Last week I popped by the Portland Juggling Festival’s public show. The show was a mix of different levels of performing experience, and lots of styles. Like a magic convention there are a lot of acts that were really arty and not really real world acts. They’re acts that I can’t imagine building a show out of, but could work in a variety show. Then there were the working acts, and you could really tell the difference between them and the acts that aren’t out there performing all the time. It’s a tightness in the show that I notice.
The headliner of the show was Jay Gilligan. He did an amazing act that solved what I think is one of the problems with a juggling act. That problem is that most juggling patterns really look the same to someone who doesn’t know juggling. Jay basically juggled 3 balls (he did more than that), but did them in very novel ways there were very different looking, even when it was just a basic 3 ball cascade.
His closer was juggling three balls in a cascade slowly and it was amazing! I don’t want to ruin the ending for you. It an amazing ending!
What Jay did was take something very standard and figure out a way to make it look very different. How can you do that with magic? They guy who invented the sponge bunnies did it when he turned balls into bunnies. Jonathan Burns did it with his cheese card trick. There’s a lot of room out there to reimagine standard magic. Go and do it!
-Louie