I’ve always been fond of the shoulder launcher, and recently have been working on multiplex launches. This is video of me using it in a passing pattern with Mark at juggling club yesterday.
Cedric arrived from France to teach in Tucson. Over several years he endeared himself to the Tucson Jugging Club.
This is a tiny juggling club cast in bronze. I originally carved the shape in wax.
Today I welded a juggling club made from some wire bent around the body of a Renegade Juggling club. Each strand of wire was welded to a central hub piece between the handle and the bulb and then a knob and cap were welded on to the opposing ends. Some random washers and round things were welded on inside the bulb, which was completed by wrapping it in barbed wire. This was a gift for Cedric, a French juggler who has been living in Tucson for two years and is now moving to Ecuador.
Today I was messing around with a Google product called “Google Trends,” where you can see statistics about subjects being searched on the net. The first thing I tried was “juggling.” One of the things tracked is the region where the word is searched most frequently. The data has been normalized so that places with the higher populations do not necessarily appear higher on the list.
New Zealand comes in at number one for the country who searches about juggling on Google more than anyone else in the world. When I decided to travel in New Zealand for a year, juggling was not one of the things I considered in my destinations. When I was in college I had gone for a week, and I had always felt the need to return some day. After my lay-off in 2005, I organized a work abroad visa for a year in New Zealand and picked a date out of thin air. Unknown to me, the annual juggling festival began on the date I was scheduled to arrive. A fellow juggler I had known since college had moved to Australia and informed me of the happy coincidence. I was picked up at the airport by him and driven to the festival, and from that point on my life in New Zealand was inextricably linked to the network of jugglers spanning the islands. The juggling community linked me to people everywhere I went, giving me an instant peer group no matter where I ended up.
As mentioned previously, Auckland has a vibrant juggling scene. At the center of it all is Central City Circus, who organize weekly juggling and fire nights in Auckland. At the bottom of the North Island you’ll find the Wellington Juggling Collective with meetings on the same night. Up in Northland you will find Circus Kumarani teaching the next generation of jugglers their craft.
In the South Island, Dunedin has a juggling club and even held a festival last year! Christchurch is the home of CircoArts as well as poi, producing many of New Zealand’s top performers. There is even a juggling themed Back Packers in Picton.
New Zealand comes up on many of the top ten juggling related search terms (circus, juggling clubs, chainsaws), but not surprisingly, Kiwis don’t need to learn anything about poi on the internet.
Last summer I participated in a collaborative video in which members of the Rec.Juggling community submitted short clips of them juggling. I sent in a clip that I shot one day while having a yard sale, but due to delays in the project I had time to practice and find a really nice location on the west side of Tucson to shoot a new video. When the collaborative video appeared online they had used my first clip shot in the back yard, rather than the one above.