Incredible feats

Tom Forquer

Though some of them were half as tall, the audience participants in

the limbo contest were no match for Julius Marumbi, who showed them

all up with an astonishing shimmy under a bar hardly higher than a

foot.

Performing their first year at the Orange County Fair, the African

Acrobats made their audience ooh, ah and, in some case, cringe at

their super-human feats of strength, flexibility and coordination

Wednesday afternoon.

Accompanied by high-strung Soukous, a type of African music, the

Acrobats started off their show with some coordinated dancing. Soon

the five men, all in their 20s, executed a barrage of back and

forward one-handed handsprings and flips.

After the opener, they brought out a large jump rope swung by two

of the guys. The other three took turns executing more flips,

push-ups and other tricks inside of and through the swinging rope.

The performance also included a chair balancing act performed by

group member Shauri Khamisi. Balancing them at odd and precarious

angles, Khamisi built up a four-chair tower on which he performed

handstands and vertical push-ups.

The concluding portion of the act involved several indescribable

human sculptures formed by the five rapidly wrapping around and

balancing atop each other.

At one point, Stephanie Vanderhoff of Lake Forest screamed at an

act of back-bending contortion. Though Vanderhoff may have found

parts of the act too extreme to bear, her fellow Lake Forest resident

and friend Ally Lozano said, “That was awesome. I liked it.”

Kifalu Kalama, John Jacob, Juma Ngala, Marumbi and Khamisi, all

from Kenya, have been together for more than 10 years.

“What we do is something we learned from the Chinese acrobats,”

Jacob said, adding that many different acrobatic styles inspire them.

“We were all in different schools doing P.E. Every one was the

best from each school,” Jacob said. “This is something we do for fun,

this isn’t something we intended to do as our job.”

The group lives in Costa Mesa and performs at Disneyland. They

have also performed on “The Best Damn Sports Show Period,” “The Late

Show with David Letterman” and with groups such as the Harlem

Globetrotters.

Kalama, though, said, “We’re happy here with the fair.”

* TOM FORQUER is a Daily Pilot intern.