PEKING ACROBATS : UNDERSTANDING THE GRAVITY OF THEIR SITUATIONS

“I didn’t think I was going to like it,” someone was saying as the intermission crowd poured out through the doors of Ambassador Auditorium on Thursday night. He was referring to the Peking Acrobats, who are on their first U.S. tour since the 1984 Olympics, and one could understand both his skepticism and his somewhat relieved expression of pleasure, both of which were shared by your reviewer.

To the extent that there’s an art to everything, the Peking Acrobats are an impressive example of how far human beings can go toward locating that maddeningly unstable center of gravity in the body and, in a Zen-like paradox, build on it as though it were as sturdy as a fence post. Thus we could see a cyclist circle the stage, festooned with eight other bodies in an upright human rhombus perched on delicate wheels. Or a woman stand on two teeterboards, the bottom one balanced on a log, the one above balanced on four water glasses, with two other women hanging off her sides and a third perched upright on her shoulders.

In virtually all of the 10 or 11 acts (the bill changes slightly from night to night), some principle of balance and symmetry is brought into elaborate play, as though the acrobats are a buoyant human expression of some basic laws of physics. It’s visually stunning, and a little surprising, to see how swiftly bowls of water can be tossed and spun around at opposite ends of a rope without a drop being spilled--an extreme example of the inscrutability of centrifugal force. And when the tumblers hit the floor in a curl instead of a splat, you can see how neatly inertial thrust is guided away from catastrophe.

Whether all this consummately skilled display is really an art is another question altogether; to the extent that there’s no continuity or build, or emotional synthesis (one act simply follows another after a semi-blackout), you’d have to say it isn’t. And in the face of the argument that art is the concealment of art, the sterility of perfection here still leads to emotional disengagement.

Too, some of the pure theatrical elements are dubious. Though the costumes are bright and two cherry-colored Chinese lanterns and a suspended red logo make a tranquil stage setting (the lighting is good, too), the taped music is so perfunctory that one must assume it isn’t intended to be listened to. As each act builds from one level of difficulty to the next, the performer stops and invites our applause. After a while we get tired of being milked. And after Bill Irwin, Penn & Teller, the Flying Karamazovs and other post-modern show-biz practitioners, the Peking Acrobats’ strong man--though formidably powerful--looks a little silly in his classic posturing, as though Hulk Hogan had adopted the moves of Mae West.

But this is, after all, a group that comes from one part of the world that’s had relatively little exposure to what’s going on elsewhere. The Peking Acrobats troupe was established in 1956 in Northern China and is billed as a kind of repository for Chinese juggling and tumbling techniques that go back to the Ch’in Dynasty of 221 BC. Seeing the flawlessness of these performers, one might wonder if mainland China isn’t littered with the broken plates and bones of all those poor souls who could never get their act together and play the palace.

These acrobats’ feats become so predictable after a while that the churl in one mutters, “Anyone is capable of anything, given a predilection and a lot of spare time.” But on another level, their skills are linked with those of every other fine acrobat in the world who has soared above us with his or her extravagant expression of physical self-control, in the process showing us how klutzy and constricted our normal range of movement really is.

The Peking Acrobats is a great spectacle for kids. What redeemed the show finally for an older head was the exuberance the acrobats displayed beyond the two or three comedy routines, their joy at performance. We could appreciate their clockwork perfection; it was the emotion that led us to connect.

The troupe plays today at the Japan America Theatre at 3 and 8 p.m. and Tuesday at Bridges Auditorium of the Claremont Colleges at 8 p.m.