Dogfish Juggling

So I haven’t written anything lately for a few reasons, none of which are lack of material. 

In fact, I might say that the past few weeks have been some of the most productive of my juggling career. When last I wrote, I was feeling a bit lackluster about juggling, and in an attempt to refocus myself I came up with a practice guide. 

It has been more successful than I could have ever imagined. 

Writing it out gave me a wonderful rededication and focus and I have made absolutely wonderful progress. I’ve made a few changes to the guide in practice, but I am not going to go through and make a real revision for a few more weeks. 

The reason for the delay? 

I am learning 4 clubs, and putting in so much time to get past the initial stumbling blocks that I am not following the guide as closely as I hope to once I am more comfortable with 4. 

Well, that sort of lets the cat out of the bag, because 4 clubs is my biggest news. At least to me. I’ve been very happy with my juggling so far, but honestly up to this point I’ve really felt like I haven’t been doing anything that special. 

4 clubs is different. 

I consider running 4 clubs fairly serious juggling, and working on them fills me with a wonderful sense of accomplishment and purpose–which is nice, since other parts of my life aren’t really so hot these days. 

Also something that warrants mentioning, and is directly related to 4 clubs is the Jesup Juggling Jam. I hosted a World Juggling Day event this year and it was a great success. I actually met another juggler in town!

I hope we can arrange some time to juggle at some point. Anyway, it was at the event that I really got the idea that I had 4 balls down pretty solidly. I saw Ian (the other juggler) run 4 and i knew right off that my fountain was much more solid. 

So I thought after a while, “hey I wonder if i could do 3 balls and a club.”

Well, a few hours later I was juggling 3 clubs and one ball, and that night I ordered my fourth and yellowest club. It got here friday and on my third attempt I got 4 catches. 

I went out of town for the weekend, and only practiced a bit while I was gone. I managed to get enough catches for a few nice pictures, but didn’t feel like I made any real progress. 

Once I got back home though, I made a clean qualifying run with a nice collection after about 20 minuets in the yard. Yesterday, after a warmup I went out and got around 10 catches on nearly every try. I had a few long runs, topping out around 30 or so, but it was hard to keep count. 

I feel pretty comfortable with the progress I am making, and it is so very, very exciting even to be working with 4 that I just can’t wait to do another session. 

It is all thanks to the practice guide I made. Since I started doing that my practices are no long just haphazard attempts, they have structure and direction.

I have also made profound progress with 3 ball shower, the box and 4 ball multiplexes. Work with five is also going much faster now. My flashes are much more reliable and I  can actually run a few catches of the chase (505050?) and 50510. I think that if I start flashing from my left hand I will be in good shape by the end of the summer. 

Almost everything I know with 3 is crisper now too. 

I am very pleased with the state of my juggling right now. If i can manage to escape the office, I am going to go do it right now. 

I’ve been bored not from lack of things to do, but simply from a bit of enuiee I can’t really seem to shake. 

The one really happy thing I’ve got going on at the moment, though, is some nice juggling progress. I learned a very nice new trick in the past week, and I have made some really excellent progress with four. 

I learned a 3-ball carrying trick which I’ve seen called “yo-yo on both sides” or something similar. Carry tricks have a nifty look to them, because instead of letting the balls take a natural trajectory, well you carry them in a pattern of your own choosing. The yo-yo carry I’ve been working on is really fun to juggle, and it has a very dramatic visual component. The carried ball seems to sort of hop along with the pattern while the other balls do what they are supposed to. 

The very same day I figured out this yo-yo carry trick (even though I was able to find some videos of the trick after I’d learned it, I figured it out on my own) I had a big breakthrough with four ball crossing patterns. 

I managed to work two different types of crossing tosses into my 4-ball fountain (an outside and an inside switch). For both of the crosses the throws are fairly similar–a high “5″ throw followed by a low “3″ throw, and back into 4 4 4 4 4 etc.–and the only difference is, one uses regular cascade tosses, and the other uses reverse cascade tosses. 

I think that, with the reverse tosses at least, this is how 4-ball half-showers are juggled. I think for the inside (read: traditional cascade) throws, this is the first step in learning some “siteswapy” patterns. 

I have also been working on a cool little multiplex start for coin juggling. This isn’t exactly the most productive thing in the world, but all the same it is cool. I think it could make a good youtube video. I kind of want to go get some $1 coins from the bank though, quarters are tricky to catch with any reliability. 

I also taught my friend Robert how to juggle using my new methodology, and he was up to 12 catches on day 2. 

Juggling has been a bit more of a mental priority I suppose. It is a comfortable place to send my thoughts when things are stress-filled in real life. Sitting at work today, I came up with a structure for practicing.

I’ve thought about doing this, even tried it once or twice, but with very little success. This list, I have been musing over while juggling for the past week, and I am pretty pleased with it. It seems like the more I’ve read from jugglers such as Anthony Gatto, and Jason Garfield–jugglers who are unquestionably at the top of human achievement–the clearer it is that having focus in practice is the most important thing for improvement. 

Taking a page from Gatto’s practice book, What I plan to do with this practice list is go through each item, spending about 2-5 minutes per line trying to get everything on the line down, in sequence, without any drops.  I have toyed with the idea of imposing a “drop limit” per line–after which I would have to move on to the next trick–but I don’t think I am at that point yet. 

Basically, this list represents what I can do, with a huge variety of proficiency. The ultimate goal here is to get everything clean. There are quite a few 3-ball activities, patterns I would call “prep work for 5″ that I have left off. I think if I add anything It will be 3-ball flashes. For now though, I am going to focus on what I have outlined so far. 

I hope that, within a few months of spending at least 1 hour a day, every day, on this list, I will be able to develop the across-the-board-consistency I am looking for. 

I have also included focus points for each section, just to give myself a reminder of what I am looking for. While there is no strict relationship between them, it should be obvious that things such as fluidity and continuity are necessarily preceded by things like endurance, accuracy etc. 

Here is the list: 

BALLS 

3 ball–focus on: fluidity

cascade, 1-up 2-up–left, right, cross, underarm cross. 

cascade, 423–high, low, high claws.

cascade, claws; mills mess claws. 

cascade, over the top, tennis, reverse cascade, mills mess. 

cascade, fake 1-up 2-up, yo-yo carry, factory

shower, box

 

4 ball–focus on: continuity 

fountain endurance. 

reverse fountain endurance. 

pistons endurance. 

circles endurance. 

fountain, reverse fountain, pistons, fountain, circles. 

fountain, synch switch, left, right, cross, shower, switch. 

fountain, inside 5-3 swap, outside 5-3 swap. 

 

5 ball–focus on: accuracy (first 2 throws)

flashes

 

multiplexes–focus on: precision/endurance

4 ball cascade stacks

5 ball cascade stacks

4 ball cascade split to 4 ball fountain

 

RINGS

3 rings–focus on: comfort

cascade endurance

cascade, 1-up 2-up, 4 ring prep work

cascade, over the top, reverse cascade

 

CLUBS

3 clubs–focus on: continuity/accuracy

cascade endurance.

cascade, 1 double, 2 doubles, 3 doubles. 

doubles endurance.

cascade, 1-up 2-up.

half shower endurance.

reverse cascade endurance. 

423 endurance.

mills mess endurance. 

cascade, over the top, tennis, half shower, reverse cascade, mills mess, UA-double to cascade. 

 

cool down with mixed props 3 and 4 patterns, or juggling on unicycle. 

I’ve never felt like more of a snob in my life. 

To be fair, I was coming down with a bit of a cold, so I was probably a bit testy to begin with when I went to the Georgia Renaissance Festival.

I already had my doubts about seeing any really impressive juggling there. My mom is a potter, and at a recent show she had a booth next to a group of people promoting the renaissance festival. Striking up a bit of conversation, she started telling them about me, and how I juggled and how, “wouldn’t it be great for me to come see the jugglers at the festival?”

She told me all of this later, and at one point she said she told them how I’d just started working on five. This is where my misgivings came from. 

According to my mom, the lady seemed really surprised and said, “Wow! If he is doing five then he must be really really good, no one does five.”

This was not a good sign. 

Yes. Five is tricky. Five has given me fits for months now. Not that I have been able to dedicate half as much time as I’d like towards it, but since my first flash of five a few months back, I am only up to 7 catches. 

I, however, have been juggling just over a year. That’s one year. One. Probably I’d peg myself at about 14-15 months at this point. 

I’m no prodigy, I don’t have any special gift–I just like to juggle. 

What I don’t like, though, is juggling for money. And therein lies the difference. 

Not to detract from the performances at the renaissance festival–I mean, after all, balance ladders and rolla-bolla’s are neat, they look cool–but still. To watch a half-hour of something billed as a juggling show and to see non-continouious under-the-leg throws be the most difficult trick performed–wait, make that the only trick performed–was a huge disappointment. It was more than disappointing. It made me angry. 

This was not a juggling show by any stretch of the imagination. I realize that it must get tedious doing the same half-hour show dozens of times in a weekend, week after week. 

But still. 

Go ahead, juggle the can of span, garden weasel and knife; the audience goes for it, include it in your act. 

But don’t you think they would respond to some quality 3-club tricks? I’m not asking for 7-ball siteswap patterns–no one but jugglers like that. 

A few backcrosses though, a good run of Mills mess, a pirouette or two, or even a kick-up to a run with five if your up to it–these tricks could be done in less than five minutes. I can’t fathom that seeing them wouldn’t be exciting for an audience and it would do so much to expand their idea of what can really be done by jugglers. Is it really so important that what you juggle be pointy or gimmicky that you don’t have a single club on stage during a juggling act?

I just don’t understand what would lead a person to call a show with so little juggling a juggling act. 

Other performers at the festival, I am thinking here of the Dexter Tripp Thrill Show (note the lack of juggling in the billing) actually did much more real juggling on stage. 

While the Thrill Show didn’t feature anything too elaborate, and despite having five torches on stage, Tripp only juggled three (I learned later, from his fiance, that he can do a run of continuous back-crosses with five torches) he also didn’t bill himself as a juggling act. 

I actually really enjoyed Tripp’s performance. He did a great act on a loose high-rope, and when he did a nice, clean run with three torches while standing on an audience member’s head, it looked really nice. 

He also threw in a few double tosses, and when he did chops with the torches, I have to admit it looked way, way better than club chops–the trail of fire really made the trick stand out. 

Tripp, too, used some interesting props. He did a run with a knife, an apple and a chainsaw that ended with the apple being cut in half by the saw. He played it up well, and it got a nice reaction. 

While Tripp didn’t do anything juggling wise that I would call exceedingly technically difficult, he didn’t bill himself as a juggler. His was a thrill show, and the focus was on the rope act. His performance there was fantastic. 

His tricks were complex, difficult and technically demanding; and it showed. He was a great talent because he pulled them off. He was a great performer because he made them entertaining. 

The same thing is true for good juggling. Good juggling, done well, is hard. Making it appealing onstage is even harder. 

The irony of all of this is that, of all the performances I saw, the “Juggling Show” not only had the least amount of juggling, but the juggling it had was also the most boring. 

Even the Barely Balanced Acrobatic show had more juggling in it. There were a few runs of simple 3-torch cascades, and some very clean four-count passing. 

I didn’t go to the renaissance festival to see a WJF or IJA routine. But I expected to at least see something that I couldn’t get up on stage and do after scarcely more than a year of casual practice. 

And for a final note, the juggler who tossed the can of spam and the other “dangerous” objects, was celebrating his 21st year on stage at that festival alone.