Contact Juggling

[ellyssian]

I mentioned contact juggling a short while ago - well, the day I started looking into learning it - and since then I've been meaning to post a bit more info and resources about it. Mostly, these are videos on YouTube - a search on "contact juggling" or "Michael Moschen" will find bunches more.

To start with some background, I first came across contact juggling - as did so many other people - with Michael Moschen's performance as the goblin king's hands in Labyrinth. I didn't really discover who or what was going on with those tricks until I caught Michael on television. There was a PBS special - which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be available on DVD. A little while later, Deb and I were lucky enough to catch a live performance with Michael.

Here's an excerpt from the PBS special with two different scenes showing mutli- and single ball routines:

For more on Michael, check out why I want him to be a percussionist in my band, as well as some of his ring work and an S curve piece - he does a lot more than the few simple tricks that appear in Labyrinth (although those are still the ones I love best.)

Here's a nice video with a few experiments in contact juggling - a short, enjoyable watch with some nice ideas. In this one, Matt Olsen mixes in some illusion with some great reveals - the ones with the slinky are really simple and really neat. Although she says she is rusty and needs more practice, this shows some good, solid work at a slow pace. Makes it easier to break down the tricks and see how they're done, plus The Mission provides the tune!

I had mentioned Contact Juggling.org in the prior post, and they have a number of good videos up on YouTube. In this first video, community member Jea9 visits Ryan and Drew in a meet in a London hangar for some great improv and a few worked out bits. Dawn shows how obsessed one can become with contact juggling, indeed, they might even contract OCCJD, which can lead you to a padded room lockup at the Ministry of Manipulation. And Silver adds more movement into the performance. Now, this is probably a good example of what you won't see me doing, on account of the dance-like thing not being my thing. However, martial arts - including and especially the slow circular movements of Baguazhang - are my thing, so I can see me mixing and matching there, once my level of competence grows.

That actually gets directly to why I'm doing this. It takes some coordination, physical dexterity and strength. Baguazhang is, literally, the "eight trigram palm", and the palm techniques are the key, as are the aforementioned slow circular movements. Working on the sphereplay techniques is also working on baguazhang, to a degree, and they can be easily blended. There's also a certain level of mastery regarding touch and object manipulation that fits right in with the wing chun techniques and training I've done with Jeet Kune Do. The sticky hands exercise - forms of which also exist in Baguazhang - is essentially contact juggling, with each person attempting to juggle the other.

If you're interested in learning how to do this sort of thing, check out Richard Shumaker's beginner lesson for a three-step course on the Butterfly. If you do better with text, check out Contact Juggling by James Ernest, which provides detailed descriptions and clear, easy-to-follow line drawings for a number of tricks. For additional video lessons, check out Brine Child's lessons on a variety of tricks - including the enigma. He also had a great one of him walking around a site (s?) in Edinburgh doing some excellent contact juggling, but it appears he took the video down.

Comments

[jadecat9.livejournal.com]

I'm going to point my boy over to your post. He started learning how to contact juggle.

[nursemae.livejournal.com]

Ooooh! The last time I was in Portland there was a silver street performer that was quite talented at this. He used his entire upper body - something I hadn't seen before. Needless to say, he earned some of my money that afternoon!