowd thought for a flash of an instant that Sarah Guyard-Guillot’s spectacular fall was part of the choreography—and gravity- and reality-defying stunts were a hallmark of the Cirque brand—the sound that followed the fall was all too real. Everyone could hear the screaming, then Sasoun’s anguished moans and groans and the sound of a woman crying.
The first news flash came from audience tweets: “Wire snapped. Performer on far stage left side of stage.” “He/she fell fast & awkwardly at LEAST 50 feet into pit.”
The fall was from twice that height. The show was stopped. A recorded voice asked the audience to leave and said refunds would be offered. The other acrobats watched from above as they dangled in the air. One by one, they were lowered to safety.
Sarah Guyard-Guillot was pronounced dead in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. She was thirty-one. Hers was the first onstage fatal accident in Cirque du Soleil’s twenty-nine-year history. The Clark County coroner ruled that she “died from multiple blunt force trauma suffered Saturday when she fell approximately 90 feet during a performance of ‘Kà’ at MGM Grand.”
The production was shut down. It resumed on July 16, without the final battle scene.
Three months later, the Nevada Occupational Safety and Health Administration completed its investigation into Sarah’s death and concluded that she “flew up at a higher rate of speed than normal toward the grid without tucking in her feet or legs” and collided with the grid. “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.”
OSHA cited Cirque du Soleil Nevada Inc. for six safety violations, including improper training in the use of equipment, improper assessment of hazards, improper record-keeping, and the removal of Sarah’s thirty-eight-foot-long wire before investigators arrived. The citations added up to a fine of $25,235. MGM Grand Hotel and Casino was cited for three violations, including exposing employees to hazards caused by Cirque’s deficiencies, a $7,000 fine.