Neil
Genzlinger

December 8, 2014

Here’s a fun experiment for you to try. Stand on one leg, then raise your other leg up until your foot is above your head, sole facing the ceiling. Now balance a bunch of glassware on the bottom of that upturned foot. While you’re waiting for the ambulance crew to arrive to treat your shredded groin and hamstrings and pick the broken glass out of your flesh, contemplate this: That is only the opening move in the crowd-pleasing contortionist routine that Ping Gao performs in Cirque Zíva, the Golden Dragon Acrobats’ show that has taken up residence at the New Victory Theater. By the time she’s done, a whole kitchen’s worth of glassware has been balanced on various body parts and she has bent herself into an amazing variety of gravity-defying positions and shapes. Her routine is the highlight of the first half of this family-friendly show, which will dazzle the younger set but might also have them stacking up the dining room chairs and climbing the curtains when they get home. Those feats occur in other segments of the show. The Tower of Chairs is the second-half highlight, though Hui Yuan Zhu, the man who is balancing gymnastically atop those chairs, is so high up by the routine’s end that someone made him wear a safety harness, which detracts from the derring-do.