BY JOHN NATIONS AND BEN SCHOENBERG

 

Early in August, the German city of Hagen played host to the 17th annual

European Juggling Festival. Among the 2,000 or so jugglers in attendance, there were many technical masters. At least three of them brought juggling in the gym to a standstill.

 

Two Ukrainians from the Kiev Circus School presented individual styles of juggling the likes of which many people had never seen before. Victor Kiktev, 24, is a ball specialist who astonished the Hagen crowd with five ball five-high double pirouettes and nine ball cascades (kicking up from eight!). With a ball on each foot, he cascaded five, then picked up the balls on his feet, one-two, directly into a seven cascade. He even pirouetted under six balls with a seventh balanced on his forehead! He juggled hollow plastic balls partly filled with rice.

 

A recent graduate of Kiev Circus School's four-year program, Kiktev won a silver medal in this year's Cirque de Demain championship in Paris. In sharp contrast to his polished numbers juggling, Kiktev's high-energy public show performance included just three balls. He amazed the crowd nevertheless, displaying powerful gymnastics moves and hand balancing while rolling the balls along his chest, stomach, head and back. The act began with Kiktev emerging from a transparent globe and ended with a glowing sphere rising out of the globe, all to futuristic techno music.

 

Ruslan Fomenko, currently a third-year student at the Kiev Circus School, showed a hypnotically graceful style of juggling using three, four and five unusual objects called "sviaska." A sviaska (which means "bundle") is a. pair of large stage balls connected with a three-foot rope. Fomenko juggles the sviaska by gripping the rope near one of the balls, then swinging the other end upward with a flourish motion. The rope straightens in midair, thus ap­pearing rigid as the sviaska rotates. In addition to performing kickup starts, backcrosses, dive rolls and multiple spins, Fomenko also manipulates the sviaska around his back and shoulders like num­chucks. When he cascaded five in the gym, the slow-turning props barely missed the ceiling in a pattern that majestically filled the air high above him. Not bad for a "third-grader," as he refers to himself.

 

Fomenko, 18, explained that the man who invented sviaska used them mainly for swinging. As far as he knows, Fomenko is the first to juggle three, four and five sviask a in performance. For jugglers in Hagen, his performance was a unique, graceful and awesome spectacle in the public show, and his friendly, humble disposition was a fine complement to his artistic ability.

 

Another juggler who amazed conventioneers was the Swiss circus juggler Christian Elliker, or Chriselly. Not much of a show­off, Chriselly usually juggled late at night when there was more room. But for those who stayed up late, Chriselly presented long, controlled juggles of five club backcrosses, six rings while bouncing a ball on his head, and head rolls with difficult variations. While cascading five rings, he set one in a forehead balance and continued with four. In Saturday's Games, he won the five ball and club endurance contests.

 

Chriselly competed in Cirque de Demain last year and is currently performing in circuses in Zurich. He was practicing with handmade clubs that resemble those of Sergei Ignatov, but in performance he uses sticks like Rastelli's. His performance repertoire includes a combination trick of balancing a ball on a fore­head pedestal, spinning another on a mouthstick, spinning a ring on one leg and juggling five rings - all on a six foot unicycle! Chriselly, now 25, has been juggling for about 12 years. He met with a juggling teacher once a week during his early years and said he used to practice about eight hours per day.