A Troupe That Flies Without Wings, or Wires

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ANTIGRAVITY Boots sound like equipment for X-Men, and they look that way too, raising the wearer — at rest — 16 inches off the ground on a sleek fiberglass rod that curves like a parenthesis from a “footprint” no larger than that of a high-heeled shoe. The daredevils who wear them charge onstage to a techno beat, rocket 12 to 15 feet skyward and do backflips, landing like high-pressure pistons on concrete and rocketing off again. Just watching can give you an adrenaline rush. More than once the impact has smashed the floor.

“The boots are light; they’re springy,” said Christopher Harrison, the founder of AntiGravity, a New York confederacy of dancers, gymnasts and aerialists. “They’re not cumbersome. They make you feel superhuman. They allow you really to leap and jump. You can run up and down stairs. You feel like a gazelle. The only thing you can’t do is stand still.”

A consumer model is in development, but for now the deal has stalled. “I think there are liability issues,” Mr. Harrison, 45, said recently. But the pro model and other AntiGravity specialties — aerial silks and hammocks, state-of-the-art bungee acts — will be on view from Wednesday to July 2 at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan, the final stop on a tour that began in February in Honolulu. It’s also the company’s first stand-alone engagement in New York since a sold-out run at the New Victory Theater in the spring of 2001.

In the real world gravity is a constant — what goes up must come down — and antigravity a chimera from science fiction. But to Mr. Harrison it’s an ideal, a metaphor.

“Deep down we all come from a place where we could fly,” he said, speaking from his West Side office. “Who wants to be stuck on the ground?” His three commandments for his performers are: “Be safe. Have fun. Be awesome. In that order.” But before each show their mantra is “Fly high.”

Mr. Harrison grew up in Utah participating in the theater and gymnastics. At 17 he placed an impressive fourth in power tumbling at the World Games in Honolulu. But looking at the champion he could tell he didn’t have the body to reach the top in competition, so he took up dance at the University of Utah. When the choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett went to Provo to work on the film “Footloose,” there he was, 18 years old, doing flips all over the drive-in.

“He was an inspiration,” Ms. Corbett-Taylor said in a recent telephone conversation, “always asking: ‘What more can I do? How can I make it more exciting? More dangerous?’ ” At her urging he struck out for New York. “He had trained as a competitor,” she said. “He did moves you didn’t see every day. It was a different skills set, and the degree of excellence was definitely unique.”

Mr. Harrison appeared on Broadway in “Meet Me in St. Louis” and in national companies of “Cats” and “A Chorus Line.” Like his fellow gypsies, he also discovered a lucrative sideline performing at corporate events. At the same time he was meeting more and more gymnasts and athletes hungry for work. Prospects for a new nonprofit dance group were bleak, but by 1990 he had the pieces in place for a commercial company of his own.

In 17 years AntiGravity has created more than 4,000 well-paid jobs for hundreds of performers, among them numerous prizewinning Olympians. The core group today consists of 80 artists, who are not held to exclusive contracts. Some acts recall Cirque du Soleil, and talent has gone back and forth between the companies. Yet AntiGravity’s urban edge is worlds apart from Cirque’s hypnotic New Age rituals.

“I want the audience to see our athletes as real people,” Mr. Harrison said. “It’s not fantasy.”

One early assignment was to entertain the runners after the New York Marathon. “They were going to be exhausted,” Mr. Harrison said. “Our job was to keep them awake. So I gathered together my friends who also had a background in gymnastics and had transitioned into performing, and I used the format of dance — counts, music, patterns — but filled it up with acrobatic flips and aerial somersaults and handsprings. I didn’t realize no one had done that.”

The formula has proved highly salable. Bill Gates hired AntiGravity for Microsoft’s 20th-anniversary celebration; Giorgio Armani has also used the troupe. Sometimes the clients even get into the act. In Chinatown, Richard Branson of the Virgin Group was harnessed in a bungee rig and went caroming over the heads of cheering travel professionals.

This month Tom Schoewe, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Wal-Mart, showed up at his company’s annual meeting in Fayetteville, Ark., as a working member of a human pyramid. “Initially I was very intimidated,” Mr. Schoewe said last week from his office. “But we went through the routine four or five times. Everybody was very welcoming, and they calmed me down. At the end two of the young ladies were nice enough to tear off the pants I was wearing over my business suit. I think everyone had a nice time.”

In mainstream show business, AntiGravity has done jobs running the gamut from the Easter show at Radio City Music Hall to a 10-year stint of incidental acrobatics in Verdi and Puccini at the Metropolitan Opera. Broadway often calls on Mr. Harrison. For “Swing!,” directed and choreographed by Ms. Corbett-Taylor, he devised a bungee system with tracks, so the dancers could travel and not just jump in place. Jane Krakowski’s slithering aerial descent in a bolt of white silk, which stopped the show in “Nine,” was another Harrison special.

“Oh, that was fun,” he said. “Jane was keen and very agile. The silk pulls at your skin, so you have to be able to withstand some pain. But she loved it. And she didn’t get dizzy hanging upside down. She said that her voice almost felt more resonant when she was singing that way.”

Flush with success AntiGravity renovated an entire building, complete with apartments for guest artists, scenery and costume shops and, best of all, a spectacular rehearsal studio with the soaring clearances that the aerial work demands. The studio was also popular for photo shoots, which in turn led to associations with top fashion designers and entertainers.

Still, Mr. Harrison kept dreaming of a theatrical showcase of his own. “Antigravity’s Crash Test Dummies,” the concatenation of greatest hits that played the New Victory, should have been the breakthrough. On Sept. 10, 2001, contracts were signed for a deal covering not just theatrical rights but also film, television and even comic books. At 7:30 the next morning, the company took off from Kennedy Airport for a celebration-working vacation, singing for their supper (so to speak) at Club Med on Paradise Island in the Bahamas.

“By the time we landed in Miami, it didn’t matter anymore how successful our show had been,” Mr. Harrison said. “The world had changed, and there was no room for it.” The New York operation was downsized, the rehearsal space moved to Orlando. What had gone up was coming down.

“The Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City were our saving grace,” Mr. Harrison said. In February 2002 AntiGravity appeared nightly at the Olympic Medals Plaza. Kenny Ortega, the choreographer in charge of the closing ceremony, saw the performers in their boots, froze in his tracks and asked if they could do their thing on ice.

They never had, but Mr. Harrison said no problem and quickly invented ice-gripping cleats for the rods. Days later the members of AntiGravity closed the closing ceremonies for a television audience in the millions. They went last because they had to. Their number was going to shatter the ice.

The long bounce back had begun.