World Juggle

On my last day in New Zealand I shot this video of Pauly Paul as we waited for a potential buyer for my van to arrive.

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.

Auckland has the best juggling night in New Zealand, so whenever I’m in town I stop in. Last night, Chris shot some video of me playing around with my favorite sequence of balances.

This is some footage of Alberto Gorostiza doing contact club tricks and juggling at the Fleet FM radio station in Auckland. I had seen him juggling in Greece at the European Juggling Convention a couple years ago. He and his friend (who will be coming to the NZ juggling festival) were throwing multiplexes of eight between them in the gym.

I taught Pauly how to do tennis balls and can juggling in 2006.  Since then he has been performing it in his shows.  This is our first attempt at passing with this prop.  It’s a bit messy, but there’s enough time for us to work out some more ideas to perform at the festival.

Receiving two clubs in my left hand from Colin on Mt. Eden.

This did not turn out as nice as I had hoped. The sun was too bright on this day to really see much.

The other night I performed with some other jugglers I’ve met in my travels over the past three months.

I went to fire night in Auckland yesterday evening and had a super time! I know there are a few fire groups in Tucson, but I’m thinking it might be nice to organize something as cool as the one I’ve had here.