Drinking And Stripping On High Wires

Paul Lopez, Paul Resell and Oleksiy Snarskyy all came to the high wire on different paths.

“I think all of us got into it in different ways,” Resell recalls. “Myself, I went to a circus school when I was a teenager in St Paul, Minnesota, and one of the things we trained in there was the high wire.”

“I always wanted to be one,” Lopez muses. “I was a clown and an acrobat in the circus, so when an opportunity came along I had complimentary skills and they asked me to do it and they trained me.”

“My background was aqua sport,” Snarskyy adds. “And then I joined the circus, and then decided to work on the high wire now.”

High wire work is considered to be the most dangerous of all the circus arts - at least since animal acts were banned - and as such always attracts a lot of attention and admiration from the crowd. But these three, in addition to having seemingly no fear of a fast drop and a sudden stop, have added a few new wrinkles to the old aerial act.

“Well, we’re drinking,” Lopez tells us. “And we’re stripping. Yep, drinking and stripping: that in itself tends to be different from most high wire acts.

“The show’s all about... it’s kind of like an absinthe trip. It’s a lot of aggressive comedy, it’s very adult. We’re also right above the audience. We’re drinking and stripping and literally our bottles and our bodies are right above the audience throughout the entire act. So there’s a high level of risk and a high level of fear.”

Says Resell, “I think being over the audience also presents a huge challenge for us too, because not only is our safety on the line if something were to go wrong, we are directly over the audience with folding chairs and other props. We have to be focused so we can keep ourselves straight and also that the audience below us can remain safe. It’s something we’ve trained hundreds and hundreds of hours to perfect, so we don’t fear falling at all, but there’s always a possibility with the audience below us.”

Although it can be hard for the three to judge how their act is going down with the punters - “We usually just see a bunch of awestruck faces looking up that can’t believe we’re doing what we’re doing,” Resell says. - there is one way they can tell they have their onlookers in the palm of their collective hand. As Lopez explains, “The majority of the act is comedy and it’s designed to make the audience feel that it’s easier, what we do, so they’re comfortable with us doing it. Then for our finale, we say, ‘silence, please,’ and a good sign is audience members shushing each other to make sure we stay safe.”

For all that, he maintains it’s the comedy that sets the Frat Pack apart. “The heart of the show is comedy mixed with danger. So that’s kind of what makes this act unique compared with typical wire acts. They take themselves very seriously, while we’re pretty ridiculous.”

Originally published in X-Press Magazine