How to Slackline! - Falcon Guides

The History of Slacklining
You may think of slacklining as a new sport or
as something that is just now catching on. While
balancing on webbing is a relatively new invention,
rope walking has been around in some form
or other since at least the Roman times, and likely
earlier.
Tightrope
Reportedly, tightrope walkers put on spontaneous
performances high above the streets of Rome and
even in the Coliseum. The Romans called these
artists funambula, and today funambulist is the technical
term for wire walkers, tightrope walkers, and
slackliners.
Ancient plaster paintings, buried for 1,700 years
under the same volcanic ash that buried the ancient
city of Pompeii, depict what look like small demons
walking on what are unmistakably tightropes
stretched over A-frames, a structure slackliners still
use today. This discovery stretches the written (or
painted) record of tightrope walking as far back as
AD 79.
Tightrope walking is not only an old sport, but
also a global one. Historians can’t say how long the
Korean tradition of Jultagi has been around, but it
may have begun as early as 57 BC. Now considered
part of Korea’s cultural heritage, Jultagi is a unique
form of tightrope walking where performers combine
acrobatic performance with music and acting.
A group of Gibbon athletes visited Korea in
2010 to appear on a television show about the similarities
between slacklining and Jultagi, and were
shocked to see traditional Jultagi performers doing
many tricks very similar to those in slacklining. A
between-the-legs butt-bounce is now named “The
Korean” out of respect for a culture that has been
performing it for more than 2,000 years.
Across the globe, at the wedding of Charles VI
to Isabel of Bavaria in 1385, a funambulist reportedly
walked high above the royal wedding feast.
A modern-day Jultagi performance in Jeonju,
South Korea
w i k i p e d i a c o m m o n s
Rope walking was popular all over Europe for
centuries, but didn’t make it across the Atlantic until
the first American circus in 1793.
Decades later, in 1859, Charles Blondin of
France elevated rope walking to a high art when
he made the first daring crossing of Niagara Falls
on a single 3-inch hemp cord. Blondin walked the
270-foot-high and over 1,000-foot-long line blindfolded,
on stilts, even pushing a wheelbarrow—all
with no safety harness or net of any kind.
Highwire
Until 1800 the term “tightrope” was correct,
because artists used ropes. Tightrope walking is the
art of walking on a rope tensioned between two
points. However, what people usually mean nowadays
when they say “tightrope walking” is highwire
walking.
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