DANCE REVIEW : New Generation Boosts Peking Acrobats

Currently on its sixth North American tour, the Peking Acrobats performed in Pasadena Civic Auditorium on Sunday. As usual, the company members were listed but not specifically identified in the house program, and the souvenir booklet on sale in the lobby featured a different generation of performers doing different tricks.

The latest tour showcases very young Peking Acrobats (seven women, 15 men as listed) who wear lots of glamour makeup, make lots of mistakes in their routines and seem to be evolving toward a freer, more mobile virtuosity.

For instance, there’s been a major change in the traditional pagoda-of-chairs. Normally, as you’ll recall, furniture is stacked on the floor or a platform until the pile reaches the top of the proscenium. Then somebody does handstands off the highest point.

Not anymore. These days, all those chairs--plus a bench and the youth handstanding on top of it--balance on a tiny platform on a pole that a hunkier youth manages to support on his head. No hands. Not even when he climbs a ladder to walk on a giant moving ball.

You like Chinese dancing lions with two performers inside each costume? The latest pride can do backflips off high platforms and roll up-and-over teeter-totters with gymnasts balanced on their backs.

Early in Act II, male gymnasts dive through a four-level wall of wooden hoops--brilliant at mid-air contortions, sudden changes of direction and unpredictable linkups with their colleagues. Toward the end of the program, however, they become the hoops, forming a high, human Great Wall of China that provides both apertures for others to dive through and balconies off which the women hang in the air and spin.

So it goes: an ancient ribbon-dance performed atop a high pole with the dancer hanging by her teeth. A contortionist balanced on the outstretched arms of a gymnast. New variants on familiar displays of dexterity with whips, flying ceramic bowls, spinning ropes, hanging straps, tiers of glasses, uni- and bicycles. Plus a 9-year-old boy impersonating the Peking Opera Monkey King.

Better keep an eye on that kid: No telling what new feats his generation has in store.