REVIEWS 

Video Review

Air Jazz: A World in Motion. New Frontier Productions, 1993. Approx. 30 minutes. VHS, color. $19.95.

 

Though they now only get to­gether for rare appearances like this summer's lJA festival in Fargo, Air­Jazz delighted audiences everywhere with their witty and skilled performances for the past decade. Peter Davison,Jon Held and Kezia Tenenbaum performed in countries all over the world, and this video is a very brief collage of those experiences.

 

The tape begins with a wide variety of small snippets of recorded performances both in and outdoors.

 

We get a good sense of the breadth of their experience with different crowds and juggling circumstances, but the audio and video quality of many of these brief scenes is not good. It seems AirJazz was going for a kind of funky, rough-cut, MTV-ish quality here. There are some comedy bits in and around telephones and phone booths, taped especially for this video and used to segue from piece to piece, but I found it hard to understand many of the voice-overs.

 

There is an extended selection from their New Zealand tour. Their Maori hosts provide Airjazz with some entertainment and Air Jazz reciprocates with a lively devil stick routine that is enormously appreciated by the audience. This is followed by scenes from an unidentified performance (never identified) before an enthusiastic audience - their streamers routine; beach balls; 3-ball in group; some 2­club swinging by Kezia; diablo by Jon; Peter's 3-ball jazz-inspired routine; 3-person staff variations; and unicycles.

 

What strikes you about AirJazz is not so much their technical excellence - though they are quite precise and wonderfully smooth in their execution - but the high level of experimentation with body motion, use of space and pattern formations. I find their work highly theatrical and entertaining. The three performers match well and coordinate their different rhythms and b04y lengths in every routine.

 

The finish to the tape is a section from their performance on The Tonight Show, introduced by Johnny Carson. This is an excellent example of high-pressure performance juggling, carried out flawlessly by Air Jazz. I was puzzled though, when, at the end, the video cuts away from that particular television performance to a theatrical version of the end of the same act!

 

This is especially a tape for AirJazz fans, for those who would like a retrospective of one of the most accomplished juggling acts of the past decade. Although it is not a learning/teaching tape, viewers can glean many ideas for new acts by watching these three performers do their stuff.

by Craig Turner