Page 21 Winter 1984-85
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Curl Up With (or Work Out With!) A Good Juggling Book This Winter
Dingman,
Richard. Patterns. Published by the author, 1984.
$30. ISBN 0-9613432-0-6
Only
200 copies of this encyclopedic compendium of club passing patterns
exist. It's not inexpensive, nor meant for casual jugglers, but for
serious club passers it's an inexhaustible treasure-trove of
ideas.
Three years in its research and writing, drafts of the book were circulated to numerous well-known jugglers for their suggestions and input. The author hopes that it becomes the standard reference work in the field, a piece of common literature to facilitate communication between club passers the world around.
Dingman
spells out clearly on the first page who the book can help and who it
can't. He writes, "Patterns is created specifically for a
small select audience, formation jugglers. It will teach you how to
pass clubs. It will introduce you to hundreds of group juggling
patterns. It is challenging. It can be difficult. If you are really
excited about passing and want to do a lot of it and learn a lot about
it, this book is for you.
Patterns
encourages passing proficiency,
intelligence, originality and enjoyment, though not by collecting
tricks or by teaching someone else's routines. Instead, by exploring
and communicating the whole range of possible passing patterns, from
the simplest to the most challenging and bizarre, it hopes to expand
our awareness of all that we already know how to do. And then to point
ways beyond this, to new understandings, without resorting to listing.
Dingman builds his patterns from combinations of the basic ingredients of club passing - counts, variations of throws and configurations of participants. There's heavy emphasis from the beginning on ambidexterity. Dingman's mathematical approach is lightened somewhat by witty writing, but the book is expressly a reference work rather than literary entertainment.
Though he can pass eight clubs proficiently, Dingman admits he has not tried all the patterns he includes in the book. However, he said, "I'd like to stretch people a little. I figure if people see some of the more complicated patterns written down, someone will try them and we'll start to grow as passers."
The book is well organized and amply indexed. There is large type and are hundreds of understandable, but rudimentary illustrations by Judy Gailen. Chapters sequentially covering patterns of from two to six people are subdivided into sections according to the number of clubs used. Furthermore, patterns are categorized into simple counts, variations of simple counts and complex counts.
Appropriate
to its intention as a workbook, plastic spiral binding allows any of
its 450 8 1/2 x 11" pages to lie flat in front of the practicing
juggler. Alvarez,
Francisco. Juggling - Its History and Greatest
Performers. Published by the author, 1984.
Little
by little, the history of juggling is being uncovered and recorded.
Resources
available to historians like himself are slirn, and thus his
descriptions of many early performers are likewise not as thorough as
one would wish. However, the style of the book is infused
with a rare enthusiasm for the subject due to the 71 year old Alvarez'
personal involvement with the subject. During a 50 year performing
career, he knew many of the jugglers in his book personally. Additional
research through private collections and old variety arts magazines have
helped him shed light on jogging's history in Western civilization as
far back as the 1700's.
The
129 page, 8 1/2 x 11 inch book is paper bound and spiced with 40 line
drawings by the author. For quick reference to specific performers and
events, there's an index. For those wanting to do their own research, he
includes a three page list of suggested further reading. There's even a
five page alphabetical list of some past and present juggling artists.
With
a smooth and easy writing style, he helps readers understand not only
jugglers themselves, but the mood of the times in which they performed.
In talking about the vaudeville age, for example, he writes,
"Saturday night at the movies wasn't the name of a television
program. It was a living, exciting, unforgettable experience... For the
same price of admission the darkened movie theater suddenly came alive
with lights, musicians, and performers who'd walk on stage in an aura of
unbelievable glamour, to dance, to sing, to juggle. "
The
author's fine writing is almost poetic at times. Speaking of his
childhood idol, Serge Flash, Alvarez writes, "He did everything
with a flair - graceful to his finger tips. He literally embroidered the
air with turning, floating, undulating little sticks. One didn't care
how many. It's the way he did it."
The young Alvarez stepped onto the juggling scene as vaudeville was being slowly exterminated by the advent of radio, talking motion pictures and television. He met and learned from Serge Flash, Bobby May, the Elgins and Carl Lorenz, among others. He performed respectably in the lively post-World War II entertainment scene, and made his first television appearance in 1944.
Today
he meets regularly with Albuquerque-area jugglers. Though he's impressed
by today's young "superjugglers" who are sensational with
large numbers of balls and clubs, he laments the passing of the elegant
work of giants of old in the fields of stick and ball work, salon
juggling and heavyweight balancing.
As
fine as the book is, it should not be construed as a definitive history
of juggling, for many fine artists are never mentioned. The historical
narrative ends altogether at the end of World War II, and the more
famous jugglers since that time are covered in individual reviews in the
last 10 pages of the book.
At the end, the reader will be left wanting more. Considering the amount of time Alvarez spent on this volume, other historians have a formidable task ahead in filling in the gaps. |