Club has talented couple climbing the walls

Friday, July 13, 2001 | 9:45 a.m.

Armando Farfan was flat on his back and suspended in mid-air by chains.

Stretched across his body, doing the splits, was his perfectly poised partner Stephanie Costello. The two move fluidly into varying acrobatic positions.

Wearing leather bikinis, the two perform above a late-night crowded dance floor at Studio 54 at MGM Grand. This is a common routine for the former circus performers-turned-nightclub aerial artists.

Known as the Living Art of Armando and Stephanie, the duo plunge 45 feet on bungee chords and bounce amid confetti blasts five nights a week at Studio 54.

Each Tuesday during the nightclub's Erotically Delicious Entertainer's night, they dangle and pose their taut bodies to choreographed music from a rotating trapeze. Dressed in strategically placed flowers, they re-create an aerial performance based on the biblical story of Adam and Eve.

"We came to Studio 54 because of the whole decadent background (of the club)," Farfan, a fifth-generation circus performer, said. "(And) it's been great because we've never had our creativity tapped or limited."

And, amazingly, they make their acrobatic feats, which are choreographed to music, look not only pretty, but easy.

They've had a lot of training. The two met 12 years ago when then 21-year-old Costello joined a circus that Farfan's family was forming.

For Costello, who was working as a banker at Club Med in Mexico, the phone call she received from someone telling her the circus was being put together was "the phone call of a lifetime."

She had been familiar with the Farfan name. While working at Club Med, she became interested in the trapeze and she would practice during her free time at the vacation getaway. To pick up pointers, she studied bootleg videos of the Farfans performing aerial acts.

Although she had attended Babson College in Wellesly, Mass., and was planning a career in international banking, the circus was forefront in her mind. So she came to Las Vegas and began training with the family.

"His father asked me how many pull-ups I can do," Costello said. "His mother asked me (could) I sew. It was crazy, a whole circus was being produced in their back yard."

Meanwhile Farfan, who had literally spent his life swinging through the air, was very familiar with circus life.

His experience was even prenatal. While pregnant with Armando, his mother did aerial acts in a traveling circus. By the age of 3 Armando's father had put the toddler in a harness and let him swing around.

When he was 6 years old Farfan began performing with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and continued touring with circuses. At the age of 7 he was featured in Jill Krementz's children's book, "A Very Young Circus Flyer" (Knopf, 1979).

Costello toured the world with Farfan and his family. When the circus closed in South America in 1992, Costello went back to the United States. Farfan stayed in Chile for two more years, where he began performing more elegant and artistic aerial acts at a cutting-edge nightclub called the Oz, which he said "was like the Studio 54 of South America."

"It got to a point where I realized what I did was no longer circus," Farfan said. "It was more of an art form ... rather than childlike wonderment."

Farfan, who also designs and builds sets for "EFX Alive" (and built for the original "EFX") brought the "living art" experience to Las Vegas, where his family had kept a home since 1969.

He and Costello began performing at Studio 54 nearly 2 1/2 years ago. The two started working Fridays and Saturdays and do 11 performances each week.

Their newest act: wall walking.

Wearing holographic Spandex body suits, biker boots and 15-pound steel "turning belts" that connect them to the wall, they tumble backward and forward, up and down metal I-beams. Inverted, they stop and pose or push themselves outward for a midair spin.

Playing on the defiance-of-gravity theme, Costello even does a moon walk along the beams.

"There were times in the circus where I was practicing eight hours a day and I thought, 'This better pay off,' " Costello said.

And it has.

Although they've put in many hours practicing for the acts for Studio 54, the duo's background makes the effort a little less challenging, she said.

"It still took us an easy eight weeks just working on the (wall walking) act," Farfan said.

For that act, they practiced five days per week, two hours per day, all the while enduring nasty head bumps from the iron I-beam.

Their refined moves are complemented by their sleek costumes that Farfan said are "a mix of feels, from '(The) Matrix' to '(A) Clockwork Orange.' We're always looking for cutting-edge looks."

And so is the diverse audience that frequents the high-energy club modeled after the original Studio 54 in New York City that, in the late '70s, drew an eclectic mix of artists, hedonists, writers, celebrities and musicians.

"When (people) walk into Studio 54 they are walking into a theatrical experience," Farfan said.

"Nobody knows what's going on," Costello said. "We drop out of the ceiling and scare everyone."