He is generous with credits to other jugglers, to performers in other fields and to collaborators but he's had no specific teacher to point to, and in the end he's had to find his own way through new territory. His relations with the juggling world haven't always been smooth.

 

To visit Moschen in his loft apartment - which he shares with his artist-wife Danielle Mailer and, since last June, their new daughter Isaballa - is to enter a world that Moschen has largely made by hand, a haven perched above Manhattan's teaming Bowery. Dominating the central rehearsal platform at the moment is the ten-foot-high triangular wooden structure (featured in the BAM show), off whose miked walls he bounces multiple balls at dizzying speeds. Facing the triangle are a mirrored wall and a video camera. Every nook of the apartment is used with maximum efficiency, from Mailer's work area topped by a storage platform that also houses the television, to file cabinets vertiginously stacked ceiling high, to the baby's room that Moschen has been building. A keen family man, he says he and his wife "have a great communication about what works and doesn't work" in their respective art forms. She's his best critic.

 

Growing up in Greenfield, Massachusetts, Moschen was already something of a maverick, more interested in reading on his own (which he continues to do as thought food for his work) than learning the set curriculum of school. "There, I was learning things, rather than learning how to teach myself, which is what you have to do in life. So I just sort of abandoned it and did ceramics for a year and a half," he relates. He has always loved working with his hands, along with sports and especially golf, which he feels is still the activity most natural to his body. His comment on golf evokes the respect for objects that marks his work as a juggler: "There's a oneness between this tiny little ball ­ through the club and the ground - and yourself."

 

Another influence from his childhood that he relates to juggling is that of his Italian grandfather, a stonemason who made his own wine, had his own garden, and "was so steeped in the physicality of the world. I remember the smells, the tastes, the touchings of that world," says Moschen. "It was all exotic and different and very much to be loved."

 

At age twelve he began juggling along with his older brother, Colin, and their next door neighbor, Penn (now the talking half of Penn and Teller). At first he worked just for his own satisfaction, without thought of performing. He liked practicing to music, which was to become an integral element in his work. Soon the three boys began doing some local shows. An experience that impressed him early on was the televised sight of the great Francis Brunn juggling. "His work was so passionate, so complicated and fast, that I was dumb-struck. Fifteen years later I got a chance to meet him and become his friend. It was just wild."

 

At the very first juggling convention Moschen attended, he met Hovey Burgess and his wife, along with Stuart Reynolds and Tommy Curtin. "They were wonderfully giving," he says.                                         

 

Eventually he and Penn got a job with a club-passing act at Great Adventure Amusement Park. At one time, Moschen was interested in learning numbers juggling, but after winning a competition with three balls while others were using several more, he realized that it was possible to do interesting things without that. The experience also put him off of competitions; when he complimented the person he beat, he was met by a retort suggesting he shouldn't have won. He feels strongly that creativity rather than competition should be the focus for juggling.

 

His eclectic experiences included learning some basic stretching and floor work with the University of Massachusetts gymnastics team when he was eighteen. Consequently he became interested in developing bodily movement, and he took the first of a number of dance classes in ballet, tap, and jazz, as well as the martial art t'ai chi and acrobatics. But he has always considered himself a juggler, not a dancer. About that time he also worked with Peter Cunneen on club swinging, which would later develop into his fire dance. He also took a few classes at a commedia dell'arte school in California.

 

After considerable experience as a street performer, he joined the Big Apple Circus for three years from 1977 when Paul Binder first formed it. "It was great. Paul really allowed me to try to do what I wanted to do," says Moschen, who also served as ring master for a year.

 

An important decision for his career was to turn down a job in Reno, Nevada, the usual track to Las Vegas, in favor of working for much lower pay with Lotte Goslar's concert performing group, Pantomime Circus. Goslar, a delightful mime/clown/dancer originally from Germany, had decades of performing experience behind her. On meeting her, Moschen thought, "This woman knows too much" to pass up the chance to work with her. Her very evident love for the work and the audience as she performed, and her use of music were to be inspirations for him, along with the chance to learn from her working methods as she choreographed a piece on him. This period gave him an entree to the dance and performance­art circuit, where favorable reviews and other connections were to lead to grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

Moschen has always been very much interested in the history of juggling. At one point, concerned about why he wasn't able to continue progressing with his work, he went to Berlin to visit the archives of the historian of juggling Karl-Heinz Ziethen. Moschen's realization of all the great jugglers who had come before was so humbling to him that he went to work as a carpenter's assistant, while continuing to rehearse after a full day's work. "That made me face my hunger to do something that meant something to myself," he recounts. He came to see that juggling could be something personal and individual, and that it is reflective in some way of its own time. In his case, he says, he reacts against "the amazing frenetic complexity that has taken over life."