Acrobat dies after fall at Six Flags Elitch Gardens

I'm rather suprised that there was not safety harness on the acrobat. I've seen this same routine done by several different troupes and they used the harness. Very sad.

We had one of those troupes (Chinese Dragons?) visit my college years ago, and they operated without a net.

Kind of hard to do it with a safety harness if they performed it right in the audience (if I read the article correctly) as opposed to the main center stage.

I have an episode of Cirque Du Soleil with a man doing the same thing--and oh yeah he has a cake in his hands too! The one difference? He has a safety cable attached to him. When I worked as an usher at Cirque during the "Dralion" show, my fellow usher said he heard a couple walk out because the young female Chinese Acrobats were using safety cables. I'm really glad I didn't hear those comments first hand. They would've gotten an earful from me.

The performer in Imaginique several years ago did not use a harness.

I heard an old performer (Kumar of India) discussing a similar act recently. He used to do chair balancing on top of 4 bottles with no safety rig. He would then have an audience member remove one of the bottles leaving him balanced on three bottles. He was on a stack about 12-15 ft above the stage when his volunteer removed the bottle before he was ready. He came down and injured both arms badly enough that he had to drop the acrobatics and started doing plate spinning and juggling instead.

Same thing happened a few years ago at SFGAm. A 16 year old girl was in the Chinese Acrobat show and fell with no net. Luckily she survived.

Thats insane, I saw the guy doing that show a week before this happened.......