How to Slackline! - Falcon Guides

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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. Introduction xiii
The Flying Wallendas were the first act to make human pyramids on the highwire, with as many as nine artists on the wire at a time. k a r l w a l l e n d a Tightrope walking was much more difficult and dangerous than highwire walking. Around 1800 the Industrial Revolution advanced to a point where reliable cable was readily available, and most circus performers switched to rigging with this steel wire instead of the traditional round rope or cloth cord. This was the beginning of highwire walking, and artists could now perform much more technically difficult and eye-popping tricks like building human pyramids and riding bicycles across the wires. The modern highwire is made of a steel cable that is between 5 ⁄8 inch and 1 inch in diameter. xiv Introduction Highwires are tensioned and stabilized with supportive wires called guy wires, or cavalletti wires. Wire walkers commonly use a weighted pole for balance. The pole Philippe Petit used to walk the highwire between New York’s Twin Towers was 26 feet long and weighed fifty-five pounds. The most iconic highwire walker in history is probably Karl Wallenda of the Flying Wallendas, a famous circus act that began in Milan in 1922 and continues to perform today. By the age of 16, Karl Wallenda, their founder, was doing handstands on the shoulders of a German wire walker 40 feet in the air. Karl would go on to make tightrope
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How to Slackline! - Falcon Guides

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