Wednesday through Sunday this week, Boxcar Theater Studios in San Francisco is hosting “The Amazing Acro-Cats,” a live show featuring cats skateboarding, jumping through hoops, walking on high wires and playing musical instruments, which is to say, acting cooperative, energetic and totally un-catlike.
On top of the acro-catics, the show will include performances by the The Rockcats, a band comprised of five cats and a chicken which occasionally pecks at the tambourine (shown above).
Behold the Rockcats music video for the Eddy Grant classic, “Electric Avenue”:
Cats are famously great jumpers, scratchers and nappers, but they aren’t known for being easy to train, nor for shredding guitars and whaling on the drums.
But in an interview with San Francisco Weekly, Acro-Cats’ owner Samantha Martin says cats can be trained in 10 minutes a day, and “If you have a cat with a behavioral problem, the truth is that they’re just bored.”
And Martin’s trained more than just cats: she started her company 20 years ago with an act called “Acro-Rats,” for which she had to transform rodents into circus performers. Unfortunately that endeavor was unsustainable, because as she put it, “There’s never been a rats-to-riches story.”
