No Bones Broken But Some Scares

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30534, 1 September 1964, Page 2

No Bones Broken But Some Scares

Zari, who is apparently whipped unmercifully by Kazbec in their Oriental whipping and acrobatic dancing act in the show “The Roaring 20’s,” is not hurt by the lash of the whip. Kazbec, who perfected his whipping technique by practising with the whip for five years before making a person his subject, cracks his whip so that it coils around Zari without hurting her.

“1 am sometimes scared,” said Zari, the “slave girl,” in Christ-, church yesterday. “Things can always go wrong.” She has a whip scar on her arm which she got in Turkey when a man wandered across the stage and Kazbec had to deflect the whip so he would not hit the man and it cut into Zari’s arm. Kazbec and Zari make their own whips. “They have to be really strong as Kazbec uses so many whip strokes a night and swings me around in the whip,” said Zari. “We have just bought some leather in Auckland to make more whips; they wear out very quickly. The last lot of

leather we bought from a leather market in Persia.” Kazbec and Zari have given three command performances —before Queen Elizabeth, the Shah of Persia, and the late King Feisal, of Iraq. CHINA BORN Zari, whose real name is Angela Lambert, has been working with Kazbec (Dennis Ross) for seven and a half years. Before she teamed up with Kazbec, Zari was in acrobatic and dancing acts. Zari was born in China and now lives in London. “I started in show business very young annd never thought of doing anything else,” she said. “1 trained with the Russian Ballet School in China and did a lot of concert work there when I was a child.” When she went to London, Zari thought of joining a ballet company, but she had learned the Russian technique and would have been obliged to begin her studies again. “I wanted to travel so I went into the present side of show business,” she said. Another woman member of the cast is a Negro singer, Sheela Violet, described in New York as the rival of Eartha Kitt and Shirley Bassey. She recently married Barry Muhroe. who does a song and dance act in the show. The tour is part of their honeymoon. “We met in Germany where we were working for the same agency,” said Sheefla yesterday. NO BONES Dennis Kazbec is rather noncomraital about the effect of his bull-whip on Zari. “Well, she’s never actually had any bones broken,” he said yesterday. “No, she doesn’t often get hurt, luckily. She sometimes gets injured if the leather loop holding the cracker at the end of the whip breaks. It goes like a bullet and she has caught one in mid-flight.” The whip used in the act has an extremely thick plaited butt, and tapers rapidly. “It’s modelled on the ones used by Arabian slavers." said Kazbec.