Juggler's Workshop

 

by Martin Frost

 

In the last couple of issues we've talked about some basic patterns and throws in club passing, so this time we're going to delve into some more exotic ideas. Some of these are not too difficult to put into practice, while oth­ers may require highly experienced jugglers.

 

The Slow-Fast Pattern

An uncommon pattern, though not a very hard one, is the Slow-Fast. The name comes from the fact that one of the two passers is jug­gling very slowly while the other juggles fast, in fact at twice the slow person's speed. How is that possible? Don't they have to make equal numbers of passes, lest one person end up with all the clubs? Yes, they do, but they don't have to have equal numbers of selves.

 

The slow juggler passes from both the right and left hands to the partner's left hand, whereas the fast juggler passes to both hands from the right. The slow juggler has no selves, only passes. The fast juggler has as many selves as passes and thus makes twice as many throws as the slow juggler. Fig. 1 shows all the throws. Basically, the fast jug­gler feeds the slow juggler's two hands, and the slow juggler responds to any club com­ing to a hand by passing from that hand to the fast juggler's left hand.

 

The easiest way to start this pattern is for the slow person to have one club in each hand and the fast person to have two in each hand. The fast person immediately starts feeding the slow person's two hands, and the slow person just responds as necessary. (It's only slightly more difficult to start with each person having three clubs.)

 

The slow juggler should throw from in front of the body a bit when making the left-handed diagonal passes. The fast juggler has to pass a right diagonal behind that left-hand diagonal.

 

Now consider the following two interesting variations, which can be done separately or together. First, the fast person can feed the slow person's two hands at random. The slow person simply responds with the hand that a club comes to, without trying to predict which side it will be on.

 

Secondly, the slow person can catch any incoming club with either hand. That is to say, instead of catching a club with the hand it is coming to, you can catch it with the other hand by reaching across your body. Of course, in doing so, you have to pass the club that was in the hand that is reaching across. The main trick here is to allow for that hand's momentum when making that pass, so that it goes to your partner's left side, not way outside nor way inside.

 

The interesting thing is that if the fast per­son suddenly throws to the "wrong" hand, the slow person may automatically react by reach­ing across the body and catcl~ng with the "cor­rect" hand anyway. This is a good way to learn the reaching-across catch. Once that catch is mastered, both jugglers can have fun playing around with these two random moves.

 

The Slow-Fast pattern can also be used in a drop back line with three or more people. The front person takes the slow role, and the rear person feeds the front person's two hands with doubles: right-to-Ieft, right-to­right. The middle person(s) just throw nor­mal dropbacks. If the rear person feeds the front person with triples, there's enough time to add an extra club (the rear person can

start with four).

 

Alan's Anguish

Once you've got the Slow-Fast pattern under your belt, you might like to try the following three-person-variation. This is called Alan's Anguish for Alan Morgan, who suggested this pattern recently at Stanford University.

 

The basic idea is to take the selves of the fast person in a Slow-Fast and turn them into passes to a second slow person. The fast person thus throws no selves but feeds two slow feedees: the right hand feeds the two hands of the right feedee and the left hand feeds the two hands of the left feedee (from the feeder's per­spective). Since slow folks never have selves, this leaves us with a three-person Slow-Fast with no self throws anywhere.

 

The fast juggler-the feeder-simply makes the following four passes repeatedly in this sequence, shown in Fig. 2:

 

(1) right hand to right feedee's left, (2) left hand to left feedee's left, (3) right hand to right feedee's right, and (4) left hand to left feedee's right.

 

Each feedee simply responds with a pass from any hand that gets thrown a club. The left feedee passes only to the feeder's right hand, and the right feedee passes only to the feeder's left hand (see Fig. 3). These passes cross in front of the feeder, and therein lies the danger point of this pattern-a collision caused by uneven timing of those two crossing throws can result in two clubs crashing toward the feeder's face. So be careful and alert.

 

The above description is really pretty simple (not to imply that the pattern is), but we haven't discussed the start. Each person has three clubs, with two in the right hand. The first pass goes from the right feedee's right to the feeder's left, followed quickly by the feeder's pass from the right to the right feedee's left (pass number 1 in the feeder's se­quence listed above). Just barely after that, the left feedee passes from the right to the feeder's right, and the feeder responds quickly with a left to the left feedee's left (pass 2 in the list). The feedees continue by passing when necessary to catch a club and the feeder continues with passes ...3,4,1,2,3,4... from the sequence listed. Note that each person always responds to a received club by throwing back to the person the club came from, but to the hand that didn't throw that club.