LATE NIGHT IJA - Tales of A Renegade Junkie

by Dan McDonald 

 

You see it every year, buried down in the bullet list of great things to see and do at the festival: "24 hour juggling facility." 

 

Ever wonder why? 

 

Sure, you love juggling, I love juggling, we all love juggling - but 24 hour juggling? Is that really necessary? Who on Earth would be up juggling in the wee small hours of the night? And what would they be up to at that hour? 

 

If you still don't have the answer to that question, you either haven't been to an IJA festival, or you've gone to bed way too early. Either way you've done yourself a disservice. The IJA after hours is not a sight to be missed. Club Renegade is a very fine and wild and special experience, but if you crash immediately after- wards, you're missing half the fest. 

 

It's 2:30 a.m. in Pittsburgh on a hot summer night in August. The Renegade show is over, and the better part of the crowd has made its way off to bed. Descending to the gym floor at this hour is almost like walking into another festival. During the day, the activity level in the gym is so high you don't know where to look. 

 

Nighttime is a different haunt. The gym is still lit in the same stark, even gym light. The only way to distinguish night from day, aside from gazing out the doors at the darkness, is to count the heads on the floor. The late night IJA gym is home to a special breed, and if you look closely, they'll amaze, delight and stagger you. 

 

"The Monsters" come out after dark - "Numbers Monsters," mostly. They creep in after Renegade, still chuckling to themselves, and figure, "What the heck. One more pass at eight, then I'll call it a night." An inhuman number of beanbags pile at their feet, and they start up. "One pass" isn't fooling anybody, and as "one more try" becomes another and another and another, the hours of the night slip by without notice. "One more, one more - Ooooo, that was close - one more..." 

 

There's plenty of space on the floor, plenty of room all around, and no one else's props in mid- air to distract them. The Numbers Monsters are the night's time-keepers, counting the hours a catch at a time. And if one run happens to qualify, well, maybe it's bedtime after all. Pity nobody saw it. 

 

Maybe somebody did. Who's that kid it the corner? He's new to juggling, and this is his first festival. There's no clock in the gym, and he took his watch off before lunch today so it wouldn't catch on his diabolo string. He's been overwhelmed by the array of vendors, the tight- packed workshop schedule, and the seemingly endless straws he's seen so far. Every time he got into the gym this afternoon he found himself just standing and staring at 1 the amazing feats, a little 1 embarrassed at his own modest skills. Now reeling from the Renegade experience, he wants to juggle, just a little, before bed. 

 

Maybe he'll work on that Mess trick he saw this morning. Maybe he'll pass with a friend. But either way, the crowds are gone now, and there's no one around to see him drop, so he'll give it a whirl. He might get a run, and sack out with a secret smile of contentment. Or, if he's awake enough to notice what's going on around him, he might find himself in much the same situation he was in earlier today - sitting and watching, three balls in hand, while someone else tries and tries and tries to nail that five club backcross. 

 

There's still another breed of juggler up at this hour. Nighttime is the traditional haunt of the freakish. The modern freak is bony, narrow, tattooed and pierced. He's the latest incarnation in a long line of what you might call "unique juggling individuals," from the early vaudevilleans to the tie-dyed hippies to the freak we recognize today. It's after hours, and time to howl! 

 

Shirtless and gaunt, he's trying frantic, impossible tricks, and hitting them far too often to call it luck. His props are as narrow as his frame, with skinny little Radical Fish and Renegade numbers clubs in high demand. Not showing off, not posing for the crowd, he's simply in his element - hanging out and jamming with friends. He's a little too scary looking for the newbies to watch him overtly, but from the far corners of the gym he can feel the eyes on him and knows they saw him make the catch. 

 

The Pro is up now, too. He's the juggling professional, on the road most nights, doing show after show all over the country. He's happy to have made it to the festival, and since his normal schedule has him up at this hour anyway, he might as well juggle. He's a kind of strange mix of all the other late night jugglers - part Numbers Monster chasing the big trick, part Newbie trying to juggle when nobody's around to bother or distract him, and part Freak hanging out with friends and toasting the night's accomplishments. 

 

Monsters, Newbies, Freaks and Pros scattered around the gym. The gym world has no weather, no night, no day, no clocks. There's just props and space and the endless chase, catch catch catch catch catch. As a friend from D.C. once put it, "I'm not a night person - but I'm a night juggler."

____________________________________

 

THE LAST LATE NIGHT - A Pittsburgh Eyewitness Perspective

by Dan McDonald 

 

It's a beautiful sunny afternoon. I know that tonight is going to be a tough one - the last late night of the festival. I try to grab some sleep out doors on the grass to prepare for the long haul. A light breeze is chasing big cotton ball clouds across a painfully blue sky. Try as I might, I can't sleep. It's too perfect a day to waste it. The crack of bullwhips, lined up on the crest of the hill, doesn't help any. 

 

If you stayed up for the end of that last great Renegade show in Pittsburgh, you got to see Faje finally get that microphone head catch he'd been trying all week. Now it's 4 a.m. and nobody will say die. Nobody will admit it's over. The gym, far from it's usual late night scattering, is packed to the walls. I'm amazed. At 4 a.m. this gym looks like high noon at a good-sized regional fest. There must have been 300 people, still going at it like gangbusters. 

 

Around the gym are the painful goodbyes. With the coming of the dawn, this fest is over, and people are saying farewell. One by one, the

weak admit exhaustion. The strong just grimace and pick up their drops. 

A couple of vendors are still ostensibly open for business. "Everyone else is packed up and gone," I say. "Why are you still selling?" "Pm not," comes the answer. "Pm sobering up and hanging out." The next guy I talk to is a little less sure. He chalks it up to inertia, decides the festival is in fact over, and starts packing his stock for the trip home. 

 

Weird things turn into props at that hour. An eight-foot postal mailing tube spun around with the feet. Giant beach balls. Empty chairs. As the mayhem of the week finally crests and rolls back, anything can get caught in the juggling rip tide of the festival's end. 

 

At 4:30 a.m., the combat game is still going strong. At 4:45 a.m., an impromptu Renegade recap is going on at the other end of the gym. A dozen onlookers watch an ironing board skit, complete with music and props. Bravo. 

 

People start looking for food. Talk of just staying up all night abounds, especially for those with nothing but a plane ride to anticipate in the morning. 

This is a crowd of personalities and people who watch them - and some are both. One by one, the stars of street and stage grow tired of watching each other juggle, and drift off into the night.

 

Five a.m. There are now two games of combat going on, and neither shows signs of waning. 

 

At 5:10 a.m. I decide that there's nobody left in here but zombies, and I start the long trek for the door. At last, it's one last chair balance on the chin for the road. 

Dawn is a thin blue arc just starting to warm the edge of the horizon as I warm up my dew-covered car. A familiar looking guy is standing outside the gym entrance, looking around with his bags. "Need a lift?" I asked. 

 

"Yeah," he said, "if you're going to the airport." 

 

"I can be," I answered, "hop in." 

 

He's Tim Furst, IJA member and one of the original Flying Karamazov Brothers. 

"Thanks for the ride," he says at the terminal. 

 

"Anytime," I replied. Amazing things happen late at night in the IJA. It was an FKB show that inspired me to juggle. I didn't get to tell him at 6 a.m., but I was really just returning a favor.