Defying gravity is a balancing act

When Xing Peng Jue, a member of the Peking Acrobats, performs his

chair act on the outdoor stage at the Orange County Fair, death

always looks a misjudgment away.

“I still get nervous,” said Patrick Keegan, the stage manager of

the Ralphs Park Plaza. “One day, we had some strong winds and they

got concerned. You could see it in their eyes, but he’s good at

concentrating.”

To the performer, it may be concentration. To spectators, it may

look like scrambling the laws of physics. During his act, presented

toward the end of the Peking Acrobats’ set, Xingplaces four glass

bottles on top of a platform, balances the legs of a chair on them,

then stands on the chair. As fellow acrobats deliver more chairs to

him, Xing stacks them one after another -- four, five, six -- until

his head nearly touches the roof above the stage.

By chair number six, those bottles don’t look very strong. Upon

reaching his summit, Xing does a handstand on top of the pile -- then

balances the top chair diagonally on the fifth one, and does a

handstand again. For good measure, he does it with one arm.

And there’s no safety net.

That’s little worry to Xing, who has done the trick for years

without ever falling.

“Ever since he was a little boy -- 6, 7 years old -- he’s

practiced every day,” said Peng Lian Jie, the only English-speaking

member of the Peking Acrobats. “Now he’s 19.”

The Peking Acrobats, who made their debut at the Orange County

Fair this year, have toured the world since 1985 presenting one of

China’s principal art forms. Acrobatics in Chinese culture date back

more than two millenniums, and thousands of boys and girls, like Xing

did, begin training when they are barely out of preschool.

Ken Hai, the artistic director of the Peking Acrobats, ventures to

China every few months to interview acrobats for the international

troupe. Hai, along with producers Don Hughes and Cynthia Dyke, books

performances for the group 11 months a year. Before their engagement

at the fair, the acrobats toured Italy for five weeks and performed

at the Hollywood Bowl.

The group’s half-hour show at the Orange County Fair is part

graceful athletics, part slapstick comedy. In one segment, five male

acrobats take turns leaping through a series of hoops at increasingly

difficult angles; in another, four women on unicycles kick plates

into the air and balance them on their heads. At one point, a small

group of men dress up as pizza chefs and spin plates on top of long

metal poles, racing back and forth to keep the poles vibrating so

that the plates remain on top.

Despite the often frivolous nature of the material, though,

Chinese acrobats approach their craft with deadly seriousness. In

ancient times, emperors used acrobats to impress foreign dignitaries,

and some popular routines have their origins in Buddhism. Hughes

noted that being a successful acrobat can move a person higher on the

social ladder -- particularly a woman approaching marriage age.

“In China, if you’ve got money, you can marry higher up on the

echelon,” Hughes said. “That’s what I’ve found with a lot of the

women. They work for a few years to save up their money, then they go

home and get married.”

* MICHAEL MILLER covers education and may be reached at (714)

966-4617 or by e-mail at michael.miller@latimes.com.