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Juggler's Workshop

Juggling Misconceptions and Evolution

BY MARTIN FROST

Although there are some books that explain various aspects of juggling, much information about juggling has been passed between jugglers by word of mouth. Not surprisingly, details are often lost or accidentally changed in the process. This actually makes for a sort of Darwinian evolution of juggling, creating more variations than we might have had otherwise, with the strong ones (that is, the popular ones) surviving.

Sometimes, unintentionally modified juggling ideas even get into print and thus get preserved and propagated to a wider audience without any real certainty of accuracy. One such incident formed the impetus for this article.

Hovey's Nightmare

In the Spring 1993 Juggler's Workshop, I described what I had come to think of as "Hovey's Nightmare." This was a club passing triangle involving passing from both right and left hands in the sequence: inside, inside, self, outside, outside, self. Then in September at the European Juggling Convention in Leeds, England, I met Hovey Burgess, for whom the pattern is named. I asked him about the origin of his Nightmare and found out that his original version of the pattern was actually quite different from the version described in Juggler's Workshop.

Hovey had created the pattern so that he could include the four possible passes in the triangle formation: right-inside, left-inside, right-outside, left-outside. The first trials of his pattern took place during a late night session at the Circo dell'Arte in New York City in 1970, with chalk drawings on the mats showing the pattern. Hovey recalls that dawn was breaking by the time he and his partners, Larry Pisoni and Judy Finelli, had gotten the pattern working they were finally able to get all the way through the six counts of the pattern, though not much beyond that.

For a year or so, the pattern was only done by those three jugglers, and they never got much beyond one cycle. Eventually Larry's role in the triangle was taken over by Bill Barr. He's the person who dubbed the pattern Hovey's Nightmare. The name stuck, but the pattern faded a bit.

Independent Developments

In the early 1980s, our juggling club at Stanford University got seriously involved with passing from both right and left hands. At the 1984 European Juggling Festival in Frankfurt, Barry Rosenberg told me about a new book on passing by Richard Dingman, called Patterns. As soon as I returned to California, I ordered two copies of the book, one for myself and one for my two main partners, Laura Novick and Craig Smith. The book introduced us to the "count" system for describing the frequency of passes.

One of our favorite patterns was what Dingman's book called the 3-count (in

which each person passes with both hands by doing pass-self-seIf. But I wanted to be able to do this pattern with both Laura and Craig at the same time, so I worked out exactly such a feed, which I named the 3Count Feed. The feedees still do pass-self-self, while the feeder does pass-passself (inside, inside, self, outside, outside, self).

The 3-count feed became a popular pattern at Stanford, and I taught it wherever I went. Every now and then, I would teach it to someone and he or she would say something like, "Hey, that's just like Hovey's Nightmare." Not having heard of Hovey's Nightmare, I asked what it was and got some nebulous description that it involved doing pass-pass-self with three people. At first, I thought that the Nightmare might be exactly a 3-count feed, but I finally came to realize that it involved a triangle formation rather than just a feed.

But no one who mentioned Hovey's Nightmare to me really seemed to know exactly what it was. I assumed that it was a triangle in which all three people did the same sequence, passpass-self. Over the years, I somehow became convinced that this was indeed the pattern except that the three people are out of phase, because if they are in phase (all passing at the same time), the pattern is somehow too simple (mentally and visually) to have been some one's nightmare.

So when I wrote my article on various triangle patterns last Spring, I decided to include this pattern I called Hovey's Nightmare. I didn't make a big deal about the name, since I wasn't absolutely sure that I was describing the right pattern with that name - but I did want to include my pattern and I didn't want to omit the name that it seemed to have. I even tried to find Hovey Burgess at the time to check things out, but he wasn't listed in the IJA roster and I didn't pursue it further.

Then I just happened to meet Hovey after my club passing workshop at Leeds and my nightmare surfaced - I found out that I had called the wrong pattern Hovey's Nightmare! My In 5 & 6 pattern and his have a lot in common, but they are quite distinct.

After that, in researching the real Nightmare, I decided to go back and look through the Patterns book to see if it contained a pattern called Hovey's Nightmare. Sure enough, it does, but it too doesn't describe Hovey's own version but yet another version, which is actually the mirror image of the version I described in ]uggler's Workshop.

Hovey's Original Nightmare

How is Hovey's own Nightmare different from the one I've explained before in this column? In his version, each of the three people does something different, whereas in my published version (as in Dingman's) all three people do the same thing, but out of phase. As a result, if you learn one corner in my version, you can do the other two easily (only the start is different). But for Hovey's version, you have three different roles to learn.

In both versions, whenever you pass to someone, that person is also passing to you. (There are no triangle passes in which all three people pass at once.) On each count, two people are exchanging clubs while the other person does a self. If you remember this fact and the sequence of passes for any person in the nightmare, then you can reproduce the entire pattern.