Washington: Madonna’s toga-clad slack line dancer says that despite having performed death defying stunts throughout his career, the idea of performing them with the pop icon on stage was ‘scary’.
Andy Lewis was on the line for about 30 seconds before back flipping on to the stage, but within a couple of hours, he was a national sensation. Lewis, who goes by the stage name Sketchy Andy, said in an interview that his Super Bowl experience was “spectacular.”
The California native has been slack lining for more than seven years, and though a YouTube reel of his work shows him nailing death defying stunts – catapulting off a slack line into a canyon (with a parachute) and walking high above cliffs and mountains (without a net) — Lewis called the sport “relatively safe.”
“The thing is when you’re walking over grass lower to the ground, you’re in control,” a news channel has quoted him as saying.
“You don’t fall off; you don’t fall on your head. When you lose your balance you just step off. Relatively, it’s somewhat safe to learn,” he said
The Super Bowl presented entirely new challenges. Lewis found out he’d been chosen to join the halftime show in December and rehearsed every day since then, adjusting to his costume, the stage, and the prospect of performing alongside the Queen of Pop.
“It was scary. You normally slack line between trees let’s say and you focus on the tree. And on this, all I see are flashing lights and Madonna dancing on the thing so it’s very, very distracting,” he claimed.
If Lewis had fallen, he would’ve dropped more than 12 feet.
“I would have probably broken my leg,” he said.
But for the dancer it was worth doing his act.
“When you have that many people live there’s this energy that kind of gets put in to you that you can’t access any other way and it’s amazing. The music, the flashes, the lights, the moment. It’s just a spectacular thing,” he added.
ANI