Winning Routine Frees Kennedy To Return to the Obscurity of his Workshop

by Bill Giduz

 

Consider Greg Kennedy as a scientist tinkering in his juggling laboratory. He spends almost all of his free time in the garage workshop of his Garfield, N.J., home building and playing with "things." Pieces of PVC pipe lie here, slabs of granite there, some

cloth is stretched over a frame in the corner. A video camera is near at hand on the workbench, as is a notebook full of oft-erased penciled equations and sketches.

 

This flotsam and jetsam represents the creative output of the IJA's 1996 Individual Champion, a man who decided long ago he would rather juggle with his mind than his body.

 

Search as you might, however, one very obvious thing is missing. Nowhere in the workshop will you find the prop that he used in winning the IJA's top honor! He stored that three-foot diameter hemispherically-shaped piece of clear plastic in his parents basement as soon as he returned from Rapid City, and took a deep sigh of relief in doing so. By putting it away, the 25-year-old Kennedy freed himself from the shackles of nonparametric equations and relentless practice required to master the prop no juggler before him had ever conceived. Now he can move on to explore the other ideas that seem to regularly result from his visits to the hardware store.

 

In a sense, it was not Kennedy himself, but the new form of manipulation that won the championship. He, as the manipulator of balls rolled around the hemisphere, was diminished by black clothing, dyed black hair, downturned head and no body movement. The white silicone balls, first one, then two, three, and up to eight, were highlighted by a large angled mirror over Kennedy's head that allowed much of the audience to watch as complex patterns of their rise and fall develop in the curved space.

 

Demonstrating patterns he developed on paper with site-swap notation and the geometry of parabolas, he created art by catching balls, redirecting them and adding to their momentum after they completed different numbers of arcs in the bowl. As the pioneer of this new form of juggling, Kennedy had to sweat through it all from scratch. He spent weeks figuring out patterns that he can now teach others in mere minutes. "Development in the beginning was very slow because I didn't understand the properties of the bow!," he said. "Once I figured it out, things went quickly and I was creating new patterns every couple of days toward the end."

 

Bur apparently it's exactly that creative process that drives him, rather than the accomplishment of teaching his body to do something he has seen someone else do. Now that he feels he has exhausted the possibilities of the bowl and enjoyed the satisfaction of demonstrating it publicly twice (once in Rapid City and once at the Continental Congress of Jugglers in June), he's back in the workshop exploring other ideas.

 

"Everything is a puzzle to me," he said. "Typically what I do first is play with an object for large amounts of time, then document everything that works, then analyze why, then create a system or description of it so that other combinations can be created mathematically, then salvage about half of what I've been doing and put it together into a routine."

Right now he's puzzling over how to turn two slabs of perpendicular granite sitting at an angle edgewise on the ground into a four ball routine named "Orthogonal." If I throw a ball from my right hand straight down, it'll hit one slab, then the other, and come straight back to other hand," he explained. "That's the base pattern, then I add English and differently angled throws to create variation."

 

Other pieces in development include "Columns," which involves three three-foot lengths of PVC tube, and "Cradles," in which a ball is manipulated "like a kendama without a string" around frameworks of cloth, wood and steel.

 

The idea for "Hemisphere" originated in 1991 as a two-person act when he and a friend, Mike LeRoy, fooled around and found that they could keep balls rolling inside a large mixing bowl. It lay dormant, though, until last fall when Kennedy found the oversized bowl he was looking for at a plastic shop in New York City. "I have no idea what it was intended for," he said. "The only place I've ever seen anything like it was in a McDonald's play land! "

 

At that point Kennedy was figuring out what he could do in the bowl by himself. He noted that rolling balls in the hemisphere presents an entirely different set of challenges than in regular toss juggling. "The big problem is collisions," he said. "In toss juggling if you make a mistake you have a chance to catch and correct, whereas in the hemisphere it's impossible to correct from a collision."

 

For instance, he pointed out that the standard five ball pattern in the air involves balls crossing only one time, whereas they cross each other three times in the hemisphere, raising the chance of error. On the other hand, cascading five balls in the air requires arm strength, while cascading in the bowl requires almost no strength but a lot of touch.

 

Though he only moved his hands and arms in "Hemisphere," he is keenly aware of the role movement plays in enhancing manipulations. His movements were dramatic and calculated m a diabolo routine he performed at Club Renegade in Rapid City, and he is developing other routines with movement in mind. "In a routine the entire person is viewed, not just the prop, so dance is very important," he said.

 

He credits his girlfriend, Shana Miller, for a lot of help in the development of character and movement in his routines and for lending a constant flow of support.

 

He has attended IJA festivals since Baltimore in 1989, but Rapid City was his first competition. He entered not to win, but because it was the best forum to premier "Hemisphere" to a broad spectrum of the juggling community. "I didn't want to go through the politicking it takes to get into the public show," he explained. "The easiest way to do it seems to be to enter the competitions, where you can show anything. Winning didn't change my life dramatically, but it has given me more confidence in working on new things. I love creating new material, but am unsure of how people will react to it. It felt good to know that my peers appreciated it."

 

His juggling career began as a student at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He

attended meetings of the Philadelphia club, and was soon doing high numbers. He now regularly attends meetings of the Carmine Street Jugglers in New York City, as well as the Morris Plains club in New Jersey.

 

Though Kennedy occasionally performs a standard technical juggling act at Foxwood casino in Connecticut, it's not how he wants to express his art. He would like to find an establishment that would permit him to do his more creative work, rather than what most members of the public expect from jugglers, and might consider going professional if that happened. In the meantime, he holds down a day job as a geotechnical engineer in New York City.

 

It pays the bills, but doesn't excite him nearly as much as the development of his

manipulations. "I spend probably 80% of my free time juggling - doing it, documenting it or writing it," he said. "It's really a scary one­sided life that may not be healthy from the psychological point of view... but I'm happy with it!"