Flip Circus brings Bello Sisters to Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove

The Bello Sisters — whose acrobatic act vaulted them to the finale of NBC-TV's “America’s Got Talent” All Stars competition this year — will perform live on Long Island for the first time from April 14 to 24 when the Flip Circus comes to Lake Grove.

The trio climb onto each others’ backs and shoulders to form human pyramids and create graceful, contorted poses that caused "AGT" judge Simon Cowell to call their performance “as close to perfection as I’ve ever seen,” and fellow judge Heidi Klum to proclaim them “glitz, glamour and glutes.”

In addition to the Bello Sisters, Flip Circus includes the Bellos' father, Stiv, and uncle, Roni, dubbed “the siblings of silliness,” and other colleagues who take on the trapeze, tumbling, and mounting the “Double Wheel of Death” (more later on the latter). The circus takes place under a red-and-white, 800-seat, climate-controlled big top on the grounds of the Smith Haven Mall.

‘IN OUR BLOOD’

The Bello Sisters — Loren, 25, Celine, 22, and Joline, 16 — come from a long line of circus performers. The girls grew up watching their father perform acrobatics for 12 years with Cirque de Soleil; their mother, Gipsy, also walked a high wire on stilts before giving birth to them and their youngest sister, Vivien, 12, who is not part of their act.

“We got to be backstage a lot,” Loren says. “Watching the show and seeing how the audience reacts, it made us really want to be on stage, too. That’s where we got our inspiration from. But I think it’s also in our blood. We don’t know anything else.”

The sisters’ act is the last performance before intermission; they’ll be dressed in red, sparkly, sequined costumes and perform to a score composed especially for them, Loren says.

Is Loren scared, when, for instance, she or one of her sisters might be balancing in a handstand on top of another sister’s hands, while that sister is supported in the air as well by a third sister? Close observers might notice their linked hands often shake from the effort and concentration.

“I think being sisters helps us trust even more in each other than people that just work together,” Loren says. “Of course, we have respect of what we do. We know that if we fall, we can get hurt. At the beginning when you try new tricks and stuff, you’re scared the first few times of course, but that goes away.”

OTHER ACTS TO SEE

Loren says she finds another act in the show to be more dangerous: The Double Wheel of Death. “Even the name of it is already like, wow,” she says. “It’s like a large, metal structure and it has two wheels at the ends, and it moves, it goes in a circle motion the whole time. These two guys, they’re in it and they walk in it like a hamster wheel. One of the guys does a somersault on the outside of it.”

Not all the acts are daredevil feats.

The sisters’ father and uncle provide levity throughout the show with their comedy act. Stiv is the clown and Roni is the straight man; every time Roni dreams of becoming an act in the circus, Stiv thwarts his plans. For instance, when Roni tries to become a magician, Stiv shows the audience how he does the tricks.

Father and daughters don’t typically perform together — but the sisters did have Stiv appear with them in one of their “America’s Got Talent” TV segments. Stiv, 45, used a crossbow to shoot a flower that Celine held in her mouth while the girls were holding a pose in a pyramid. The arrow cut the pink carnation’s stem, causing the flower to dramatically fall to the ground.

By Beth Whitehouse

beth.whitehouse@newsday.comBethWhitehouse1

Beth Whitehouse writes about families, parenting and great things to do with the kids on Long Island. She’s been a Newsday editor and shared a 1997 Newsday staff Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800.