Official rules in the" numbers game" are hard to find, by no means as well defined as, say, the rules for track and field events. How long must you juggle 'n' rings to claim to be an n-ring juggler? With large numbers, even starting and stopping become major problems as the human hands find difficulty with more than four objects. Jugglers sometimes circumvent these problems with a belt to hold props at the start and an assistant to catch them at the finish.

 

With rings, Ignatov is quite confident with 11. He includes this often in performance and finishes in elegant fashion, tossing them backward over his head to an assistant with a basket. A fellow Russian, Petrovsky, also does 11 rings, and Albert Lucas has even flashed 12.

 

With balls the numbers are somewhat less. First, balls collide much more than rings. Also, top professionals tend to concentrate on rings, realizing their greater visual impact. Enrico Rastelli, considered by many the greatest juggler of all time, is credited with juggling 10 balls.

 

On a recent trip to Europe I met Felix Adanos, a "gentleman juggler" using props such as top hats, canes and champagne bottles. Adanos, in his seventies but still doing juggling dates, was a friend of Rastelli. he said that Rastelli "played with 10 balls but really didn't do them." However, I also talked with juggling Historian Hermann Sagemuller, who is writing a biography of Rastelli. He believes Rastelli worked 10 balls well, and also mentioned Jenny Jaeger, the German prodigy, as also juggling ten small leather beanbags.

 

With clubs, the record seems to be seven by the Rumanian Mitica Virgoaga, using triple spins. His student, Jack Bremlov, later equaled this record, as have a number of others since then.

 

IJA historian Dennis Soldati gives 11 rings, 10 balls and 7 clubs as the current numbers records, and I used these in constructing my first diorama.

 

I placed three clowns against a black velvet stage, because it is excellent material for absorbing light.

I suspended their props with blackened needles, which were totally invisible from more than a few inches away. The props were half-inch beads for the balls, miniature cake-decorating bowling pins for the clubs, and curtain rings.

 

Night after night I looked at these frozen jugglers and, Pygmalion-like, wished that they and their props would come to life and actually juggle.

 

This led, finally, to a project requiring several months of work. With the help of assistant Phil Stone and members of my family, it culminated in a display of three animated clowns juggling the record numbers of props.

 

THE ILLUSION

In this miniature theater, we first hear a German folk song. The curtains open and three tiny clowns are seen, spotlighted against a dead-black background. All of the clowns are juggling in time to the music.

The left-hand clown, "Ignatov," is juggling 11 rings in a cascade pattern with the rings passing from one hand to the other. The rings glow brightly in different colors, and the little juggler's hands seem to be throwing them up while his head moves as though observing their flight.

 

In center stage, "Rastelli" juggles ten balls, five in each hand in a synchronous pattern. He later changes to an alternating, fountain pattern.

 

On the right, "Virgoaga" does a cascade of seven clubs using triple spins. The clubs are caught in a flat position, as in human juggling. At the catch, they go through a "glitch" of a small amount of reverse rotation, and then are reversed again in direction and proceed airborne to the other hand. The amount of motion on this little stage is mind­boggling. In scientific terms, the three clowns and their props appear to move with 96 degrees of freedom.

 

THE REALITY

How is all this magic wrought? With a bag of cheap scientific tricks and a fiendishly ingenious backstage mechanism. In the first place, the audience sees only what it is supposed to see - the clowns and their props. The stage is completely lined with black velvet, and the scene is illuminated by ultraviolet light, "black light." The combined effect of black light on black velvet can best be described with a phrase from an old blues tune, 'blacker than the darkest kind of night."

 

The juggling props are painted with fluorescent paint and glow brightly against the dead-black background. Each juggling clown has a tiny spotlight trained on him.

 

In Peter Pan, Mary Martin flew through the air supported by the great tensile strength of steel wire. Our three performers similarly depend upon steel. In this case, horizontal rods, projecting from slots in the backdrop of the stage, support the jugglers' props.

 

Behind the backdrop, each of the three jugglers has his own special mechanical system involving a great many sprockets, gears and cams. They all, however, use a chain drive system to move their props. The props are mounted on very thin (.021 ") steel rods which go through slots in the backdrop and, backstage, through two parallel ladder chains.

 

For the ball juggler with an even number 01 balls - five in each hand - there are two sets 01 chains, each carrying five rods and five balls. For realistic juggling, the balls and hands should describe paths partially in front of the juggler. This cannot be done with the supporting rods for right and left­hand balls parallel - the rods would have to go through the juggler's body. For this reason, the two sets of rods - those for the right hand balls and those for the left hand balls - were brought in from the sides at about 15-degree angles encom­passing the clown. Coupling these angled chain systems to the main motor drive required a pair of universal joints.

 

A friction clutch was introduced between the right and left hand drives. This allows slipping the phase of one hand relative to the other to change from synchronous to alternating variations. The juggler's hands are driven synchronously with the balls and, in fact, the same shafts that carry the lower sprockets extend out to cranks which move the hands in small circular patterns about I 1/2" in diameter.

 

The ring juggler with an odd number of rings uses a cascade pattern. This requires the rings to move from hand to hand and therefore the rods, which control the rings, to slide in and out. This is done by having the rods carry small discs which ride against slanting tracks. At the top of the track a choice must be made, to go right or left. The choice is governed by a cam which moves the discs alternately one way or the other. When the disc comes from the right, the cam forces it over to the left, and vice versa. The cam is coupled synchronously to the rest of the mechanism and operates by sliding the shaft that carries the sprockets and chains back and forth.

 

The club mechanism is still more complex, involving rotation of the clubs as well as three dimensional positioning. The mechanism is similar to that for rings but with the addition of a disc on each of the rods that carry the clubs.