THE BALLOON MAN

Dropping the Balls

TWIN THREAT Marty, left, and Jake LaSalle in the Big Apple Circus in 2008.

By SARAH MASLIN NIR
Published: November 12, 2010

THE cast of the Big Apple Circus burst into the tent for the show’s opening number, clad in confetti-bright colors. The big band’s trumpets shrilled, and the performers separated by gender into Sharks- and Jets-style packs, snapping and dancing.

A young man in a red T-shirt with a yellow musical note on the chest to match his blond curls stepped into the center of the ring. A spotlight hit on the bandstand, and suddenly there was another young man in a red T-shirt with a yellow musical note on the chest to match his blond curls, 15 feet up on a balustrade. Children in the stands gasped: “There are two!”

Then, a moment later, the one on the balustrade flipped off his perch onto a springboard and somersaulted midair to meet the other, in center ring, face to face. Martin and Jacob LaSalle, identical twin brothers, pantomimed palm to palm, mirroring each other’s movements. They never stopped smiling.

As children, the boys loved gymnastics. But Jake said, “I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t juggle.”

Halfway through the show, the brothers returned to center ring, transforming it into a whirling, hyperkinetic flurry of juggling pins and flashing grins. The LaSalles, then 24, bounded across the tent with the giddy spring of schoolchildren let out for recess. Seven clubs flipping between them in the lime-lighted dark became eight, then nine, without either twin ever losing a beat or breaking a sweat.

Blink, and Jake, younger by a moment, was suddenly 12 feet tall, standing on Marty’s broad shoulders, the pins still circling about the pair like a flock of seabirds. Blink again, and Jake swan-dived off his brother’s shoulders and tumbled like a ninja before chucking the last pin. It trailed a faint, white blur in an arc through the dark, home to Marty’s broad palm, completing another flawless performance.

The brothers bowed, still in unison.

The scene that unfolded that snowy afternoon in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center nearly two years ago was repeated daily throughout the LaSalles’ debut in the Big Apple’s 2008-9 season, and is captured in the six-part PBS documentary “Circus,” currently running on Channel 13. But these days, the small screen is the only place to catch their act: The brothers, who started pairs juggling at age 11, won their sport’s top medals, performed at National Basketball Association halftime shows, backed up Britney Spears and strutted their stuff in front of tens of millions of viewers at the 2009 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, no longer appear together.

read more at:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/nyregion/14circus.html