Aerial Straps

Aerial straps, or sangles aeriennes, use two suspended cotton or nylon webbing straps whose ends wrap around the performer's hands and wrists, leaving the body free to hold, swing and rotate. The technical vocabulary is closest to men's gymnastic rings: iron crosses, front and back planches, levers and balance positions, joined to circus-specific rotational elements. Historical accounts trace strap-like apparatus to China, where straps appeared as a performance discipline during the Qing dynasty as a repertory of static vertical figures, possibly derived from riding reins, and Chinese acrobatic companies developed the work through the 1950s; the Beijing Circus performed an influential straps act in France in 1956. The modern idiom was defined in the 1970s by twin brothers Yury and Valery Panteleenko, trained by Vladivien Levshin, who debuted their duo act in 1972, won the Soviet All-Union Circus Competition in 1973 and performed at the closing ceremony of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games. Their contribution was to replace static posing with continuous swinging, circular travel and lyrical partner work, the template for essentially every contemporary straps act.