Rhys's juggling technique matches his verbal virtuosity - he juggles and even multiplexes five clubs, cascades seven balls, and performs an impressive array of unusual five-ball site-swaps and multiplexes in his routine of "classical ballet."

 

Although not jugglers themselves, creativity runs in Rhys's family, and he found strong support there for his creative impulses. His father is a designer, sculptor, graphic artist, musician and fire chief. His mother is a baker, soft sculptor, tie-dye artist, musician and teacher. His sisters are visual artists.

 

In high school, Rhys recounts, "I learned to juggle to impress a girl; later, I lost the girl and juggled to forget." Crow, Oregon, Rhys's hometown, nestled in the rural Willamette Valley, is, in Rhys's words, "a tiny town in the middle of nowhere." Not especially interested in organized sports as a kid, and unable to watch much TV because of the poor reception, Rhys took to juggling naturally.

 

Performing opportunities arose, among other places, at the Oregon Country Fair, where his family has had a booth for years. The Oregon Country Fair, an annual three­day event in mid-July, evolved out of a sleepy renaissance fair over 20 years ago. Animated by a spirit of community and fantasy, the fair still retains its counter-culture / alternative spirit despite its dramatic growth. Rhys's early exposure at the fair to such performers as Avner the Eccentric, the Karamazovs (who would juggle torches naked on stage), and the Laughing Moon Theatre (who would bring an entire Italian meal out of a hat) sparked his interest in performing.

 

He put together a show and began performing at the fair himself.

Of the jugglers he saw in his formative years, Roberto Morganti (who won the 3­ball competition at the 1978 IJA convention in Eugene, Oregon) taught him the most. More inspirational, however, were stories of his friend David Lichtenstein's juggling exploits in San Francisco and in Europe. Rhys recalls, "I'd think to myself, 'I'm in high school doing homework, and David's juggling on the streets of Paris... That's the life!' When I'd see his show I'd think, 'This is great. This is me.'''

 

So in college, at the University of Oregon, he met up a couple of other jugglers, Tim Miller and Ken Glenn, and they put together an act with a lot of singing, vaudeville and juggling in a group called Out to Lunch. "My favorite bit," Rhys recounts, "was sitting on each other's shoulders, three high, juggling, singing three­part harmony, and doing totem pole impressions. Very Northwest. Later we broke up, and I became 'Up For Grabs.'"

 

Rhys was bitten by the performance bug. After acquiring a journalism degree and a secondary education teaching certificate at the University of Oregon and doing a stint as a junior high school English teacher, Rhys answered his true calling as a performer-and lifelong student of the circus arts. Now he does professionally what he used to do for fun between classes.

 

Rhys's bread and butter show is an all­ages, "acrobatic comedy juggling tour-de­farce." Typical venues include corporate events, school programs, fairs and festivals in Oregon, Washington and Alaska. He adapts his basic show for specific audiences. For instance, he juggles inflated 50­gallon garbage bags in a recycling show at schools. In a show for the Oregon State Fire Board he performed a fire eating routine. At the International Congress of Neurological Surgeons he slipped in jokes about split-brain activity while spinning balls and rings on different limbs and fingers. At the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, he performs his "Science Circus" routine, which uses juggling as a vehicle to teach basic physics. He makes balloon animals out of condoms in his "safe juggling" routine at comedy clubs.

 

Other noteworthy shows include a live broadcast from AT&T Bell Laboratories. Along with ex-Karamozov Tim Furst and mathematician Ronald Graham, Rhys taught Nobel Laureate Arno Penzias the physics of ball spinning and the mathematical principles of site-swaps before a world­wide television audience. For the occasion of the Washington State centennial, Rhys received an arts grant in 1989 to research and present three genres of performance popular in 1889 (vaudeville, medicine show, and wild west). More recently, Rhys won the "Most Inspirational" award at the 1994 Portland Juggling Festival.

 

JW: How do you come up with new material?

RT: I glean ideas and inspiration from my collection of around 150 books on world circus history and miscellaneous object manipulation techniques, as well as from old diabolo postcards, freak show souvenirs, posters, old props, and so on. From these ideas I improvise. I've got stacks of 3 by 5 cards of ideas, and I use the smallest amount of them. The biggest drag about being a performer for a living is that you have to keep your commercial material ready and stay rehearsed. That takes a portion of your time. You have to sell your show, and that takes a portion of your time. You've got to relax now and then, and you have to actually be out there performing. When do you have the time to do the R&D? What it really takes is discipline, and I don't have quite enough of that. Maria, my bride and partner, has been a terrific influence. She keeps me working, praises me when I do well, reminds me to take my props, gives constructive criticism, and she's a helluva juggler!

 

JW: Do you also have a collection of circus / vaudeville videos?

RT: Yes, but I never watch them. Some of them I've never even seen once. There are two reasons: the time involved, and, well, it's like what I used to say in the journalism school, "I don't read any newspapers; I'm afraid they'd influence my style!" (That never went over very well with the teachers.) I'd rather see a still of a trick and take that as my goal, but reinvent all that leads up to that image.

 

JW: This relates to growing up relatively isolated in Crow, Oregon, and how that helped you develop an individual style. While many jugglers were stealing from each other's shows, you were collecting juggling ephemera at junk shops. What other kinds of historical juggling do you do?

RT: The kitchenary stuff is all based on old photos. For instance, pulling the table cloth from beneath spinning bowls. My malt cup routine uses real malt cups because, although I had read about shaker cup routines, the Goodwill only carried malt cups. And lately, there's what Neil Stammer calls "monkey tricks"-spinning a ring around one ankle, for example, while balancing a spinning ball on your finger, while spinning a ring on that arm, and juggling two balls with the other hand. It's no Brunn finish, but old photos of such combination tricks inspire me greatly. Monkey tricks interest me, and I'd like to get better at it, because when you do that sort of body isolation you've got to think on many planes at once. It's neat because as you're learning it, each movement requires conscious thought, but when you get it, you go into a kind of "peripheral" state where each motion is peripheral and nothing takes your full mental focus.