The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  In part, his natural determination fueled his work. “If I can’t figure something out I lie in bed all night thinking about it,” he once told an interviewer. “The papers sometimes say that I do not bring out enough new tricks,” he said on another occasion, “but they do not understand how difficult I make my feats.” Cinquevalli became one of the highest-paid performers in the music hall and a star in Europe. He purchased diamonds for journalists and bought a château. “Exhibitions of this kind are not new,” noted The New York Times in 1889, “but no one has ever equaled Cinquevalli within our memory. His feats … are simply bewildering.”

  Which brings us back to the original questions: What destroyed the prestige of juggling? After such a meteoric rise, how did juggling fall so steeply?

  With the advent of cinema and radio, vaudeville houses plunged into decline. Many jugglers fled to the circus, but by then most shows had mushroomed into three-ring spectacles, behemoth extravaganzas where jugglers found themselves overwhelmed. Their subtle tricks were no match for a parade of elephants and fireworks. On television, a few jugglers found a reprieve, especially on variety shows like those hosted by Ed Sullivan and Red Skelton. But the gigs were few and far between. They were nothing compared with the vast opportunities available before.

  Jugglers also deserve some of the blame. As their popularity began to wane, they shifted their approach. Sacrificing novelty and theatricality, they emphasized athleticism rather than showmanship. Instead of “What new object can you juggle?” the operative question became “How many objects can you juggle?” The trend took root before World War I, but it wasn’t until the twenties that the movement from juggling creativity to juggling quantity burgeoned, largely through the work of a single juggler, Enrico Rastelli.

  Today, Rastelli is widely considered the greatest juggler in history, the Nijinsky of the discipline (an ironic epithet, since Rastelli actually trained with Nijinsky’s father as a boy). Born in Siberia in 1896, he was the son of a family of touring Italian acrobats. His parents coached him as a boy to carry on the family tradition, but juggling mania seized him when he was six, and he began training in secret. By the time his parents discovered his preference, he was so good that they were forced to acquiesce to his desires and began booking him gigs. His first solo job came in 1915 with Circus Truzzi in Russia. The revolution in 1917 caused the family to flee abroad to Italy, where Rastelli’s professional stock exploded. By 1923, his name was headlining the marquees of the biggest venues in the biggest cities, from the Hippodrome of London to B. F. Keith’s Palace Theatre at Broadway and 47th Street, where he was billed as “Europe’s Greatest Music Hall Artist.”

  As a man, Rastelli was famously ebullient—according to legend, he had to will himself not to smile for photos—and that manifested itself in his juggling as volcanic dynamism. Dressed like an athlete, in nylon shorts and a rugby jersey, he was an avatar of virtuosity, racing between tricks, hurling his balls into the air with maniacal abandon, beaming, posing, pouncing. His single focus was keeping objects in the air. To this end, instead of incorporating a diverse range of props, he concentrated on a few—inflatable balls, plates, and wooden sticks, all selected exclusively for their properties of flight. This narrow approach, combined with a herculean work ethic—his practice sessions could last ten hours—led him to achieve feats previously deemed impossible. In 1893, less than two decades before Rastelli’s rise, George Fielding had made international headlines at the world’s fair by juggling six balls at once. Like his predecessor, Rastelli could juggle six balls—while skipping a rope, bouncing a ball on his head, and spinning a hoop on his leg. Without such distractions, he could juggle ten balls. He could also juggle eight plates, or eight sticks, or three cantaloupe-sized balls on his head. Even by modern standards such feats are extreme. In 1930, they were borderline supernatural.

  Rastelli died young: In 1931, one of his sticks sliced the inside of his mouth during a show at the Apollo Theater in Nuremberg, Germany, resulting in a fatal hemorrhage and infection. His legacy lived on in the form of a statue in his adopted hometown of Bergamo, Italy, and in the wave of jugglers who rushed to copy his kinetic, technical style. The Rastellian mode, with its emphasis on what is known as “toss juggling” and a limited range of objects, became a benchmark, so widely practiced that it literally defined juggling as a pursuit.

  Before Rastelli, a juggler was a creative manipulator of objects; afterward, he was a person who could throw a lot of objects in the air and catch them. He threw bigger objects both higher and faster than had been previously done. Before Rastelli, a “trick” was an ingenious stunt (e.g., throwing a knife such that it sliced open an envelope mid-flight); after Rastelli’s performances, a trick was defined by an object’s pattern of movement.

  This definition of a trick still holds today. There are literally thousands of these juggling tricks, or “patterns,” as they are sometimes called, categorized online and in books including The Encyclopædia of Ball Juggling. The basic juggling trick, wherein the objects loop from hand to hand, is called “the cascade.” Throwing one ball over the top of the other two is termed “tennis.” Tossing two balls vertically while shuffling the third between your hands is a “box.” For traditional or “technical” jugglers, these skills constitute the essence of the craft. A “strong” juggler knows lots of tricks and completes them with a large number of objects—balls, rings, or clubs—like Rastelli.

  But this traditional definition of a performance is precisely where juggling runs into trouble. By hinging their craft on virtuosic execution, jugglers painted themselves into a corner. Although it is thrilling, this kind of technical juggling is also tough for audiences to appreciate. The tricks themselves can seem indistinguishable. Many tricks are harder than they look, and vice versa. It’s even accepted that, when there are more than a certain number (some say five, some say seven) of objects, audience members have trouble identifying how many are in the air simultaneously. The result is this awful Catch-22: the more a juggler improves, the less accessible he becomes to an audience.

  This issue—call it the problem of disassociation—is nothing new. Cinquevalli spent nine years learning how to catch an egg, as I said previously, only to drop the trick from his act when he realized audiences had no appreciation for the superhuman skill the trick requires. Nor is the issue unique to juggling. “There’s such a moat between what a performer is able to do and what the ordinary person is able to do,” Aloysia Gavre, an American acrobat, once told me. “Even if the spectator has some experience using his body—even if he does yoga—a strong performer can still leave them cold.” (This problem is at the root of the annoying habit of ringmasters who call attention to ambitious tricks. “Now, in ring one, the famous quadruple somersault, the most difficult maneuver known to man.”)

  But jugglers wrestle with the problem with particular acuity. Though other disciplines can seem remote, they also offer secondary pleasures: the danger of a woman walking on a wire, say, or the majesty of a man flying on a trapeze. Jugglers have no such joys to fall back on. The only danger a juggler faces is the danger of looking foolish. His dynamism is real, but the performance is also limited and self-contained.

  Jugglers know this, of course, and have all sorts of strategies to bridge the divide. Dick Franco, an American master, told me that he varies the rhythm of his throws and staggers the level of difficulty so that audiences can feel the difference. “The object is to create a situation where the viewer knows you are doing something different even if he cannot actually perceive what you are doing.” But this happens rarely enough, and the sad truth is that skill can be a handicap.

  This irony was once made clear to me in a conversation with American juggler Steven Ragatz. A longtime performer with Cirque du Soleil, Ragatz was discussing the work of another Soleil star, Anthony Gatto. By any technical measure, Gatto is the greatest juggler in the world and maybe the greatest juggler in history. Son of a vaudeville juggler, he started juggling at the age of
four. By eight, Gatto had won the Junior National Championships among kids twice his age. When he was thirteen, he could, amazingly, juggle seven clubs. Seven years later, he set the world record for rings with twelve. Since then, he has held world records in twelve different juggling categories. Other jugglers uniformly discuss his achievement with a mix of awe and bafflement. The English juggler Luke Burrage once captured Gatto’s reputation very well: “If there’s something Anthony hasn’t done,” he said, “it’s only because he hasn’t tried.”

  And yet, at least according to Ragatz, this mountain of skill, this once-in-a-generation talent, is almost completely lost on an audience. “Imagine stopping somebody in the lobby after Anthony’s act and asking them what he did,” Ragatz said. “Probably they’d say something along the lines of ‘Okay, well, he did the balls, and he did the pins, and he did a whole lotta rings. Oh, and there was this girl, and she was really hot and she was dancing around a bit.’ ” Ragatz chuckled at the indignity of it. “I mean, it’s a shame but it’s also the truth. People just have no fucking clue.”

  EMERGING FROM THE MÉTRO, Gilligan thrust a hand into his pocket and pulled out a scrap of crinkled paper.

  “Rue Duuunkerque,” he read in an exaggerated American accent as he glanced around. Montmartre, Paris’s famous bohemian mound, rose above us to the north, capped by the Sacré-Coeur Basilica like an ivory glacier. It was a gray day, the sky hanging low above us.

  We headed south, and within minutes found ourselves standing in the doorway of the juggling shop. It looked like Santa’s workshop circa 1953: Every inch of the space was slathered in toys, and we relished the simple joy of the store’s inventory. Pogo sticks and unicycles leaned against wooden columns. Sacks of marbles hang like grapes from the ceiling. I was basking in the ancient smell of the place—lacquer mixed with dust—when a shopkeeper came scuttling around a low counter.

  “Bonjour,” he greeted us. He was in his forties and well accoutered for his role as resident Geppetto, with scraggly hair and a beige cardigan pulled over a blue oxford button-down. In a docile voice, he asked if there was anything we desired. When Gilligan mentioned the rings—the bigger-than-average size he was looking for—our host smiled grandly and whisked him toward the back of the shop.

  Like golfers, chefs, and mechanics, jugglers are notoriously finicky about the tools of their trade. According to legend, Rastelli used to carve his own clubs from trees growing near his home in Bergamo. Francis Brunn, a German star, commissioned his sticks from a cousin who also manufactured ball bearings for Mercedes-Benz. These days such strategies are unnecessary. Juggling objects are rendered by computers, manufactured by robots, and sold in bulk online by dealerships like Dubé, based in New York City.

  Still, Gilligan has his requirements, and in the shop he peeled a ring from the wall and set to appraising it with the squinting, lip-pursed air of a jeweler. He bobbed the ring up and down, then shifted it from hand to hand. A second ring came down from the wall. Each got tossed—right, then left. Being thin and hollow, these rings were both easier to grab and less likely to collide in midair, and so among professionals are often employed for what is known as “high numbers”—roughly, juggling more than seven objects. But even here in the shop, Gilligan’s competence was clear. There’s a precise yet casual disregard in the way Gilligan handles rings, and like those of a tennis player with his racquet, his smallest tosses resonate with practice.

  He let the rings come to a rest, and made a satisfied smack with his lips. In slow English he asked the shopkeeper if the store carried an identical model in white.

  “Oh no,” the shopkeeper replied, wincing. “I am sorry. I have no white.” Then he eagerly added, “But if you are coming back today, maybe I have some white for you later.”

  Gilligan nodded vaguely, gave the ring another instinctive toss, and returned it to its metal hook. He told the shopkeeper he would think it over. The truth, he told me later, is that he prefers to work with white, a color that triggers no “preconceived notions” (as opposed to neon orange, say, or flashy silver). In his early years, Gilligan wouldn’t have been so picky, and his change in attitude says much about the changes in the craft.

  Born in 1977 in Arcadia, Ohio, a rural farming town with a population of five hundred, Gilligan began as a technical juggler of renown. He started juggling when he was nine, after discovering the skill at a unicycle convention, and plunged headlong into obsession. He juggled seven, sometimes eight hours a day, in a “juggling lab” in his converted barn. After some introductory lessons with a vaudeville juggler-turned-boxer from Michigan (“this really old dude”), he began performing.

  Not surprisingly, while experiencing his bliss, he also grew quite skilled, and as word of his skills leaked to his neighbors, they began inviting him to perform. He did the local Cub Scout banquet. He did Christmas at the firehouse. The shows were nothing special, usually a medley of tricks set to the music and theme of whatever movie happened to be big that summer (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was one), but the local audiences loved them. Before long, his phone rang with offers from farther afield. At age seventeen, he had his own business card and headshot and had embarked on his “word-of-mouth American tour.”

  At the height of this activity, Gilligan received a call from a producer in Las Vegas with an offer to perform there. For most young jugglers the offer would represent the culmination of a dream, but Gilligan’s feelings were mixed. By then he had become aware of certain limitations inherent in juggling. He found himself growing bored during practice. “With numbers juggling, you can kind of turn your brain off,” he said. “What comes after nine? Oh, ten—it’s not hard to figure out.” More troublingly, he wondered about the place of juggling as a form of performance. Jugglers developed a specific kind of rapport with the audience: “There’s a power thing that happens. It becomes: Watch me. I’m going to impress you.” Juggling, he felt, was reduced to technical show, a concern thrown into relief when he saw his first ballet.

  Like jugglers, he noted, dancers cultivate a skillful form of bodily movement. Yet audiences approach the work from a vastly different perspective. “You don’t go to a ballet and say, Wow, he jumped super-high,” he pointed out. Instead, the audience is expected to consider the totality of the performance: the themes and composition of the dance, the expressiveness of the dancers, the lights, the stagecraft. “Although I hadn’t realized it, that’s how juggling always was for me,” Gilligan said. “I was always more interested in the performance than the skill.”

  Gilligan’s qualms came to a head one night in Vegas. After a show, a Scottish producer knocked on his door. He was interested in hiring Gilligan to perform in Scotland. To help cover the costs of the flight, Gilligan booked other gigs around Europe. All told, he spent six months performing and meeting other jugglers in England, France, Germany, and Scandinavia. What he discovered there changed his life.

  In Europe, Gilligan found jugglers who practiced a completely different form of juggling. They moved in odd ways and according to odd rhythms, and on the whole seemed to be thinking less about tricks than about creating shapes—shapes among the objects in the air, between the objects and the body, and between the objects and the environment. There was an intellectual quality to the work that he appreciated. “For the first time I had to sit down and think: Why am I going to use this technique? Or how could this technique join this technique?” The work seemed to come from a different place. Gone was the emphasis on pure displays of skill. In its place was the notion of juggling as a vehicle for creative expression. The European jugglers “weren’t just trying to impress people.”

  The “modern” (or “art”) juggling he found in Europe felt like a revelation, a scene he missed out on growing up in rural Ohio. (“I was eighteen years old and just beginning to figure things out.”) Unbeknownst to him, however, the modern form dated back almost sixty years, and, as he later discovered, its roots were actually American.

  During the thirties and
forties, as most jugglers propelled themselves headlong toward virtuosity, a select few had taken an opposite tack. One of the first of these so-called minimalists was Bobby May. Born Ludwig Mayer, May, who debuted as a professional in 1922, was in many ways a throwback to an even earlier time. Dressed like the gentlemen jugglers of yore, in black tie and tuxedo, he created routines using elegant props: top hats, canes, pool balls. What made his act unique was his approach. Instead of creating routines with more objects, May deliberately worked with fewer, often as few as three—three hats, three balls, three canes. In his posters, he rarely specified what he did, working instead to cultivate an air of mystery. In one ad he listed his name, “Bobby May,” followed by the line, “or he may not.”

  As juggling historian Alan Howard told me, May thought of himself first and foremost as an entertainer. Francis Brunn, another minimalist, took himself more seriously. Son of a champion diver, Brunn learned to juggle from his father, who had taught himself using stones while a prisoner during World War I. Performing first in Germany, later in the States, Brunn worked his way up the cabaret and circus circuits, often appearing with his sister, Lottie. Like May, Brunn usually juggled a small number of objects. (He’s quoted as saying, “I am fascinated by controlling one ball.”) But whereas May saw himself as an entertainer, Brunn considered his work closer to dance. Though many jugglers had trained in dance before him, they viewed the skill as preparation, a means to an end—namely, bodily control. For Brunn, dance was part of the performance. In one of his most famous pieces, he played a flamenco dancer, prancing through his moves like a matador with an inflatable ball, his chin aloft, spine erect. More broadly, Brunn approached his work as a dancer might choreograph a number. “Everything had a flow,” Howard said. “Every move was a picture.” Between tricks, Brunn struck balletic poses. He was obsessed with the shapes his body made during routines, with line and rhythm.