Peking Acrobats

I went to see the Peking Acrobats tonight (they were putting on a performance in the Hart Auditorium). They were absolutely amazing. We weren't allowed to take pictures, so I'm going to post a few from around the Internet that were some of the same acts they did tonight.

This was the only individual act that got a standing ovation. The guy stacked up the pedestal (about 5'), four wine bottles, and then six chairs. All the time he was stacking them he was climbing around on the structure. The sixth chair he tilted a couple different ways and then flipped sideways and balanced on the top bar of it with one hand like in the picture.

This was in the finale, there was a girl twirling an umbrella, and a girl riding a unicycle on top of said twirling umbrella.

This girl balanced a glass of liquid of her nose, then had 3 or 4 layers of trays with glasses stacked on top of that, and then what looked like a lit oil lamp at the very top. She walked around the stage, then up a step ladder onto this semicircular balancy thing, then up the two ladders that were added to the balancy thing. Once she climbed to the fourth rungs, she took her hands off and twirled around two of those long ribbons on sticks.

They had several of these girls on stage at the same time. One step at a time they balanced these groupings of liquid-filled cups on their feet, hands, and faces, and then rolled around on their platforms, flipping over and slowly somersaulting and such.

Twirling plates on sticks; most of the girls were twirling 8 plates, two were twirling 6. This was the most impressive part, one girl balancing upside-down on her head on top of another girl's head, and they were both still twirling their plates.

I think this one's fairly self-explanatory.

Other acts they had:

-Girls on rollerskates who did tricks like they do for ice skating competitions, lifting eachother up and spinning around like mad at the same time, hooking their legs around the other's neck while twirling, etc. Once they attached a rope (for lack of a better word) to two girls' necks and one spun in place while the other was lifted up into the air because of her momentum/centrifugal force/whatever and spun around on a horizontal axis by her neck.

-One girl attached one end each of a rope to both her feet, and another girl hauled up both ends of rope so the first girl was doing splits in the air.

-They erected a fake tree thing, which the girls climbed up. They grabbed onto part sticking out from the tree with their teeth, then flipped upside down and balanced with their legs and arms in the air.

-The guys tumbled through cardboard hoops simply stacked on top of one another, up to about 6' in the air. Once two guys linked, each holding the other's feet and rolling across the floor like that, then leaping through the hoop still attached to one another.

-A couple guys dressed up in Chinese dragon costumes (the ones with the big heads, blinking eyes, flapping mouths, etc) and balanced on a big ball that they walked around on and rolled up a seesaw and back down again while balancing on the ball.

-Two guys laid on the floor with their feet in the air, and two little boys sat on their feet and got thrown up in the air and flipped and spun around. The girls also flipped and spun around big vases, tables, and umbrellas with their feet like this. Another girl balanced a long pole on her feet so that it lay horizontally, then two girls grabbed onto the ends of it, and she twirled the pole around with her feet with them swinging from the ends.

-They broke bricks with their heads, or alternately, broke bricks on someone else's head with a sledgehammer.

-They juggled hats between one another, and instead of throwing the hat up in the air, they put the apex hat on their head continuously.

-A guy balanced a bowl of eggs on a stick about 15-20' long, and then let it fall forward towards the audience (which really scared a couple people in the first row), but the eggs were all attached to the interior of the bowl by string (presumably they were fake) so nothing happened. They had a couple comedy acts like that.

-What looked like two guys in panda suits came on stage and were wrestling each other and flipping each other around, then were revealed to be one person that had been walking around on hands and feet.

-Two guys put a thin metal bar between their necks (if the circles are heads, and the line is a bar, it was kinda like this: O________O), circled each other, then pushed in and bent the bar.

-They balanced a guy in the air on four spears.

-One guy did contact juggling with a giant vase.

-A lot of the girls spun around fabric circles like pizza dough, and maintained that while doing somersaults and backwalkovers and climbing on top of one another, etc.

-A girl in ballet pointe shoes climbed on top of a guy and went on pointe on one foot on his head while he walked around the stage.

-Two guys held one girl by her feet and hands respectively, and twirled her around like a jumprope while the other girls jumped through.

-12 people climbed onto a bicycle they were riding around the stage.

-A guy rode a seatless unicycle.

-They had some pretty impressive tumbling, and stacked up on top of eachother in pyramids and things while rotating on the stage.