Old Tricks for a New Act

Adding Drama and Panache to Your Juggling Skits

 

By Matthew Power

 

Of the many jugglers I have met, most are what I caIl "closet exhibitionists." They are part of the large population of amateur fruit tossers who lack either the courage or the motivation to display their talents to an audience.

 

Alas, the only things I can juggle are overdue student loans. My business is professional theatre. I achieve through directing and performing plays what jugglers do for an audience with their props.

 

Most of my juggling cronies believe throwing diverse objects up and down in the air is the finest creative outlet since crayons. Most also label themselves as the purists of their hobby, defining juggling as a form of self-therapy. When asked to enlighten the rest of us with a demonstration of their prowess, they vanish behind a mumble of excuses about "prostituting the craft," and avoid any sort of public display. For safety, they cling together in small groups of sympathetic peers, where the emphasis is on the trick, and not on the dramatic value of the performance.

 

Last month, the Karamazov Brothers awakened me to what I call "dramatic juggling," combining club tossing with good theatre to create a dynamic show, complete with suspense, surprise, and even a hint of plot. And they made it look easy.

 

But it's not. Filling the dramatic bellies of today' s television spoiled public calls for something more than mere trickery. I realized the principles applied by the Karamazovs are basic to all forms of live performance. By fleshing out their juggling with plot and character, they take the audience on a roller coaster ride that ascends ever higher until the final "big drop," when they leave the stage. Their finale always comes too soon and leaves us with dazzling images of whirling clubs, raucous humor, and above all, vivid and memorable characters.            .

 

The amazing truth is that the Karamazovs spend more time defining character and building suspense than they do juggling! Therein lies the key.

 

The day after the show I put my own wheels in motion. I was determined to find out if I could use some of the Karamazov's good ideas to put together a juggling act of my own and a formula to help bring my talented friends out of their shells.

 

Using two of my close friends as juggling guinea pigs, I wrote and directed a short skit around a series of six fairly standard juggling tricks of increasing difficulty. I purposely kept the tricks simple to test my theory. If the system worked, the audience would applaud the final trick regardless of its nature and form.

 

There was no slapping of bottoms, tweaking of noses, or beeping of bicycle horns in this act, but from beginning to end the crowd ROARED! This may sound a

little self-inflating, but the real success of the act was more the product of a few practically applied dramatic rules than any personal brainstorm. The two jugglers (one of whom is my wife) had no mime training, a limited bag of tricks, and their acting bordered on melodrama. Yet, after five minutes they had a tough audience of 300 doing flips in the aisles. The secret formula is anything but a secret.

 

Theatrical directors and actors live by their own brand of technique, and in the paragraphs below, I've tried to synthesize that know-how into simple juggling terms.

 

This guide is geared toward two-person acts, but the principles will work for larger shows as well. Just follow these basic guidelines and you should be able to write and perform a winning show in record time, filling in the blanks with your own unique style of improvisational silliness.