Sep 23: Acrobats

Conversations last night upon seeing Chinese acrobats hula hoop with one leg pointing up to the sky at greater than a 180 angle, perform serpentine gymnastics with seven lit candelabras balanced on their bodies, and balance several colleagues stacked on their shoulders while balancing on a plank on top of a ball:

Bill: "There just aren't muscles in your back that could let you do that."
Karen, open jaw working up and down trying to get some sound out: "Um. . . er. . "

Bill: "She can't have the same skeletal system I do."
Karen, shaking head: "Ar. . . ack."

Bill: "Can you imagine how compressed her spine must be?"
Karen: "Nnn. . argh."

Ok, a quick aside. . . you'd think from this blog that all I've done at this symposium is go out to theater events at night. I would like to take this opportunity to say that's not true. There have been some really wonderful traditional symposium events. The Germans put on a full-on carnival for their cultural presentation -- with clowns, can-can girls, men dressed in tutus, and Jester-style poetry -- which had everyone up on their feet cheering and dancing. This was immediately followed by the Dillard University students' presentation on Hurricane Katrina and the devastating effects on New Orleans, which had everyone tearing up. There have been fantastic presentations of Social Service Projects and great outings to see the sights of Hangzhou.

So, that having been said . . . let's move right on ahead to the acrobats we saw tonight.

When we were nine or ten, my parents took Holly and me to a Chinese acrobat show at the Kennedy Center. At one point, a man balanced one pole of a 20-foot ladder on his forehead. A woman climbed up the ladder to the top and then pulled a cord so that all the rungs, and the superfluous pole fell to the floor. She then grabbed ahold of a small red ball attached by some -- hopefully very strong -- rope to the top of the pole, and placed it in her mouth. At which point, attached just by her mouth, she began to swing her whole body around and around the top, her momentum keeping her rigid body horizontal to the floor like a helicopter propeller. Around a pole, balanced, may I remind you on a man's forehead.

As she circled through the air, Holly leaned over and whispered in all seriousness: "I bet you they practiced that."

The line has stayed with my family ever since, a catch-phrase we use whenever stunned by someone's prowess. . . but here's the thing -- having watched an acrobatic troupe tonight I am suddenly realizing "practice" is an entirely inappropriate term -- just as you would never say a native English speaker was fluent because they'd "practiced" so much. The dictionary definition jibes, but the skill set is far more intrinsic, an inherent part of daily life, a control over and flexibility of one's body that is as constantly used as speaking.

For one thing, these are transferable skills we're talking about here. Hell, if you can stand on one hand and then bend sideways at the waist until your legs are horizontal to the floor, then you're going to be able to do that on the floor, on someone's bent knee, or at the top of 12 chairs stacked on someone's bent knee. If you can balance a candelabra on the top of your head, you can also do it while swinging on a trapeze -- and from there it's a short jump to balancing a pole and a helicoptering woman.

It's not that they practice. . . it's that they live it. And they really do. The language comparison was a good one -- you have to learn to make your body work that way from when you're a young child. (In Xi'an, Eleni and I saw a 5-year old girl busqing for money by putting her mouth over the nob at the top of a one-foot high tripod, kicking her heels up over her head and then using her hands on the sidewalk, to spin herself around. In its way, it was one of the more disturbing things we saw here. ) Historically, one grew up in a Chinese acrobatic troupe, and it was all you knew. There was no education beyond that. Nowadays there is often tutoring, but the kids' time commitment to the troupe is still pretty total. Then, as you grow older, you graduate from being the slight girl doing the handstands on top of the 12 chairs, to the woman with the thick thighs of steel on whom the chairs are balanced. It's a whole life. It's really not something you practice; it seems to be something you breathe.

And as I sat there, agog, watching exquisite muscle control, impossible rubbery spine bends, and amazing balancing acts by young kids and teens who were far too muscular for their age, and who all have, I'm sure, fairly rudimentary literacy skills, all I could think was--I am SO going to make my daughter learn how to do that.