Tricksters' Ancient Art

Oriental acrobats have been the stuff of Western fantasy since Marco Polo included them, along with gems, spices and silks, in his tales about the wonders of the East. Now Westerners are getting a good look at what Marco was talking about in the first North American tour of the acrobatic troupe from the Chinese city of Shenyang. Unless one counts the Chinese Ping Pong team, the Shenyang troupe is China's first cultural export to the U.S. under the exchange agreed to last winter by President Nixon and Chou Enlai. It is a delightful debut, a cross between a Chinese circus and a ricksha pileup.

Last week, after five days in Toronto, the 40 performers and twelve musicians arrived for a ten-day stand in Chicago; future stops will include Indianapolis, New York City and Washington. Dressed in subdued gray Mao suits as they filed through O'Hare Airport, they looked more like a delegation of schoolteachers than the gaggle of brightly plumed acrobats they become in performance. With five tons of props in tow, the Chinese passed out hand-painted handkerchiefs to children in a welcoming group, received candy bars and flowers, and listened politely to the official speeches, few of which they understood without translation.

There was no need for translation, however, when they took to the stage of the Civic Opera. For this performance the Shenyang troupe used no tightropes and no trapezes. They did not heighten the drama of their performance with drum rolls or tense pauses. Their sleight of hand was charmingly, almost childishly transparent. The easiest of the stunts were executed with painstaking care; the most difficult were tossed off nonchalantly. Two girls juggled china vases with their feet. A man did a handstand atop a rickety pyramid of tables, chairs and bricks, then deliberately collapsed the pyramid. Two men, one on the other's shoulders, ran up and down a freestanding ladder.

Shadow Boxing. One of the troupe's most extraordinary acts is the longpole trick. One acrobat casually balances a 16-ft. bamboo pole between his shoulder and chin. A second climbs aboard, shins up to the top, and once there slowly swings his legs out parallel to the ground. Putting one foot in a velvet loop attached to the pole, he stands, then reaches down to a third acrobat, and the two perform a series of elaborate hand-to-hand exercises.

The real hit of the show is a stunt which begins with a single girl riding onstage on a bicycle. She does a few ordinary tricks, then is joined by one girl after another until finally there are seven. When they jump off and exit, the act seems finished. But another girl appears on a bicycle. Nine others with big grins run onstage and, unbelievably, hop on the bicycle.

Most Chinese calisthenics and exercises, notably the Tai Chi or "shadow boxing," have their roots in martial training. Chinese acrobatics go back to prehistoric times, when the first farming settlements were begun. Then, or so many experts think, "tricksters" earned their food by performing magic and sleights of hand. Vestiges of this tradition survive in the Shenyang troupe's lion dance, which evolved from the use of animal skins to work a spell on crops, and in their twirling of plates and vases on sticks, which recalls the practice of giving gifts of food to the tricksters. Anthropologists who see a migration across the Bering Strait as the origin of the American Indian point to the similarity between the feats of these acrobats with their ancient tricks and many of the similar feats performed by American Indian tribes.

Their humble origins made Chinese acrobats social outcasts for centuries. The rarefied courts of Chinese civilization down through the Middle Ages had little taste for what they regarded as the entertainment of farmers. A few acrobats kept their craft alive into the modern era, but they were classified as social undesirables and even forced to carry the humiliating yellow cards usually reserved to identify prostitutes.

Improvisations. After 1949, as part of Mao Tse-tung's revival of folk arts, acrobatic troupes were newly subsidized all over China. Today almost every one of China's 18 provinces and each big city has its company in keeping with Mao's cultural exhortations: "Let one hundred blossoms flower." By 1965 acrobats' status had risen so high that they were accused of being too bourgeois, lacking the "class character that would allow them to reflect the everyday struggles of the workers and peasants." Now they spend two months of every year in a factory or commune, working alongside the peasants by day and performing political skits and improvisations at night, adding new folk material to their acts.

The Shenyang performers, who are paid the equivalent of $30 a month, lead a rigorous and spartan life, practicing 3 1/2 hours every day and performing four or five times a week. The younger members, who are first apprenticed at seven or eight, must do their exercises in the morning and then study after lunch. For them especially, the current tour has been an eye opener. Chao Chun, 12, the youngest member on the tour and a star of the lion dance, was asked before he left Peking if he knew where Canada was. "Not exactly," he replied, "but I do know it's very hot there this time of year."

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