I’d like to draw on an essay from Steven Ragatz, particularly the following passages:

“First, work on only one thing at a time. For example, if I am working on the start of a trick, on a single trial, I would focus on the first flash and not care about anything that happens after. On another trial, I might be training the pattern balance, particularly since my left hand likes to be a bit lazy. And on yet another trial, I might focus on shoulder placement, etc.

I have found this to be more valuable than to always try to do the entire trick, with all of it’s various parts, correctly on each trial. Once the trick is out of my head and into my hands, I can put all of the pieces together, but it is just too much to remember and too many things going on to split my focus initially. When I have a clear, limited idea what I wish to accomplish with a given trial, then my chance for success improves dramatically and training is less discouraging.

Second, I try to focus with my “mind’s eye”. The information that most jugglers latch on to is visual information. That is, we watch the pattern and analyze if a given throw was too high, or outside, or under spun, etc. This feedback is crucial, but is merely a symptom of the actual juggling itself. After all, once I see the throw in the air, it is too late to do anything about it other than try to recover. The only point that I can actually influence the trick, is the point of release when I let go of the prop and send it on it’s pre-ordained path. As soon as it leaves my hand, the prop is no longer in my control and I can no longer have any influence over it.

As such, I try to focus on the body and how it “feels” when executing a given trial. Even though my eyes are looking up, my mind’s eye is watching my hands. I try to make it feel correct. I much prefer a run that feels smooth, but results in an error, than a run that requires constant adjustments and is a struggle to keep off of the floor. The body-tool is the only way I have to influence the trick, so I try to focus on it and not rely only on an intellectualized analysis of visual information alone. On some trials, I might focus solely on elbow placement, or placement of my feet. A common focus point for me and small ball juggling, is for me to “see” how the balls are oriented in my hands on the catch/throw cycle. Is it on the palm, or is it in the fingers? Are the hands different? Do they feel like the arm swing is symmetrical? Does one hand tire more easily? Is my left wrist tensing? Etc.”

Whew.  That’s kind of a lot, but maybe I can pull some of the best passages for next Sunday’s class.  I also think some basic breath-awareness exercise, and a short guided body scan would be good points to include in this session. Also, Mr. E’s warmup method (do something which is easy for you, then do it while turning in a circle) is a great tool for the development of body/juggling awareness.

As Ratagz points out, everything comes from the body.  Posture, arm motion, wrist position — these things make or break juggling.

It is important, though, not to be overly prescriptive in this line of thought.  Is our ultimate goal to juggle a perfect pattern while standing absolutely rigid and unmoving? No, of course not.  Juggling should be a fluid, artistic and natural expression.  It should be fun.  But it should be an expression in which we are distinctly aware of every motion and every facet of our bodies.

Like any athlete, dancer, performer the ultimate goal of the juggler is a state of mind in which thought is less important than instinct, in which a free flow of creativity and enjoyment can be expressed. For this to happen, though, there must be a foundation of fundamental skills. Before we allow ourselves the freedom of movement, we must achieve mastery over both our bodies and our patterns.

Keep the body in mind, it is all important.  Let it be your primary focus.  Once you know that the task of juggling is nothing more than “right, left, right, left / throw, catch, throw, catch”  there is very little thought which must be given to the pattern itself. The act of throwing becomes of critical importance.  Mentally reset yourself — your mind, your arms, your body — after every trial.  Fight the urge to rush ahead of yourself.

In juggling, craving is nearly inevitable. Holding the props in your hands, it is natural to want to juggle, to feel a jugglish urge. Be aware of this without letting it consume you.  When you feel frustration and craving think, “ah, my old friends have returned to me, but they shall not lead me astray.”  There is danger in giving in to the craving for a pattern to work. It is a distraction.  It will cause you to forget your body.

Avulsion will also arise. How sick you will become of drop after drop — that mocking thud. Do not think of a drop as a failure. Think, rather, “ah, so I have dropped once more. It is time to start again.”  Do not rush to snatch up a fallen prop.  Rather, take a moment to consider it as it lies on the floor. Consider it’s location relative to your own. Try to remember it’s path in the air.  Try to remember the throw that came just before it and what your body was doing.  Then pick it up.  Pick it up with a smile, perhaps chiding it or yourself good-naturedly.  Welcome the fallen prop back gratefully, full of joy.  There is no room for frustration or anger in juggling. You are already working against gravity, against physics. Don’t work against yourself, too. The mind and body must be full of a calm collectedness. A subtle and happy awareness. Strive for equanimity irrespective of your success or failure.

Mmm… This feels like a good start.

It is the same sensation of limitless potential and effervescent joy I felt when I first flashed five. And again when I saw the pattern first becoming solid. It is a wonderful feeling, an up-swelling of self confidence and inspiration.

There is an undeniable commonality to these experiences, but there is also a nuance and individuality.  All are similar, yet none are the same — in much the same way each of the patterns themselves have an individual identity, and yet they all share the innate quality of juggling.

My most recent  moment of personal accomplishment — and perhaps one of my most profound personal juggling accomplishments to date — is four ball Mills Mess.  I’ve always had a deep affinity for the Mills Mess patterns and their variants.  Mills Mess feels almost like magic.  It completely transforms the pattern with such subtlety that it it feels almost like cheating.

Most patterns or tricks distinguish themselves with broad, clear strokes. Throw heights or orders are altered, changing the tempo of the juggling that is happening — creating a syncopation, stealing time for a trick or flourish.  Mills Mess isn’t like this.

Rather than the juggler altering the order or tempo of the pattern, in Mills Mess, the pattern manipulates the juggler.  A three-ball Mills Mess has the exact tempo and siteswap of a standard cascade, yet through the twining and untwining of the juggler’s arms an entirely new, almost organic pattern is created.

Mills Mess has a smoother flow than any other pattern of which I know. The balls seem to chase and follow one another alternately, pulling the juggler’s arms into place at the pattern’s insistence.  I make all of these observations based largely on my experience with three ball Mills. I feel, however, that with four these observations are, if anything, more apropos.

Three ball Mills Mess is a thing of beauty. It is a smooth and elegant pattern.

Four ball Mills is damn near poetic.

Like all even numbers, working with four is quirky.  The base pattern comprises two independent circles.  While they are in time with one another, they are fundamentally separate.  There are, of course, patterns which alter this but they can never escape this fundamental characteristic — the natural rhythmic disorder which accompanies even-numbered juggling.

Yet if any pattern could be said to come close to erasing this disharmony, Mills Mess would be it.

Those distinct circles — two sets of two each bound with certainty to a pre-determined hand — merge in Mills Mess. They dance like lovers, boundaries rendered invisible yet kept intact. Every moment each half of the pattern shifting in compensation.  Every prop seems lost in a miasmic tangle, and yet through it all each pair maintain their integrity. It’s a breakdown of dichotomy, a seemingly impossible union.  It is all bound by the arms of the juggler and yet simultaneously it binds him, commands him. It demands a sort of liquidness — a fluidity of motion.  It pulls the arms, constantly winding and unwinding those subordinate appendages to form a pattern of subtle and ever-changing complexity.

I’ve really only just broken into the pattern at this point, but I finally have a solid base to work from.  It’s only a matter of time and practice before I can begin incorporating more variations, some simple siteswaps and really begin to delve into the depths of four ball Mills Mess dynamics.

It would be an effort in futility were I to attempt to comprehensively  list my personal developments since my last post.  Just to bring things up to speed:  I’m making good progress on flashing six balls, have the five-ball cascade pretty solid, and have just cracked open the long illusive  four-ball Mills Mess.  I have to take a moment to say what a beautiful pattern four-ball Mills is.  It alone made me want to resume blogging here. Maybe more on that later, I want to get a few other points down while they are fresh.

Our juggling club, Neverthriving of Athens, is … well … thriving.  Take THAT archaic middle-English linguists!  The club is growing in both quantity and quality, and there is some fantastic juggling happening every week.

I’ve also been working on a short three-ball routine choreographed to a Flogging Molly song. Hopefully this will land me a spot in Mr. Blank’s Carnival of Black Hearts.

Last, but certainly not least, is what appears to be a very real chance for me to begin teaching a juggling class at a local yoga studio here in Athens, Rubber Soul Yoga (see links).

Well, as you can see, dear reader, these are exciting times.  I’ve done a lot of facebook posting of juggling accomplishments in the past few months, but maybe after re-working this site, I can shift back here.  I could certainly use the space, and this gives a much better archive to review.

Only time will tell.

I haven’t come up with a manageable approach to the convention as a whole, but there is one thread of thought which emerged during my time at the IJA which stands apart. On the final night of the convention, I met Erik Åberg, a member of the juggling company known as Team RdL (Renegadedesign Lab).

Team RdL put on some amazing shows during the convention, featuring some of the most innovative and impressive juggling I’ve ever seen. They preformed at both the Welcome Show at the start of the convention and the Cascade of Stars at the end.  Erik also performed during the late-night show known as Club Renegade (no relation). At Club Renegade, Erik put on a fantastic show with french juggler Florent LeStage, who also put on some fantastic performances during the IJA. Erik and Forent are both amazingly artistic performers, and they have a lot of great stuff online.

Erik and Florent’s collaboration at Club Renegade was pretty avant guard , and it was more of a show “by jugglers, for jugglers” than something geared toward the general public. Well, at least in some respects.

What intrigued me about the show, though, was Erik’s approach a combination of juggling and story telling. Shortly after taking the stage he addressed the audience and introduced the conceit of his show; to paraphrase: “What has made me a juggler?”

I won’t rehash the details of Erik’s story, but I will take a moment to ruminate on his theme.

I love this concept. Part of what interests me most about juggling is it’s universal appeal. Juggling can be a universally accessible form of artistic expression. The inherent drama of intertwining and shifting patterns–the illusion of sustaining the unsustainable –can be compelling without context and regardless of cultural differences.

And yet, at the same time, it can be intensely personal. While the balls, clubs or rings may have their own story to tell, the juggler below them is also a player in the performance. For many old-school jugglers (Enrico Rastelli, Francis Brunn, Bobby May etc.), there was a clear dynamic between these two parts. If you watch old footage of these performers, there is an immediate and  undeniable connection between prop and performer. A lot of modern-day juggling, though, seems to lack this interaction. The props have a story to tell–a path to follow–and a mechanical, uninteresting juggler stands below, a disengaged conductor.

This isn’t to say no modern manipulators are keeping the old-school prop-performer dynamic alive. Viktor Kee, for example, is an astonishingly vivid, if somewhat creepy, example of this.

But what interested me so much about Erik and Florent’s show, was that, in keeping with that compelling command from Ezra Pound–they “made it new.”  They changed the dynamic of juggling and the juggler, by putting the juggler on center stage, and relegating juggling itself to a secondary, supporting role.

There is a vast potential in this–this personalization of the universal.

It has taken me many years to develop my current attitude toward writing. 

As I look back over the landscape of my memory, there is a clear topography to my past. The early days of taking a profound and simple pleasure in the written word slope gradually upward, through the years of my education, into the plain of academia. 

Across the long plateau of scholarly study, I see my perspectives and attitudes develop, shifting from visceral enjoyment to intellectual appreciation. During my tenure in college, my study of English literature provided the bedrock for the development of an informed and critical eye and mind. 

Yet like the geography of our world, my literary landscape has continued its tectonic shift  with each layer and component of my understanding interacting in a sort of clumsy, gradual ballet. And just as time–the unrelenting drudgery of each passing day–erodes and reveals new facets of the earth, sparks orogeny, and thrusts new peaks into being, so too has that inescapable force wrought great and sweeping changes in my thinking. 

Like the steady drum of rain or the constant shifting of the substrata, the daily practice of writing has rendered a profound effect on my conceptualization of the written word. There is perhaps no adage more trite than “practice makes perfect,” but my personal realization of this truth has had a momentous impact on my life. 

A strange convalescence of forces led to this revelation–led me to realize that, through practice and focus, the scope of our understanding and the depth of our ability are expanded. 

When I began working for The Press-Sentinel, I began writing more voluminously and more fastidiously than ever before. The constant demands of deadlines and assignments drew a constant stream of composition through me. Stack after stack of copy grew before my eyes as I wrote day in, day out for this publication. 

At essentially the same time, I became more fully engrossed than ever before in a seemingly unrelated personal endeavor: to juggle five objects. 

Looking back, I can’t say which task seemed more overwhelming at the time. 

Writing a half-dozen stories fit to be printed seemed as impossible as cleanly releasing five balls in less than two seconds. And at first, I handled both tasks with the same sort of panicked disorganization. Yet as time progressed, I began to see infinitesimal improvements. 

At the paper, certain stories began to flow smoothly from my fingertips. Leads became clearer and cleaner in my mind. As I juggled at home, the breakdowns in my pattern came later and later. The path of each ball seemed sharp and almost tangible in my mind’s eye. 

And the more progress I made, the more strangely related writing and juggling seemed to become. 

At the pinnacle of my progress, I came to a sudden and shocking realization. Nearly everything I’d thought about both writing and juggling was fundamentally askew. 

It was as if I’d stepped off a cliff and plummeted into a new and astonishing reality. 

In all of my previous thought I’d considered the task of writing to be a sort of piecemeal process. Each research paper, feature story or foray into fiction could be broken down into component parts, the details polished to perfection and assembled. To some extent, I feel there is still some validity to this thinking, for, in good writing, every detail must be perfect and polished–every word exact and deliberate. 

And yet, this line of thinking so fundamentally misses the heart of writing it seems shocking that I could have seen what success I have had under its influence. 

It was juggling which led to my disillusionment. For in juggling, like writing, every detail must be perfect; every throw and every catch must be executed with absolute precision and forethought. With the slightest miscalculation, the slightest divergence, the entire pattern devolves into chaos. 

For months I fought the forces of physics, straining against gravity and momentum to send each element into place. For months I failed. 

Suddenly, I had a flash of realization. For any juggler to see some modicum of success with higher numbers, the details of throws and catches must be second nature. They must be absolutely subordinate to the purity and perfection of the pattern. 

In that moment I realized my limitations. What my writing needed was not more well-polished parts. It needed a stronger, more immediate sense of narrative truth–an absolute image of perfection alive and vibrant in my mind. 

To manifest that shimmering and ephemeral image, to make real the fleeting threads of thought within one’s mind, is what every juggler and every writer strives to accomplish. To do this, they must practice. 

They must practice diligence, focus and humility. They must look, without ego, for weakness, for self-indulgence, for divergence. They must practice with a full knowledge of past successes and triumphs and without concern for them. They must practice daily and never stop. 

I stand now, as both juggler and writer, on a new and uncertain terrain. I see the past with the analytical clarity of a cartographer. I see the present and future, looming and inscrutable. 

And yet, I know with absolute certainty that one step, one toss, one catch, one word at a time, it will be revealed. 

I’ve got quite a bit rattling around the old skull box in regard to my newfound ability to juggle five of things, and I do plan to write some of that stuff down. None of my thoughts are very polished yet (they need more time in the polisher) so I don’t want to really attempt an in-depth post on five. 

Suffice it to say–five is freaking awesome. It took hours and hours of practice for months and months and it was absolutely worth it. It makes me feel like a robot. 

It is still slow going to some extent. I’ve been able to keep a qualifying cascade or better going for a few months now, and I have had a lot of really nice runs. I am, however, at work right now and can’t go into any more detail than that. Full report to follow. 

On a side note, though, I’ve been considering whether to add a “Not Juggling” category and expand my blog to other facets of my life (crazy, I know). More on that as it develops. 

I suppose it is to be expected, but I was surprised all the same. Since I started working on 4 clubs I’ve yet to really hurt myself up to this point, which is a bit of a shock since learning 3 clubs involved many painful encounters very frequently. 

I don’t remember exactly what I did or when I did it, but my finger has been painfully stiff for a few days now. I bang my fingers pretty regularly working on 4 clubs, but I must have smacked this one pretty nastily because it is still sore. 

Anyway I kept waiting for it to get better, but when I woke up and it was still just as bad off as ever I decided to wrap it up in tape today and see how it reacts. 

I think I had better take a brake from practice for the next few days as well, just in case I’ve actually fractured it. 

And all I can say about that is it is disappointing. 

In the past week or so I have really come a good ways with 4 clubs, despite a lot of rainy weather that has limited my practice. I have also gotten all of the 3 ball tricks on my list down very solidly, and have made great progress with the 4 ball half shower. I even started working on a 4 ball shower yesterday, but I missed a catch and smacked my hurt finger and that was it for the day. 

I am just going to have to bite the bullet here, accept the fact that I will loose some of my most recent progress, and take the week off. 

Lame. 

I guess there will never really be a time when I will want to take time off, but it does seem like I am on the verge of a lot right now. 

So it goes. 

In 3 ball news, the box is rapidly becoming my new favorite pattern and I can’t wait to start playing with variations. Once my stupid finger is better. 

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. 

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. 

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.