REVIEWS

BOOKS

reviewed by Bill Giduz

 

Enrico Rastelli and The World's Greatest Jugglers. By Karl-Heinz Ziethen. 1996. ISBN 3-9801140-9-0.144 pages, hard cover. $22 from Brian Dube, Todd Smith and other vendors.

 

Karl-Heinz Ziethen, dean of the world's juggling archivists, has given the art a gift with this elegant little book. In its 144 pages he presents readers with profiles of three of the finest jugglers ever. He puts Enrico Rastelli on the pedestal above all, supported by Francis Brunn, Sergei Ignatov and Anthony Gatto.

 

The book reads quickly and the layout is superb. Its format is unusual- 6-1/2 inches wide by 7-1/2 inches tall. But skilled designers have used this almost square size to attractive advantage. The text is presented side-by-side in two columns, one in German and the other in a slightly different color in English.

 

The pages are lushly and generously illustrated with duotone photographs of the artists in all aspects of their lives. We see some wonderful candid moments - Francis Brunn juggling fruit in a Berlin market, Ignatov in practice with his teacher, Violetta Kiss, Rastelli and his wife washing their props in a pail, and the child prodigy Gatto innocently and simply balancing a spoon on his nose. Some of the pictures will be familiar to collectors of juggling literature, while others are printed for the first time after having been mined from the Ziethen's seemingly limitless collection.

 

The English translation is elegant and engaging as a work of literature. A very short introduction traces the history of the art into the 20th century, and introduces Rastelli as the performer who modernized it by forsaking the wide variety of props common in his day for the shapes of our world - balls, sticks and plates. The material for the sections on Rastelli and Brunn are rich and detailed to the point of definitive biography. There is ample description of Rastelli's tricks, his performing philosophy, the timeline of his career and the context of his act in his era. Ziethen's attention to detail gives the reader a sense of the centrality of variety art in public life in that era that is impossible to imagine today. He writes, "On the day of Rastelli's burial, flags flew at half-mast above every venue that employed performing artists. Evening performances opened with funereal music. Audiences observed a minute's silence before the show went on."

 

Likewise, the details of Brunn's remarkable and continuing 55-year career are thorough and fascinating, from his early skill as a diver like his father to his nick-of time reprieve from German army service (and likely death) at Stalingrad, to his warm relationship with sister, Lottie. The reader learns about the stylistic changes in his act over the years, the famous personalities with whom he has performed, and the intense self-motivation that continues to direct this "last great personality from the heyday of variety."          .

 

But the sections on Ignatov and Gatto are much sparser. The book devotes 54 pages to Rastelli and 43 to Brunn, but just 15 to Ignatov and 14 to Gatto. Perhaps that's because the life stories of the more modern artistes haven't been so thoroughly recorded as those of Rastelli and Brunn, who performed in an age when the public worshipped variety performers with the fervor reserved today for sports stars, and journalists accordingly interviewed them extensively and repeatedly.

 

Physically, the book is a collector's item. It is printed in hard cover, a rare treat these days, and presents an attractive full-color post card illustration of Rastelli in one of his most famous poses - on his back spinning a flaming star on his toe while juggling three torches upside down. It was printed in association with last summer's Rastelli Variety Festival in Berlin.