46-4,p32

Juggler's Workshop

Passing Lots 0' Clubs

BY MARTIN FROST

In this issue I'm going to describe a couple of passing patterns for you to warm

up with and then some more complex ideas that you can sink your teeth into (but hopefully not the other way around).

Fast-Fast

The Fast-Fast is my extension on the Slow-Fast pattern (described in the Summer 1992 Juggler's Workshop). In the normal Slow-Fast, two jugglers pass six clubs, but one juggler passes to both hands while the other passes from both hands. The "fast" person passes right handed alternately to the "slow" person's two hands; the slow person does no selves but passes from alternate hands (generally from whichever hand a club is coming to) back to the fast person's left (see Fig. 1). The fast person can start with four of the six clubs, to make the start easy.

The Fast-Fast version is the same except that the slow juggler adds one self before each pass. The fast juggler doesn't change but continues to feed the slow juggler's two hands. The "slow" juggler now has to hurry (making this the FastFast pattern) in order to do:

right-self, left-pass, left-self, right-pass. The self is always done from the hand that a pass is coming to.

This can be extended further by having the so-called slow juggler add a second

self before each pass to do a very fast 3count. The fast juggler continues to feed the slow juggler's two hands but in fact will undoubtedly have to slow down to give the slow juggler enough time. The slow juggler has become the faster juggler.

If the fast juggler now adds a second self before each pass, the pair can easily switch into a normal 3-count. Also, notice that in the basic Fast-Fast above, with the slow juggler doing one self before each pass, the slow juggler is doing a version of RightRight-Left-Left (described in the same Summer 1992 article). So you can see how all these seemingly disparate patterns are really closely related.

1-Count Site Swaps

Few people who have learned the 6club 1-count realize that doubles and triples and combinations thereof can be added to this "ultimates" pattern. We've been doing such throws for many years but a recent discovery by Simon Bostrom and Brendan Brolly in England has made it easy to construct a certain class of site swaps for the 1-count.

My old basic rule was: If you throw a diagonal double, you've put four clubs on one side of the pattern, so you have to move one back to the other side pretty soon. This is easily done with either a self or another double from the other hand. Thus you can throw, starting from either hand: double, self; or double, double, pause; or double, double, double, hand-across; or double, double, double, double, pause.

These are late doubles, so the receiver has a pause before the first double comes in. The trick for the receiver is: Don't throw a club back from a hand that doesn't get a pass.

The discovery is that you can look at a 6-club 1-count from the point of view of one of the jugglers as just a 4-club solo pattern (with gravity working at a weird angle). You just pretend that the other juggler isn't really there and that the club you get back after a throw is the same club you threw. It isn't really the same one - your partner has exchanged clubs with you but for this analysis, we pretend that it is. That means you're juggling two clubs in each hand.

Next we just apply 4-object site swap theory to come up with some 6-club 1count site swaps. (Those of you not familiar with site swap notation might want to read the Summer 1991 Juggler's World article by Bruce (Boppo) Tiemann and Bengt Magnusson: "A Notation for Juggling Tricks. A LOT of Juggling Tricks.")

Fig. 2 shows the 4-object site swap notation we'll use for the 6-club 1-count. Each number represents one hand's action on a given count. A sequence of such numbers represents alternate right and left hands of one person. For instance, 45623 means a R single pass, a L double diagonal pass, a R triple pass, a L pause, and a R self. A sequence can be repeated over and over or it can be done just once before going back into the basic pattern (the 1-count here) or some other sequence.

The normal 1-count is notated just 4, since all throws are 4's. The patterns I mentioned above, with doubles and either matching doubles or selves to get three clubs back on each side, are notated: 53, 552, 5551,55550 (do you notice a pattern?).