Raman Stsepaniuk and Ludivine Perrin-Stsepaniuk started dating sixteen years ago, after they had both moved to Las Vegas. Raman, then twenty-seven, was an acrobat, born in Belarus, who had toured Soviet Russia and the United States with a circus troupe. Ludivine, who goes by Ludi, was a lanky twenty-one-year-old who had recently retired from France’s national synchronized-swimming team. Along with dozens of other Olympic athletes and international circus performers, they had moved to Vegas to open a new water-acrobatics show called “Le Rêve.”
For a multimillion-dollar operation on the Strip, “Le Rêve” was intimate. Cast members liked to say that there was no bad seat in the house: the stage, which was composed of platforms set in a pool, was round, and more than sixteen hundred viewers sat within forty-two feet of the performance. Sensual vignettes involving acrobatics, dance, and swimming told the otherworldly tale of the “dreamer” choosing between two lovers. Ludi and Raman often performed in the same sequences, though Ludi rarely surfaced from the pool for more than a few seconds—she would breathe through tubes connected to oxygen tanks, and exit the stage through underwater tunnels. Yet, even in those brief moments, Raman could tell which of the near-identical swimmers was his girlfriend. Ludi, meanwhile, would catch glimpses of Raman—muscular, with a shaved head to comply with the show’s dress code—twirling in the air above her. “I fell in love with him when he was doing ‘Le Rêve,’ ” Ludi said of Raman, who is now her husband. “I used to always be in the water, and I would see him fly and do great things.”
Thousands of miles away from their homes in Europe, Raman and Ludi found a family in the cast of “Le Rêve.” The performers threw holiday parties in the dressing rooms, attended weddings and baby showers for their colleagues, bought houses down the street from one another. They baked bread and watched one another’s children. “The day after my kids were born, they were backstage,” Ludi told me. “We all grew up together.”
The couple performed together for eleven years. The work was stable: two shows a night, five nights a week. The money was good—enough to buy a house and start a family after just a few years. Ludi remained close with cast members even after she left the show in 2016, to start a private-entertainment company. Raman stayed on as one of the few remaining original cast members. He performed until March, 2020, when the show, like so much of the city, closed because of the pandemic.
Unlike most other shows on the Strip, “Le Rêve” never came back. In August, 2020, management at the Wynn Las Vegas, which owned and operated the production, told cast members that their show would be discontinued. For many, the closure was a shock; performers had received information about reopening protocols, and some felt that management didn’t give a sufficient explanation for the show’s closure. (In a statement, a Wynn spokesperson said the show “was closed due to uncertainty surrounding the date when shows would be permitted to reopen and the previous years’ decline in attendance,” and that protocols did not represent an official plan for reopening.) About ninety performers were officially out of a job. Some had worked on the show for the entirety of their adult lives.
Nearly two years after “Le Rêve” went dark, the cast is still grappling with what it means to be a performer without a show in Las Vegas. Some are still unemployed; others have found odd jobs—as sales representatives, hospital technicians, Pilates instructors. A handful are training to audition for other shows, biding their time until an elusive contract opens up in a city overrun with talent. For many in this world of high-level performance, where acrobats and swimmers start training as children, the work was all they knew.
Though he was gutted by the closure of “Le Rêve,” Raman, the self-described “old fart of the company,” also felt oddly relieved. After spending a third of his life with the show, he didn’t have to make a decision about when to quit—the choice was made for him. But he needed to find work. In the fall of 2020, his eight-year-old daughter cut her fingertip and was rushed to the emergency room. Raman was on unemployment at the time, and the family didn’t have health insurance. (“We’re still paying it off,” Raman told me.) When he was driving on the freeway one afternoon a few months later, a billboard advertising a job opening caught his eye. It read “Not Afraid of Heights?”
The job, it turned out, was installing billboards. Although he doesn’t love the work, he said, “it keeps me in good shape.” Given his previous work, Raman is accustomed to working high above the ground, but at first he struggled with the movements. After years of straining the same muscles in the same show every day, the new tasks were a shock to the system. He typically installs eight to eleven billboards a day, earning about half of what he made in “Le Rêve.”
During evenings and weekends, when he’s not installing billboards, Raman coaches at a trapeze facility, leisurely work that he likens to “therapy from the job that provides the paycheck.” Early one Sunday morning, I drove to a dirt lot between a golf course and a go-kart racetrack to watch him train acrobats who weren’t ready to give up performing. Strewn across the lot were colorful gymnastics mats, trampolines, and tall circus apparatuses, including a flying trapeze and a pair of rotating hoops called the Wheel of Death. Reggie Morlen, a twenty-eight-year-old acrobat from San Antonio, was hanging upside down about fifteen feet from the ground, with his legs bent over a rectangular frame. Morlen’s arms strained beneath him as he clasped the wrists of Melina Maus, a thirty-four-year-old acrobat from Belgium. Propelled by his movement, Maus swung through the air like a pendulum. Raman, dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans, smoked a cigar and gave curt commands. “Feel him,” Raman said to Maus. “Work with him. Not by yourself.”
Last spring, as the biggest shows in Vegas announced plans to reopen to the public, the city’s unemployed performers started training. Desperate for any opportunity to perform on a big stage again, they had to start preparing to audition for roles that weren’t even open yet. The morning I visited, Raman’s students were practicing a routine from the Cirque du Soleil production “O,” a water-acrobatics show, to which many “Le Rêve” alumni are pinning their hopes.
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The “O” sequence was part of an act called “The Ghostly Bateau,” in which acrobats known as flyers, like Maus, and catchers, like Morlen, form a kind of human hinge. For catchers, “it’s probably one of the hardest, if not the hardest, things to learn,” Raman told me. While suspended upside down, they hold the weight of two bodies: the flyer’s and their own. During the first month of training, Morlen, a muscular gymnast who can normally sit comfortably in a low squat, couldn’t bend his legs. “We’re purposefully injuring your nerve system,” Raman said.
Perfecting these routines requires mastery of the physics, but also intangible things like trust and intuition. After practicing a move hundreds, even thousands, of times, a performer should be able to read their partner’s body: where the pain sits, when the arms are ready to give. To my eyes, most of the acrobats’ repetitions of the same swings and flips looked identical, but Raman could see every gradation of weight, force, and grip. Sometimes Maus didn’t push her arms down far enough; often, Morlen held too much tension in his body, and didn’t extend his swings long enough.
“I don’t feel like I’m almost there,” Morlen told me, frustrated, after the practice. He’d only been at “Le Rêve” for a year and a half when it closed. He had been a gymnast since the age of five, and “Le Rêve” was his first big show. “I had it in my head—this was my career, I don’t want to leave,” Morlen said. Now, he was working as a sales representative in a plant nursery while training with Raman two or three days a week, hungry for another shot onstage. He missed working in the water—seeing the pool in miniature from fifty feet above, then feeling the water rush forward on the dive. He was giving the job at the plant store his best effort, even if he didn’t know how long he’d be there: a month, a year, however long it took to get back into a show, if ever.
Raman, on the other hand, was at the twilight of his career when the show closed. He joked that he’d fallen into a lazy rhythm with the company, having performed thousands of shows over fifteen years. “I got fat there, so that means it’s not very intense,” he said. As he grew older, he transitioned to less physically demanding roles, and knew that, eventually, he’d have to give it up so that younger and fitter performers could take his place.
As members of the original cast of “Le Rêve,” Raman and Ludi are elder statesmen to the newer crop of performers. They look out for younger acrobats and swimmers, helping them train and find part-time work. Raman is sardonic and unassuming; Ludi is his energetic and entrepreneurial counterpart. She assumed the role of a leader while performing in “Le Rêve,” and was intensely devoted to her crew of synchronized swimmers. During the show’s early years, she fought to make sure that swimmers—who were often viewed as “backup dancers” to the more visible acrobats—were stars of their own acts. “We call her Mom,” Maïté Tengler, a French synchronized swimmer who has admired Ludi from a young age, said.
After the initial stress of Raman’s unemployment, Ludi, who’d been retired from “Le Rêve” for several years, saw an opportunity in the show’s closure. She now had a solid—and available—talent pool for her entertainment company, Ovia Entertainment, which contracts performers for private parties. She rang up old friends for gigs as covid restrictions relaxed and the city’s social life resurged in full force. It helped that the party planners of Las Vegas have a taste for the spectacular: they needed acrobats for backyard birthdays, swimmers in mermaid costumes for surprise parties. For the opening of a casino, Ludi choreographed two numbers with twenty swimmers in four different pools.
In late October, Ludi invited me to attend a gig in Summerlin, a posh development framed by towering red sandstone mountains. The event was a masquerade-themed party for the grand opening of the Las Vegas Injury Pain Center. (Grand openings appear to be a big business in town: one man who happened to be in the building for an appointment said he’d just thrown an extravagant bash for the launch of his real-estate practice.) Doctors, physical therapists, and personal-injury lawyers milled about in a courtyard, eating hors d’œuvres and exchanging business cards. Some wore cocktail attire; others wore scrubs. Few wore the masquerade masks that were handed out at the event. The performers, several of whom were alumni of “Le Rêve,” wove through the crowd, walking on stilts, dancing with burning torches, and doing handstands.
Ludi spent the evening doting on her performers: she adjusted costumes, snapped photographs, and strapped stilts to one woman’s legs with duct tape. She gathered her team into small huddles between routines and coached them on the evening’s strategy. “Sets of twenty minutes,” she instructed them. “Then you just switch.” A crowd of men was gathered around a mobile bar, paying no attention to the performer who was balancing on a giant red ball in the middle of the courtyard. Ludi sighed. “We need to bring them here,” she said. She glanced at the acrobat and suggested that she perform closer to the bar. A physical therapist clapped while a performer danced with a flaming hula hoop.
Performers like these know that their careers depend on a particular alchemy of fitness, luck, and industry savvy. Their bodies wear down with age and injury; shows flounder, and sometimes close. Though performers spend their lives devoted to their art, in some cases instead of pursuing a college education, actually getting work is a gamble. The pandemic has only magnified these realities. “Any show,” Raman told me, “has a feeling that, is it going to be running next year? You have a one-year contract. And it’s show business. People stop coming. You are unemployed. It’s never kind of like a normal job.”
Among the younger cast members, the sense of loss seems more acute. “It felt like somebody died, actually,” Maïté Tengler, Ludi’s protégé, said. “We didn’t choose that we’re done performing.” At thirty, she is still gripped by a desire to appear on a big stage again. When I asked her and her husband, Cody, a former “Le Rêve” acrobat, how long they had imagined themselves performing in the show, they looked at each other. “Until our bodies—” Maïté began, “—said no more,” Cody finished.
Raman and Ludi see the future of performance in Las Vegas—or, at least, their future—in small gigs, like the ones they arrange through Ovia, in which performers and guests get to interact. I accompanied the couple to one such event, the opening of a lounge at the Sahara Las Vegas, in early January. Stilt walkers teetered around a sparsely populated bar thrumming with electronic music. Ludi followed, recording iPhone videos, and Raman watched approvingly, sipping from a can of Red Bull.
Big shows like “Le Rêve” don’t have to be the end, or even the peak, of an artist’s career, the pair said. “Performers don’t get it yet,” Raman said of the ambitious young acrobats he trains. “But we do,” Ludi interjected. Neither, however, is fully immune from nostalgia. Ludi has made no secret of the fact that she has ambitions to make the next “Le Rêve,” or at least something comparably spectacular. Even Raman, for all his self-deprecation, is prone to wistfulness. “Being an acrobat, you always get the energy from people,” he told me, after one Sunday-morning training. “Just talking to you now, I can remember the feeling.”
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