As juggling becomes more prominent in the public eye, there is more of a desire by some performers to explore more original ways to display their skills. Otherwise everyone's work would appear the same. That kind of exploration can effectively be done by bouncing ideas off of someone either in a workshop situation or in private sessions with a director.

 

JW: You put out the call before the convention for people to seek your advice. Did many people respond?

 

Reehl: Quite a few, and a wide variety of people. Some were novices and some were professionals who wanted some fine tuning. There were a lot of questions, particularly after the workshops, about the concept of presentation and uniqueness. In the workshop I touched on the idea that if you don't develop your presentation skills while you develop your technical skills, it gets harder to develop them when you get better technically. Presentation and theatre skills require creative risk that is different than working with juggling props, which tell you right away whether they're in the air or on the ground. The degree of perfection jugglers go for in developing technique often makes it hard for them to trust the intuitive risk-taking required in developing presentation, plot and theatre skills.

 

Performers need to keep exploring their uniqueness, and one of the strongest ways for doing this is by researching performers of other eras and evaluating how you fit into the overall spectrum of performing. I also encourage jugglers to take workshops in all sorts of allied arts -- story telling, movement, theatre, improvisation, mime and dance. Technical jugglers can be very stiff without movement training. Michael Menes is one example of a performer who uses movement well.

 

Advanced technical jugglers can fall into a trap when they try to develop their presentation too late. They go into a practice situation trying to devlop this, but it's hard and their concentration weakens. Then they tend to pick up props and think they're rehearsing, when often they're just working on technique again.

 

JW: Did you see that reflected in the IJA championships?

 

Reehl: A controversial issue not only with juggling, but with magic, ventriloquism and many other arts, is the idea of putting an evaluation on technical skills in a public performance situation. You have highly subjective definitions of what people are looking at. You're comparing apples to oranges with guidelines developed for grapes! Because any organization wants to promote the advancement of the technical side of the field, skill gets put in a competitive situation that turns it into a sports event instead of a performance event. It puts pressure on the technical side so that the performance side is invariably weak.  I get weary of seeing people have next­to-nervous breakdowns in these situations that put public performance in this competitive light. 

 

I direct a female ventriloquist who goes to national competitions in that field.

It's the same there, she's constantly being looked at for technical standards to the exclusion of performance and presentation. The number of time your lips move is like the number of drops. It's all gotten to a point of evaluation in a sports context that I think is antithetical to the arts in general.

 

I would suggest using some sort of competition for judges only to arrive at a group of finalists, but then staging a public show with them that recognizes each performer with awards of merit that indicate the strengths of their acts.

 

It's been going on for my entire 30 year career in show business. Even way back in my senior year of high school I had to make a choice between the senior play or playing basketball. It seems that our society has always made us choose between humanities and sports, or performance and competition.

 

JW: Is there a good alternative?

 

Reehl: People spend time preparing for the competition because they want some visibility and recognition for what they do. For me the question is how do we find performance visibility for the people who come to the conventions? I think a performer wants to face as diverse an audience as possible to find out what's working and what isn't. So the first thing is to get more performance venues at conventions. The Renegade Stage offers one alternative, but in my opin­ion there should be others. The Public Show had mostly jugglers in the audience, which is not an honest mix of people in a "public" performance.

 

JW: What trends do you see happening in variety arts?

 

Reehl: Well, for one thing, more people are performing solo or duet more than in larger groups. I hate to think that the attraction to ensemble work that seemed prevalent in the late sixties and seventies has given way to the "individualism" of the eighties, but that may be the case. It seems a shame though, because there are so many interesting combinations and approaches that can be developed in the larger number groups.

 

Related to that appears to be a reduced interest in networking with other performers for information sharing and attempts to solve problems that affect all independent touring performers. I jokingly call it the "solo image" disease. I tend to promote cooperation rather than competition among New Vaudevillians. I may be an idealist, but I believe in the adage that "if you don't hang together, you'll hang separately."

 

On the "plus" side, there appears to be a growing public interest in live performance. Video and TV seems to be cultivating a new audience eager for something with which people can really interact. However, how we market ourselves to that audience needs much cooperative brainstorming.

 

JW: What are ten things you would recommend for young performers to think about as they work toward a career?

 

Reehl: In no particular order, and realizing that each could be the subject of another article, I'd say... humility, research, solo studio time without props, workshops in a variety of performing skills, short- and long-term goal setting, striving for originality, networking with other performers, local and global community, soliciting honest feedback and... real estate!