Dance, Music Reviews : Chinese Acrobats at Japan America

Capitalizing on intimacy and humor, the Chinese Golden Dragon Acrobats of Taipei managed to offer creative variations on a number of familiar feats Sunday at the Japan America Theatre.

Every company features a pagoda of chairs--but who else stages this spectacular test of balance on the very edge of the forestage? Indeed, one nervous spectator in the first row suddenly moved to another seat on Sunday as gymnast Kuang-Hwa Wang teetered almost directly overhead, his feet brushing the ceiling as he performed handstands off the top chair.

Sooner or later, other troupes inevitably bring on a female contortionist executing a backbend so extreme that she sits on the top of her own head. In the Golden Dragon performance, two women (Pei Lei Liu and Xiao Ping Suing) doubled the difficulty of this trick by having one of them perched atop the other in a kind of pagoda of human pretzels.

So it went: unusually agile dancing lions, jugglers who created a surprising aerial display with their hoops and gymnasts taking ridiculous risks in handstands on top of bricks on top of a bench on top of a table. . . .

Spinning a large wooden spool along a rope, Yan Yan Zhao introduced so many arm-flips, dodges and whirlwind turns that her routine became a kind of eccentric dance. The women spinning plates on long sticks also looked choreographed: as graceful and even formal as their colleagues in the traditional fan dance elsewhere on the program.

The intimacy of the Japan America Theatre helped spotlight such whimsical, small-scale wonders as Jian Ping Qan’s egg-balancing and Guogang Yin’s bird calls, as well as heightening all the comedy.

Directed by Danny Chang (Chin-Chang Chang), the performance Sunday came close to offering the last word in Sino-circus spectacle--even if local fire regulations forced a blindfolded gymnast to run across the stage and dive through a narrow hoop (made narrower by the insertion of eight knives) without the embellishment of flames. Somehow, nobody demanded refunds.