An outline of the most common forms of juggling act on today’s stages.

Classic Forms

Comedy Juggling
Generally the juggling skill takes a back seat to the comedy. A comedy juggler will tell lots of jokes, do lots of clowning around, use lots of audience participation, etc. Finally the performer will get around to juggling, usually with something “dangerous” like knives or fire torches, normally balanced on something high or unstable. For every minute of juggling there are ten minutes of banter, meaning not much juggling skill is needed for thirty minute or hour-long shows. Comedy juggling is good for street acts, cruise ship shows, corporate entertainment, theme parks, etc. Beware of “comedy” costumes and “comedy” props. Examples: Raspyni Brothers, Haggis and Charlie, Ben Cornish.

Traditional Circus / Vegas Style
This is all pure skill. Get on stage and blow people away with your amazing juggling ability. Nothing subtle, just “Look at me, I’m fantastic, you will never be able to do this in a million years”. Jugglers will typically stick to a predictable sequence of progressively harder tricks with a progressively higher number of props. First balls, then rings, then clubs, nothing but technical juggling except for the climax of the act, one or two feats of numbers juggling. Usually an act will last between five and ten minutes or until the juggler runs out of tricks to perform. Examples: Anthony Gatto, Sergei Ignatov.

The Gentleman Juggler
In the 19th century jugglers would dress in Indian or Oriental styles of clothing and present their juggling skills as something magical or mystical. Then the trend swung to dressing up in the fashions of the day and juggling everyday objects such as hats, canes, cigars, coats, cigar boxes, spoons, knives, plates, cups, trays, flower vases, chairs, tables and anything else they could find. The audience could connect with the jugglers in a way they could never connect to a man in a turban. Fast-forward to the present day and jugglers are still wearing 19th century fashions and juggling with 19th century objects. One of the finest gentleman jugglers performing today is Kris Kremo.

Modern Forms (avant-garde)

During the last quarter of the 20th century, many jugglers saw a way to use their skills as a form of artistic expression. They put aside the goals of popular entertainment for the masses, and instead sought out new ideals, something more than just juggling.

Modern juggling begins again from first principles, abandoning traditional definitions and systems of creating new work. This dismissal of tradition also involves the rejection of conventional expectations, stressing freedom of expression and experimentation. Modern juggling often startles and alienates audiences unused to the bizarre and unpredictable.

Even so, the avant-garde approach has been very influential to the rest of the juggling world. Many performers working in traditional venues such as variety and circuses now mix modern juggling ideas into their acts.

While traditional juggling performers consider themselves entertainers, modern juggling performers will consider themselves artists. But just because a performer is artistic, it doesn’t mean they are particularly lacking in juggling skill. Many modern forms require a whole new set of skills to be learnt for each new act.

Here are some of the philosophies behind Modern juggling performances:

Concept
The traditional concept of juggling is “I will not drop”. Replacing or adding to that concept can create whole new and different styles of juggling. A good example is Michael Moschen saying “I will not throw” and almost single handedly inventing contact juggling. In purely conceptual pieces, the performance itself is secondary to the idea, and could be left as a set of instructions that any other juggler could follow and perform. A conceptual artist will have a neutral character, dress in simple costume and use minimal stage set, letting their actions be their main form of expression.

Structure
An artist may have a strong tendency to be scientific in seeking out the underlying patterns or elements in juggling. They will take these fundamental building blocks and, in a methodical fashion, create a sequence of new tricks or patterns. Sean Gandini has worked a lot in this way, basing much of his juggling choreography on siteswaps and mathematical sequences.

Character
Create a new character and look at juggling through new eyes. An artist may play with props as someone else, or someone more than themselves, and find new ways to present juggling on stage. A large character can come up with someone outrageous new ideas. A shy character can be very interesting to watch too, especially as a withdrawn presence is a stark contrast to most personalities you see on stage. Think John Gilkey and Michael Menes and you have the right idea.

Theatre
Tell a story and juggle along the way. Characters are usually stock or stereotypes. The story is often simple. The juggling typically has nothing to do with the story or themes and seems to be shoehorned in there for apparently no reason. This approach is normally favoured by “new circus” companies and, by extension, many modern circus schools.

Object
Instead of using traditional juggling props, an artist often finds or makes something new and comes up with as many new tricks as they can. The new objects can be simple shapes or complex machines. Often an artist may try to select aesthetically pleasing tricks though often their main goal is to show the interesting possibilities of manipulation. Again, when an artist is concentrating more on what they do rather than on what they are, they will have a neutral character and simple costume. One performer who is very object orientated is Denis Paumier; he has full length juggling shows where he never picks up a single club, ring or ball, instead opting for his own creations.

Environment
Instead of just juggling on a bare stage, some jugglers will create a unique environment in which to juggle. It may be simple furniture or it may be a specially made set. Often the performer will use traditional juggling props and find new and interesting ways to juggle them in, on, under or around the obstacles they place in their way. Bounce juggling lends itself well to interacting with the environment. Michael Moschen’s triangle, the Gandini Juggling Projects’ cube and Greg Kennedy’s angled slabs are good examples environmental bounce juggling.

Some people would say that Modern Forms of juggling are now so well accepted by juggling audiences that they are no longer avant-garde. In juggling convention shows in Europe, Modern juggling is just as popular as Classic juggling, if not more so.

In the past ten years whole new style of juggling performer has emerged. They aren’t full time professional jugglers and don’t create work for a non-juggling audience. Instead they perform only at juggling conventions, to other people who share their own understanding of juggling performance and culture.

Postmodern Juggling Performance

Where Modern performers hoped to unearth universals or the fundamentals of art, Postmodern performers embrace diversity and contradiction. They reject the rigid boundaries and favour eclecticism, the mixing of ideas and forms.

Postmodern performers use references to other jugglers, other performers, other parts of juggling culture or even to their own previous performances. This could be in the form of recognizable tricks, styles, characters or ideas. A postmodern juggling act taken out of context, to an audience of non-jugglers, could not be presented as a stand-alone work of art; instead it relies on a knowledgeable audience to find the meaning for itself.

While Modern performers will usually use specially written music, or music specially selected to enhance the themes in the act, Postmodern performers will always use popular music. The costume will typically conform to contemporary mainstream fashions.

Postmodern juggling performance also blurs the line between “mass entertainment” and “high art”. The artistic expression is in the repetition and distortion of currently accepted forms of performance. While the mindset of the performers are very different, most juggling audiences make no distinction between Modern and Postmodern juggling acts, they simply see both as Modern.

An example of extreme Postmodern juggling performance was Luke Burrage’s “3 ball and video” act that he performed at the 2003 British Juggling Convention in Brighton. First he selected a piece of popular music called “Not From Brighton”. He was unashamedly influenced by Sean Gandini’s work, especially the idea of calling out siteswaps as they are juggled, so Luke took this Structuralist idea but discarded the core principles behind siteswaps themselves. He made a video that would display the name or notation of every throw, every trick, every pattern and every catch, flashing up in the style of a karaoke video. Jugglers knew most of these tricks but some were only known to Luke or those who knew his juggling. The video was played alongside Luke as he juggled the tricks onstage. The act ended with Luke continually dropping the balls onto the stage, one after the other, and the TV displaying “caution, dropped balls”.

If that wasn’t enough, later in the same show Luke returned to the stage, again setting up the TV, but this time the video showed Luke juggling exactly the same routine as he had previously performed live. Luke stood beside the TV, flicking through eighty flash cards, each displaying the exact same notation as before, now describing what the video was showing.


Those are the current popular forms of juggling performance. There are many others that used to be popular and more from current times that are less known or harder to define. There will be more to come in the future too and maybe some new forms are being developed right now. Pre-defining an artistic movement before it happens, calling it something like “n-generation-manipulation”, may be fun but it’s an ultimately pointless exercise until it actually exists. Better leave the name for the n-generation juggling critics to work out.

Thanks for reading.