News that Nik Wallenda has finally won the right to traverse the Niagara Falls is a breath of fresh air for us thrill-seekers
The simplicity of the highwire is its beauty. Carefully following a straight line, balanced high in the air, you lose all sense of yourself. For me, up there on that wire, it's a unique form of extreme focus and freedom. Almost a meditation.
News that highwire walker Nik Wallenda has finally been given the right to walk across the Niagara Falls through the mist of the waterfalls and over a river that intersects the US and Canada – a feat that hasn't been achieved for a hundred years – is one that should be welcomed by the circus artists across the world. The Niagara is the holy grail for thrill seekers. In the 19th and early 20th centuries daredevils would plunge down the falls in all manner of bizarre ways; attached to anvils, in barrels, blindfolded – it's a history that fascinates me.
Wallenda's stunt, and indeed the art of highwire walking more broadly, is the sort of circus I love – that which fuses the daredevil spirit with art. The obvious pinnacle of this for any contemporary wire walker came in 1974 when Philippe Petit crossed the twin towers, a moment immortalised in James Marsh's Man on Wire. Of course the spirt of Petit's "artistic crime" is still around today, but it saddens me to see that this great discipline is increasingly rare in contemporary circus, which no longer invests as much in high-risk performances such as the highwire or trapeze.
I came to the discipline only a few years ago, after I was invited to compete in the highwire world championships in South Korea (my training is in the less precarious discipline of ropewalking). The challenge was to cross the longest highwire in the world, a 1km line, 80 feet in the air, set up across the Han River. It was, so I discovered, not the wire itself that's the difficulty, but the psychology of it: overcoming the mental hurdles that performing in such a precarious setting invoke. I made it three quarters of the way before coming off: I dropped down into the river and was lucky not to get injured. Nonetheless, it's become part of my routine ever since.
If we want to see more stunts like Wallenda's Niagara walk here in the UK, then it's about time we allowed our wire walkers the space to flourish. In the past few years I have had two big wire walks in central London cancelled due to health and safety concerns. Of course, I'm not averse to these stunts being carried out under rigorous safety checks, but I also believe that if someone wants to put on a show of this nature for the public, they should be allowed to do so. Cuts to arts funding have not helped the cause but I hope that in a time of austerity artists and performers may come up with more creative ways of putting on a show.
I look out over the Olympic stadium most days from my flat in Hackney. Staring at its angled buttresses I often wonder what it would be like to wirewalk between them; to look out across London elevated above the bustle of life on the ground with nothing but a straight in front of me.
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