STAGE REVIEW : Peking Acrobats at Pasadena Auditorium

The voice on the loudspeaker at Pasadena Civic Auditorium Thursday night sounded gentle but firm--appropriate for a quasi-parental warning to children that “‘what they see on stage takes years of practice and should not be tried at home.”

Actually, the Peking Acrobats made superb role models on this seventh local appearance under Ambassador Foundation sponsorship. You might not want to encourage American kids to bullwhip the cigarettes from their parents’ mouths--or even to juggle the family Tupperware--but it’s valuable to learn that something worth doing or being could take years of practice.

And, clearly, some members of this disarmingly young and genial company hadn’t yet graduated.

One of the youths in the jar-juggling act needed far more rehearsal in the ancient art of catching large porcelain bowls on the top of the head or back of the neck--and it wasn’t just broken crockery you worried about.

Not so long ago, acrobats from mainland China performed with grim, anonymous perfection, like Red Guards on parade: a formidable Great Wall of virtuosity. Now we get shy teen-agers not yet comfortable with wearing spangles or flinging their arms out at the end of a stunt.

But we also get a sense of performers working through technical challenges to reach new creative frontiers. In a segment called “Suspenseful Suspension,” for instance, a pair of long, hanging straps are first used like gymnastic rings--though, soon, people start climbing them to support other people by their necks or teeth high above the floor.

Eventually, however, merely climbing isn’t enough.

People begin wrapping the straps around their wrists or elbows and then flipping their bodies over and over to wind themselves upwards, like spools of thread--and then plunge downward.

Some of the acts are now embellished with extra difficulties to the point that they seem almost comically baroque: the contortionist, for example, who performs a backbend so extreme that she sits down on the top of her own head and then rotates in a complete circle, supporting herself in the air by her teeth. During all this, she must also balance tiers of tiny glasses on her hands and feet--and, who knows, maybe next year she’ll do the act underwater. With piranha.

This is a generation of Peking Acrobats obviously less motivated to join the crowd leaping over a swirling banner than to explore intricate and sometimes whimsical paths to self-realization. There’s a lesson in that about the nature of human potential--one that children should definitely try at home.