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. For the performers, it is a job, and they do it like troupers, twice a night, five nights a week. For the audience, it is a wonder, as if the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon had come to life before their eyes. As one, the Spearmen, all of them, fall upward. 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. 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. Each warrior is played by an acrobat who wears a harness attached to a wire rope. 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. 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. 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.
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