The Peking Acrobats

Last night my friend Laila and I went to the Old Luxor Theater in Rotterdam to see the Peking Acrobats.  We weren’t sure what to expect but it was a mixture of wonder, amazement, disappointment and absolute terror.

Not my photo, we weren’t allowed to take any so I had to resort to looking for one on the internet. 

Anyhow, they did some really fantastic stuff, like in the photo above.  There was a lot of jumping, flexing, balancing and flipping.  Most of it went ok but in the first half there were a few big disasters.   At one point Laila and I were looking at each other uncomfortably as we watched them crash and burn trying to do one act (jumping through the set of hoops) for the 4th or 5th time.

You see, somehow… even though all the seats around them had been taken, we’d managed to snag the very front row center seats.  I found it odd, since nothing within 7 rows was available but we took them anyway.  When we sat and found the stage about 1 foot away from our knees, we got a bit nervous.   Acrobats means a lot of flying bodies, and if one of them flies in the wrong direction, we’re screwed!

What made it worse was the amount of mistakes they made in the first half of the show.  If they weren’t making their jumps, or were dropping things they should be able to catch… what happens when they are swinging things that could possibly fly in our direction.  Can we count on them to catch it?!  Honestly, there were some points where we were gasping and dodging just in case.  I was convinced that one of us was going to leave with at least a broken nose or some missing teeth.

At one point I tried to sneak a photo with my mobile while semi holding it in my bag.  A girl had about 15 chairs stacked on top of a table that was stood on 4 wine bottles.  I just had to capture how close we were and how scary it was.  I didn’t realize that my phone was still on video mode and ended up with a really short video instead.  Check it out (you don’t really have to hit play, nothing really changes in the 6 seconds):

Now, this was from inside my bag, from where my eyes were looking it felt a lot closer.   After this point she had stacked about 3-4 more chairs and was doing handstands on the top.  All I could think is HOLY SHIT THIS TOWER IS GONNA FALL ON ME!!!

I knew I wasn’t the only one because within about 3 seconds of me capturing this, Laila said “Ok I’m out of here” and legged it over by the exit until the girl was done with her act.

Here’s another photo from the internet to show what she was doing while towering over my head:

Amazing feat, right?   Well all I could think of was all those episodes of CSI and BONES that I’ve seen where people get blown up or fall from really high places and other people wind up with their bone fragments stuck in them.  I shit you not.  If that girl fell, I was dead.

Anyhow, the second part of the show was much better.  There were very few, if any, mistakes made and some of the things they did were pretty amazing… especially towards the end when they were all on stage standing all over each other and being stretchy.

The whole front row fright made the evening a lot more interesting and entertaining than it probably would have been if we were a few rows back.  So I guess that’s a good thing, but I still think that with the amount of thing they dropped and missed in the first half of the show, we got off lucky!

Besides the fun we had with that, the show actually was pretty good.  It wasn’t HOLY SHIT OMG THAT WAS AMAZING kind of good, like you get with Cirque du Soleil, for example… but it was still enjoyable and great for an evening out with friends.