The main point I want to make today is that you must understand the reason you do what you do, whether you do it on stage or on TV or locked away in a room somewhere.

One of the biggest treasures you have is that you never forget how difficult it was to learn something. The things most meaningful to me took me through entirely new directions of technique. But if you just see someone else do it and imitate them without going through the process, it's takes a severe slice out of your imagination. I don't think anyone's creative process is enhanced by taking that easiest route.

Process to me is the most sacred thing any artist can have. I consider myself an artist because I take risks, and it means more to me than life itself to plow through those risks. I believe that if you do it right, developing a technique by taking a risk and giving up a part of your life going after it, you can discover some of the bedrock of humanity. You'll know you've reached that bedrock and everyone else will know it also. You can go all over the world performing that technique and you'll be able to tell that it pulls people

out of themselves.                           ".

Consider the first piece I created, the " crystal balls. It meant the most to me of all my work because that piece was about somebody close to me who was told they were going to die. How would you feel going though that experience with someone?

Before that I had been a club passer and ball juggler. But I was dissatisfied because I wasn't saying anything to anyone. So I went away to Berlin and looked over Karl-Heinz Ziethen's archives and became so humbled and humiliated by the physical skills I lacked in comparison to these great jugglers that when

I came back and found that this close friend was dying, I secluded myself away.

I spent six years alone with every kind of ball I could find, and learned many techniques with them. I had seen a crystal ball years before and thought it was the most beautiful object because it was so fragile and pure. There I was secluded in the woods of Vermont, and I worked and worked and worked with these balls and finally something happened with the crystal ball through this experience of death close by and my humility over my own lack of technique.

So when you want to create a new technique, where should you start? The first thing I did in trying to create something new was to determine the rule I wanted to follow. The rule was more important than all the tricks I had learned before, because the only thing a creative artist has is process, and process follows rules. The rule I set up with my crystal ball was that I'd never close my hand around it. That was all. The reason I chose that rule was that I felt such a tightness closing in inside of me because someone was going to die that I had to find a way of opening up.

Closing your hand around something gives you power over it. If you choose not to close your hands around it, you leave it free and make yourself more vulnerable.

I started with the crystal ball in the palm of my open hand, and sat there for a long time. I tried to move it and dropped it a lot. Slowly I started to understand that I could move my hand underneath it and keep it in one place. It was quite a rush. As a creative artist I was giving up part of myself to be its constantly changing support, just moving around under it.

Then I set up the rule that I'd try to move my hands in various planes, and that I'd never throw the ball in the air because it cuts that connectedness between you and the object. Eventually I started rolling the ball in my hand back and forth, and from the palm to the back of the hand. The realization that I could do that was a long journey from the first moment I picked it up. And it all came from the creative artist setting the rules of never closing the hand and never throwing the ball.

If people want to be interpretive artists on someone else's creative efforts, they should at least understand that process. The process isn't a commodity, something for sale or that you buy. When you start out to make something, you don't know you're going to make anything worth crap. You're just going into a dark comer and hoping to find some light.

I'm very proprietary about those explorations that I've given up a great part of my life for. I respect others who do the same and I cringe when I see someone who has simply stolen a technique. If I were to inspire anything in other jugglers, it would be to have them live and suffer their emotions.