Dance Reviews : The Shanghai Acrobats: Give ‘Em a Tumble

You think you had a rough day at the office? Got stuck in another freeway traffic jam? Too bad.

Imagine squeezing though a barrel narrower than your shoulders. Or a keeping a stretch of 21 porcelain plates spinning while executing some disco moves. Or balancing 19 benches--that’s about 400 pounds--on your head.

Night after night.

That’s some of what the members of the Shanghai Acrobats and Imperial Warriors of the Peking Opera did Thursday at Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena. Captivatingly. Enthrallingly.

On Wednesday, the troupe had performed similar acts at the Bren Center at UC Irvine, and the Chinese visitors faced further local appearances within days at Caltech in Pasadena and El Camino College in Torrance. What a grind.

As usual, however, the seemingly impossible looked effortless. The challenges multiplied quickly. Guesses about how complex things would get proved wrong.

Sure, Jing Ni could balance a stack of bowls on her head--but upside down, maintaining a single hand stand on the head of Jia-Cheng Zhang? Well, what about balancing on both his hands while he turned over on the floor? And all the while maintaining an impish smile. What about . . . oh, forget it.

Contortionist Wen-Tong Yu squeezed her way through a hoop--and later a barrel--as easily as a loaf of bread rising.

Lian-Hua Pan took time for hot-stuff dance moves between rushing down a row of tables to keep an increasing number of plates spinning.

Strongman Lian-Qing Pan hoisted up one, then seven, then 10, then 19 interlocking benches to balance them all on his head.

Probably the most breathtaking act, however, involved acrobat Wei-Zhen Zhu balancing on a long, flexible metal pole held by Wei-Zhong Lu and Wei-Feng Tang.

Get this. They would hold the pole at throat level, then jerk it upward until their arms were fully extended. Zhu would shoot into the air where she executed multiple somersaults--some through a hoop--with apparently endless time at her disposal before returning to balance nimbly on the pole.

Chinese opera incorporates gymnastics in fight scenes, but the opera excerpts presented Thursday probably were not seen to their best advantage taken out of context and juxtaposed against the other purely gymnastic acts.

Sure, one could appreciate the split-second timing of the near misses in “Fighting at the Crossroads,” where two men fight one another in a pitch dark room.

And one could rejoice in the wit and cleverness more than in the martial process by which the Monkey King defeats his opponents in two excerpts from “Havoc in Heaven.” But the two forms somehow didn’t really mesh.