by Don Lewis

 

For some of us, the Montreal Festival last spring started a week early. The Ecole du Cirque presented its students a week-long intensive juggling course, with Michael Menes as the invited instructor. School budgets are limited these days, so to spread the costs Serge Trempe arranged for a night course at the school for members of Les Jongleurs Associes du Quebec. About 10 of us paid up and had a great time learning new tricks and ways of presenting them.

 

On Thursday night, a camera person from NewsWatch, the local CBC news program, came and filmed us in action. I must say that at first I found it a bit distracting to have a camera wandering around. The best angles seemed to involve a shoulder-mounted camera about a foot beyond my pattern, but I managed not to wallop the lens with my chops! They aired about a minute of us juggling on the Friday evening News and - bless the editor ­she'd edited out all my drops!

 

The festival started Friday night. But an un-seasonal snow storm dumped 15cm of unwelcome wet snow on the city Friday morning, backing up traffic everywhere

throughout the day. My challenge was to find a path through the afternoon rush hour from the McAuslan Brewery to the gym with 20 cases of freshly bottled beer in the car. What is normally a 15 minute excursion took more than an hour. At least the beer was getting cold by the time I got there! But lots of people made their way to the gym through the snow, including Michael Menes, so we opened up the last evening of his workshop to anyone who wanted to participate, and lots did.

 

Around 10 p.m., we moved to a smaller gym in the building for the Vertigleries (renegade show). This gym has the advantage of a built-in bar with a large fridge. The disadvantage, from my point of view, was that I couldn't see over the crowd while tending bar. I know Dr. Stardust did something because his yellow tether balls appeared above the crowd. And I saw Patrick Villeneuve's devil sticks floating upward. There was regular applause and laughter, so it must have been a good show!

 

Saturday was much better weather-wise. It started to get crowded in the gym, but not unpleasantly so. Workshops were scheduled each hour, usually two at once for variety, with repeats as needed. A shuttle ran between the theater and the gym during the day so that performers in the public show could escape from rehearsal long enough to give a workshop in their specialty.

 

Last year the show was in a cabaret theater, preceded by a buffet. But the stage, lighting, and ceiling were suited to intimate musical acts, not jugglers. So this year we moved to the theater in the National Library and gave up the buffet dinner.

 

The show's emcee was Daniel Le Bateleur, who appeared at the back of the theater with a white cane being led up the aisle to the stage, and proceeded to do a few cane tricks.

 

Benoit Auger and Denis St. Onge (Les Bobs) did a dual diabolo routine. To start, the diabolos were worn as bow ties apparently linked to each other's hats, moving up and down as they moved the hats. Then they moved into exchanging diabolos on the fly.

 

Emile Carey wandered on stage with a music stand and a violin case, astonished to discover an audience. He was further surprised to find his violin had been replaced in the case by white balls. At one point in the show he juggled five balls and stopped, apparently confused. He went to the music stand, turned the sheet music upside down, and proceeded to bounce juggle the five balls! A year at the Ecole du Cirque has certainly developed his presentation skills.

 

Dr. Stardust & Professor Poly-Mer performed a very intricate balance of juggling objects. I thought it was astonishing that he got all those bits together, and balanced, and then was able to take it all apart again without losing the balance!

 

Christian Harel did a great job of directing the show. He also performed a marvelously choreographed club routine. Just to prove that Murphy never rests, his music died almost instantly. He stopped, casually asked the sound tech to try again, and carried on as if it had all been part of the act. The recovery was so smooth that I suspected that it was planned, but he claimed it wasn't.

 

Patrick Leonard performed a most vigorous diabolo routine. Then, because it was an audience of jugglers, he followed with a short piece that really pushed the limits. I think it fair to say that he was in motion at least as much as the diabolo! I hadn't realized that one could do back rolls, flips, and somersaults and keep a diabolo on the string.

 

Matthew Ledding did a club routine while Dirk Van Boxeleare played at being a stage hand, taking clubs out of Matthew's pattern and generally being a nuisance. Matthew did a wonderful job of being "harassed" and grabbing his clubs back in time to save the pattern.

 

Later, Dirk did a simulated street show on stage with the other performers as his crowd. The climax was him doing a backflip off the top of a free standing ladder. His "crowd" dashed out of the way and rather neatly avoided his outstretched hat. I think I'll.leave that kind of exercise to the younger crowd!

 

Later again, Dirk did a club routine which included a lot of traps and high throws. I can't begin to describe the timing of his throws, but I was quite mesmerized by the end of this set.

 

Michael Menes unfolded a waist-high screen across the stage and mimed descending stairs, falling in a hole, rotating, etc. He then set a series of folding mirrors on a table and proceeded to roll balls up, down, and around the surface. Light reflected off the surface so we could see the result on a screen behind him.

 

Then there was Tousrisk: Pierre-Luc Dube, Vincent Dube, Jean-Phillipe Jobin and Benoit Lemay. These guys do a "gangster" act complete with cheap suits and attitude. At one point a person was riding a 12-foot unicycle which he mounted by climbing up a two­person shoulder stand. Another unicycle bore two more jugglers, leaving one person on the ground. Once they got all this set up, they started passing clubs! The fellow on the top of the shoulders of the shorter unicyclist passed with the guy on the longer uni, while the one on the ground passed with the supporting unicyclist. Then they moved through an assortment of diagonal patterns. These guys should enter the IJA teams championships!

 

That was it for the 1997 edition of the Montreal Juggling Festival. The 1998 edition will be about the same time next year, so clear your calendar for April and stay tuned for details in Jugglers World and on the JIS!