On September 5, Cirque du Soleil’s Mad Apple played its last performance at New York-New York Hotel & Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. According to FOX5 Las Vegas, the show had drawn more than 1.2 million guests since May 2022, and the company said it was working with the cast and crew on redeployment across its global productions where possible. Redeployment is a soft word for a hard question, the one every stage performer eventually faces: when the show ends, what goes with you? Most of the cast will answer with skill. Mauricio Vanegas Torres, 38, who closed Mad Apple on the Wheel of Death, answers with a machine as well. Two performers, a rotating double wheel, stunts at heights that German reviewers described as dizzying, and an apparatus so large that a traditional version cannot enter most theaters. Since 2012 he has carried the act through contracts in Japan, Germany, France, Spain, Peru, the United Kingdom and the United States, picked up a Bronze Lion at the 2017 Wuqiao festival in China, ranked with Monte-Carlo among the world’s leading circus competitions, and helped rebuild the wheel itself for rooms it was never meant to fit. What follows is how a performer in one of the rarest circus disciplines turned that machine into a career that does not end with a closing notice.
A machine that cannot be booked from a casting call
Picture the last act of a Las Vegas show, the band loud and the audience already on its feet, two men running along the outside of a giant spinning wheel with nothing but air beneath them: that is the slot Cirque du Soleil gave the Wheel of Death at Mad Apple, and since the company had previously had difficulty finding stable performers of this level in such a specialized discipline, it hired Vanegas Torres and his partner in 2023.
He learned the wheel from a friend who shares most of his name, because his first teacher was Mauricio Torres Acero, and on Jan. 10, 2012, when Torres Acero organized a festival at the circus where his former student was working, he asked Vanegas Torres to sit on the jury. Between 2012 and 2015 the younger Mauricio toured Colombia with Gran Circo Di Lunna’s family shows, and in February 2016 he signed his first contract abroad, with Happy Dream Circus in Japan, where he performed and also ran the number as head trainer, coaching other professional artists, supervising safety and shaping the choreography. In 2026 the production’s former director, now Director General of Sakura Production Co., Ltd., confirmed that role in a written document.
Everything he had been taught was somebody else’s, and what came next was not. “El Gato, the double drop — nobody had put those on the wheel before I did them,” says Vanegas Torres, who trained the act in Japan before he led it in Las Vegas, “and now I watch people work them into their own routines, taking the shape of the trick and adapting it until they get somewhere near the level. Honestly, that is the part that means something. You spend years on a thing and then it stops belonging only to you.”
A bronze lion and a fire finale
Europe found him in 2017, first at Europa-Park, Germany’s largest theme park, where he worked with the troupe of Douglas Gerling, and then in October at the 16th China Wuqiao International Circus Festival, where he competed as part of an international team, one of 29 troupes drawn from 17 countries chasing the festival’s lion awards, and the wheel came home with bronze. Wuqiao’s organizers position their event alongside Monte-Carlo among the world’s leading circus competitions.
Weeks later the Gerlings were in France at the Festival International des Artistes de Cirque de Saint-Paul-lès-Dax, where the opening parade gathered artists of eleven nationalities and the local paper singled out the Wheel of Death act by four courageous performers from Colombia and Argentina, and December brought Circus Flic Flac’s X-Mas show in Duisburg, 24 performances in a single engagement.
Then came the invitation that shows what the act does to a room: at ToyNight on Ice 2018, the gala staged for the Spielwarenmesse Nürnberg toy fair in front of roughly 1,000 invited guests, the evening carried two headline entertainments — Holiday on Ice, and a fire-driven Wheel of Death finale with Vanegas Torres as one of its two acrobats. From there the wheel went to Peru with Circo D’Italia’s touring production ROMA, to Spain with LETSGO’s The Hole Zero, and back to Lima in 2019 for Circo Clásico at the Jockey Club del Perú, a 35-artist production whose season ran from July 13 to Sept. 6 and which later issued him a written recognition for outstanding participation. Each of those rooms came with its own ceiling, and a number of them sat too low for a standard apparatus.
Taking out the axis
A traditional Wheel of Death needs a very large space, and that single requirement quietly closes off whole categories of paid work: dinner shows, cabaret tents, theaters whose ceilings were set for orchestras. Vanegas Torres wanted those bookings, so rather than wait for a room that fit the machine he went at the machine itself.
“So I took out the central axis and rebuilt the structure around what was left,” he says, “and the apparatus we ended up with stands at about 5.8 meters, which is low enough for the rooms that had always been closed to us and still tall enough that the number keeps its essence. For me the calculation starts with the ceiling and works backwards.”
PALAZZO Mannheim’s 2019/2020 dinner show was where the idea met an audience, since performing with the Navas team he took part in developing a compact wheel built specifically for the tent, the first time the act had ever been presented in a dinner-show format. Regional press wrote that the wheel drove the audience’s adrenaline to its peak shortly before the finale, and that the premiere ended in standing ovations. The season expected more than 50,000 visitors.
None of that engineering removes what the act costs when it goes wrong, and in Germany he fell from the wheel and fractured two vertebrae, and the recovery took more than four months. “The doctor told me that if my spinal cord had shifted slightly more, I could have been left permanently disabled and in a wheelchair,” he recalls. Returning was, he says, one of the most difficult and important moments of his career.
By the 2021/2022 Christmas season he was in London, announced ahead of Circus 1903 at the Royal Festival Hall as part of the Colombian wheel team, for a run from Dec. 16 to Jan. 2, and after that came the Miss Germany 2022 finale at Europa-Park Arena, a summer at the Hippodrome Circus in Great Yarmouth, and Rock Circus at IFEMA Madrid, a production of close to 50 artists that ran from Oct. 6 to Nov. 1, 2022. Its 10 dancers worked in front of a 14-piece rock band, and the production’s own materials billed Dúo Blessed and the wheel as one of the highest-risk acts in the circus world.
A wheel designed from a blueprint
Las Vegas raised the engineering stakes, because at standard dimensions the wheel would have extended almost over the audience, so once the contract with Cirque du Soleil was signed, Vanegas Torres and his partner Jesse Brandao sat down with company engineer Massé Pierre.
“We gave them a series of measurements that had to be extremely precise,” he says, “and the following week the engineer came back with a blueprint, and we went through it together and corrected some of the measurements and certain points that had not been done correctly.”
Sections of the iron structure where performers normally hang outside the wheel were cut away because they were uncomfortable, a special section was designed into the middle of the axle to make certain tricks easier, and the weight was matched to the two performers’ own sizes so the apparatus would turn somewhat faster, with the bearings and tension cables settled last. Cirque du Soleil built it, and it worked perfectly.
“Every theater, every venue has dimensions of its own, so we keep adapting and redesigning the apparatus to whatever that particular room asks of it,” he says. “The wheel that closed in September is not the wheel I will build for the next stage.”
From 2023 until the closing, that wheel finished the show, its final act a duo working an industrially sized rotating steel beam with large rings at each end, and the visibility spread well past the theater. Telemundo Las Vegas, part of a network NBCUniversal says reaches eight in ten U.S. Hispanics each month, interviewed him about the act, and his Instagram audience has grown to 160,000, so the people who want to learn from him now find him directly for private lessons, in Las Vegas since 2024 and, before that, in Colombia and Japan.
What travels
Teaching one performer at a time is slow, so he is writing it down, preparing a scientific article on his approach to training wheel performers and on the way he teaches complex skills and builds new tricks, and the same paper sets out how he calculates the dimensions, weight and proportions of an apparatus for different performers and venues. He is also awaiting a decision on membership in a professional organization that recognizes achievement in high-risk performance disciplines.
As of early September, Cirque du Soleil has told him it intends to keep working with him, and the company is holding four resident shows on the Strip and said in August that it is developing the next generation of its Las Vegas productions, while the Las Vegas Review-Journal, reviewing the final night at New York-New York, wrote that the Wheel of Death would live on in Cirque productions. His own plan is a school for non-traditional extreme circus.
