Athletes fall. Dancers fall. The risks inherent in their search for excellence almost dictate that they do. But, usually, they get up again. However, when Liu Yan, a 26-year-old graduate of the Beijing Dance Academy and a top medalist in several Chinese dance competitions, fell some ten feet (more than three meters) from a faulty platform into a shaft on August 6th during a rehearsal for the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China, she apparently lay sprawled for perhaps more than an hour before paramedics arrived to take her to No. 306 People’s Liberation Army Hospital.
After a six-hour operation on her spine—as Xin Fei and Jason Loftus of The Epoch Times reported on August 16th, quoting a report in The Shanghai Daily—doctors determined that her 12th thoracic vertebra (T12) “was seriously unaligned and the nerves were seriously injured.” The medical prognosis was that she would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.
Liu, a lyrical performer of great personal beauty, technical exactitude, and theatrical puissance (you can see her dancing on YouTube) had been scheduled to be showcased for two minutes as the only solo dancer in the opening ceremonies, whose cast included 14,000 dancers (9,000 of them soldiers of China’s People’s Liberation Army) and whose predicted audience, including those watching the spectacle on television, was one billion people worldwide. Her sequence—in which she was asked to jump onto a high platform that wasn’t supposed to start moving until she was safely positioned on it—was directed by Zhang Yimou, the overall director of the ceremonies and a film director and cinematographer of international renown (Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, House of Flying Daggers).
Some elements of this catastrophe remain unclear. The public announcement by the government that she had fallen was withheld for two-and-a-half weeks; however, rumors of it quickly circulated from Chinese bloggers and news reporters via the Internet, and their increasing number and angry tone seem to have provoked the Chinese government to make a formal comment. Internet reports by various Chinese, British, and American newspapers have noted that representatives from the government have visited Liu in the hospital, called her sacrifice heroic and promised her that, although another dancer took her place in the ceremonies, it is her name that would be listed as the soloist in future records.
Yet there has been no comment on what, exactly, happened with the equipment; why Zhang was quoted as saying that he should have given more detailed directions in rehearsal, and who would be picking up the expenses for Liu’s hospitalization and lifelong care. Although some readers might presume that the government would subsidize these expenses, this may not be the case.
For example, in May 2002, Norbert M. Dubois reported in a story for Dance Magazine that travel expenses for the auditioning of dancers at the Beijing Dance Academy, once paid for by the school, would no longer be reimbursed. He quotes the school’s director, Xu Ding Zhong, as saying, “Nowadays, as more Chinese gain affluence, the parents must pay for the hotel and transportation; it’s not like we did years ago when we provided almost everything.”
Born in 1982, Liu is a native of Inner Mongolia. Her devastated parents—who remained in Mongolia during the rehearsal period—hastened to be at her side when they were informed of the accident, although it is not known when, exactly, they were informed. To date, no news agency has interviewed them. David Barboza’s story about the fall, published on August 14th in The New York Times, one of the few Western papers to report the story and possibly the sole Western periodical to interview Liu independently, now remains only in the paper’s online archives.
