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.

On Valentine’s Day I spent the afternoon at Circus Aotearoa catching up with the crew and helping pack down the tent.

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.

The original design for the 2009 NZ Juggling Festival t-shirt had some legal issues, so I was asked to put something together based on designs I had done for the festival web site. On the front I used a design based on an idea given to me by Jo Stott of Fling Juggling about a fern leaf made from juggling clubs. The back was based on a design of my own, a koru made of juggling clubs. We ran out of all the popular sizes and colors quickly, and continue to receive requests for more (Fling may still have some in their store). I think some of the popularity of the shirt was having a somewhat unintentional WJF feeling to it.

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.

I am constantly throwing a club over my shoulder when I’m standing around talking to someone and haven’t had time to put my clubs down yet.

I just finished delivering Vanessa Vortex to Circus Aotearoa. She had been traveling with me since the New Zealand juggling festival. We spent some time at the circus where we got to use some of the equipment and hang out with the performers. There were a few late-night juggling sessions in the marquee where I got to juggle with some other performers who were also traveling through. After several days of living the circus life next to the train tracks, I decided I wanted to get back on the road, while Vanessa decided to stay and will be performing with them for a while.

I am fully in van travel mode now, parked up next to the traveling big top in Mt. Maunganui. Today I spent the morning cleaning the van up and reorganizing things. Traveling with me this week is Vanessa Vortex, who I met at the Lopez Juggling Festival in September. When I met her, she was about to leave for circus school in Australia. I remember telling her what a great time she was going to have, and to try and get to the New Zealand festival if she’s still around then. I was a bit surprised to find that she had indeed found a way to New Zealand, so after the juggling festival, we went off on some travels with my friend Graham who had come over from Australia, and Tony who I had lived with in Auckland in 2006. We drove up to the east coast of the Coromandel and camped out for a couple of days.

I had a great time at the juggling festival this year! Looking forward to 2010 in Levin!