Chinese Acrobatics Show

My sister visited Shanghai not so long ago, and it was a nice opportunity to play tour-guide. I ended up going to some places that I've long wanted to visit, but hadn't yet been able to rationalize a reason. I'll have a few relevant updates about these places, the first will be the Shanghai Acrobatics shows.

There's different acrobatic shows, but I went to the one on 57 Maoming Lu. It's a convenient location, very near the Huangpi Lu subway station, and right near Jinxian Lu, which has a number of restaurants that, while not upscale, vie for being the very best in Shanghai. It all takes place in a fancy old re-purposed movie theater, with a 1930s ambiance:



The show is one crazy stunt after the next crazy stunt. Some of the stunts involved people who were just amazingly flexible, to the point it was a little difficult to watch them. I couldn't stop thinking how much pain I would be in if I even tried those kind of moves:



And there were also freakish examples of balance. This lady later climbed up onto a see-saw and started swinging around, with these glasses still piled on:



Speaking of see-saws, there were the stunts where people get thrown into the air, flip around three times, and then land on someone's shoulders:



And finally, an insane balancing act of women doing handstands on chairs while balancing themselves on other women doing handstands on chairs. The safety lines took away from the sense of danger, but it would have been insane not to use them:



Much as with gymnastics, these acrobatics are impressive enough on television, but are mouth-dropping crazy to see up-close and in real life. I'll stress on the up-close. The Lanxin Theater isn't all that large, but you don't want to be in the balcony, and I'd say try to be in the first five rows or so, or don't bother going! There's a second ticket box office near the American Center on 1376 Nanjing Road, between Jing'an Station and Nanjing West Station. The actual show is daily from seven thirty until nine.

The cheap tickets are around a hundred kuai, and the good tickets are twice that. A bit much, but as far as it goes for things that only tourists do, it's cheaper and more fun than M on the Bund!