Letter from London

BY LLOYD TIMBERLAKE

 

Britain may have become the juggling capitol of the world.

 

Consider: London alone has five juggling equipment shops. More importantly, smaller cities all over the country also boast such shops - provincial towns like Bath, Bristol, Chichester, Reigate, Wolverhampton and Newcastle. Cities and towns where you cannot find a bagel have shops selling clubs, diabolos and unicycles.

 

And meetings. A recent listing reported more than 160 weekly juggling gatherings in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands - in the big cities and in tiny, quaint places such as Edgebaston, Selly Oak, Widness and Wirral.

 

My own local get-together happens Monday evenings inside the vast St. Pauls church in West London, where the pews are pushed back so artistes can juggle and unicycle beneath the 100-foot ceilings while a clown plays the organ. There is only one rule: no juggling near the stained glass windows!

 

Any mass movement needs its chronicle, and that would be The Catch, a quarterly, glossy magazine published from a farm cottage in the oddly named village of Chew Magna in west England. Asked if she made any money with it, its publisher, Jan Ashman, replied: "Well, no. You see, we're jugglers and..." But it is crammed with advertising from the shops and the manufacturers which have sprung up over the past few years. In fact, there are so many prop manufacturing companies that they have organized a Juggling Trade Federation to assure reasonable standards.

 

So who is doing all this juggling? Opinions vary. A top cellist in her thirties who got into the art and went to a few con­ventions before becoming disillusioned (and who doesn't want her name used) said, "It's sort of new-wave hippies. The conventions are just getting hippier and druggier every year."

 

But aren't these just relaxed, skillful students? "No, they are overly relaxed ex­students who don't even juggle very well," she replied.

 

Jan Ashman disagrees (even though her own magazine does refer to itself as being full of "irrelevant hippy/arty nonsense"). She claims the juggling wave is being ridden by everybody, including students, schoolchildren and executives. She gives a lot of the credit for the boom to a company called More Balls Than Most, which a few years ago began marketing sophisticated black boxes containing three beanbags.

 

The young 20s-year-old founders, former computer salespeople Charlie Fairburn and Adam Gardner, started their business in a street market stall. They ran clinics for over-stressed executives. They got a lot of media attention. But most important, they got their products into the national store chains, including the biggest book and stationery chain, and the grand London department store, Harrods, where their balls became the best-selling "adult toy."

 

In 1993 More Balls Than Most manufactured more than one­million beanbags using an invented-for-them "ball stuffing machine" that holds the material in place with suction while millet is inserted. They had total sales of about 1.8 million pounds sterling, opened a New York office, and expanded into France and Germany. They have also branched out into other juggling props, such as clubs and diabolos. All this activity has created in Britain an army of people - 150,000 by a recent Fairburn estimate - who said they could juggle three beanbags, wanted to learn more, meet in juggling groups, and were ready to buy clubs, rings and devil sticks.

 

The movement is actually bigger than juggling, and in fact The Catch describes itself as the magazine of "juggling, new circus and street theatre." It even covers the national unicycle hockey league.

 

Britain has nasty winters, so when summer comes the place is sea-to-sea festivity, fairs, fayres (olde world fairs), conventions, carnivals, revelries and jubilations. And these are full of jugglers, new circuses and street theatres. Britain has also been full for the past few years of demonstrations against a Conservative government's attempts to build roads through ancient woodlands. Some of these protests have turned into tented cities occupying ground for months. Street theatre, juggling and circus have been a big feature at these protests.

 

The Catch is ambivalent about the protest element of new-wave juggling. Its latest edition (number six) carried an article on "the radical possibilities of street theatre." But the contents page said firmly that "we (the publishers) do live in a parallel universe where what you can do with a few beanbags is more important than Bosnia, homelessness, racism or the results of the Tranmere Rovers versus the Hamilton Academicals."

 

(The magazine does, however, go beyond beanbags into some of the burning issues of juggling. A recent letters page dealt with queries on how partners can best steal from one another when doing "oral juggling" with ping pong balls and whether acrylic balls left in direct sunlight can start fires. One juggler wrote that he was hit in the neck by a devil stick at a convention so hard that his neck bled, and now he cannot see himself in the mirror.)

 

Of course, this tiny isle is too small to contain all this energy, and The Catch claims that Brits now make up most of the street performers "met at fes­tivals and in dodgy bars all around Europe." And because most of Europe at least under­stands English, those Brits who need to can use jokes and patter in their acts to make up for a lack of skill that would not get them through a silent act.