Blog Entries featuring Tony Hernandez

Our new blog

Welcome to the new Lookingglass Theatre Company website and our new blog. For the past year and a half our blog has been housed at http://www.lookingglassmagazine.org/unedited/ and that site has served us well. Thanks to our most prolific bloggers, Tony Hernandez, J Nicole Brooks, Sara Gmitter and others, unedited has provide a great forum for discussion.

While I will certainly miss unedited, (after all it was my first major contribution to the company as an intern) I feel that this new blog will serve us even better. The site that you are using right now organizes our images, videos, blog entries and more in two important ways: plays and people.

I invite you to use the drop down lists in the side menu of the "Explore" sections to browse our content by play, season or person. As the site stands now, our media sections focus on recent seasons and our company members. In the weeks and months to come we will continue to add more and more archival information going all the way back 1988 as well as more throughly noting non-company members in our image section and elsewhere.

If you have any questions, please email me at spersch@lookingglasstheatre.org.

Happy Browsing,

Steve Persch
Web Liason

Why the 7-person high-wire pyramid in Hephaestus?

I am trying to push the limits of human achievement, and storytelling. This is neither digital, nor CGI. There are no lines or magnets, it's pure balance, trust and teamwork. We always did a three person pyramid in Hephaestus, and I always had this dream that we could do the pyramid with seven peopleas a nod towards the seven Gods of Mt. Olympus. So now that we are at the beautiful Goodman Theatre, we have the height and space to make that dream a reality.

We have been training for about 6-7 hours a day, 6 days a week. The balancing poles weigh about 50lbs each, so it takes a lot of conditioning just to be able to hold thepole properly with your wrists curled for the 6 minutes it takes to complete the pyramid. The wire is also steel and only 5/8s of an inch in diameter, so it takes awhile to getyour feet comfortable walking on it, with the weight pushing down on you. The bottoms of our shoes are only fine leather, so it is quite uncomfortable at first. Then of course there'sthe balance, which takes months and months of just walking laps, back and forth, learning to properly sway your pole to keep yourself centered. Once the pyramid starts to be put togethereverything has to be precise. Everyones foot placement has to be just right, and everyone has to kind of lean into one another, to keep pressure, or else you get pulled apart, or pushed over.

I find it incredible what the human body and brain can achieve when we get off of our butts and push ourselves to our OWN limits.