In heavy rotation in my personal list of anecdotes right now is a description of Mark Faje's bowling ball trick which he performed at the public show on Saturday night during this past weekend's juggling festival.
Mark did a number of great tricks; I can't believe all the danger he packed into about 5 minutes. But the one I can't stop talking about is when he put a 13 pound bowling ball on a pedestal, stuck steak knives in the holes so that it looked like the head of a jungle savage with feathers sprouting from the top, and then threw it in the air and caught it on his face.
Somehow he managed to keep it from rotating in the air, and he matched speeds with it, and balanced it on the side of his face. This'd be an amazing trick with any solid ball, much less a skull crushing 13 pounder. The knives take it over the top into surreal.
I love the festival, I always have a great time. And I'm always amazed by how much fun it is to just hang out in a big gym with a bunch of other jugglers, in an unstructured fashion, and wander up to people and ask them how they do things. I only went to one formal workshop, and that was the only formal activity I participated in. Oh, one other thing I did this year that was new was go to the twilight fire juggling. We juggled fire in front of the UT Tower, which was pretty keen. I brought my fire devil stick as well as my torches. It turns out that all you have to do to do a show like this is pay a UT fire marshal to oversee things and make sure you aren't being a pyromaniac.
Cool! Did you come away with a new trick, or a new future trick? Or is that top-secret?
ReplyDeleteYes, I saw several club tricks I want to work on:
ReplyDelete- helicopter throws (I can almost do these now)
- kick ups
And I got some good tips for mastering back crosses....I want to be able to do a continuous pattern of double throws behind my back.