The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  On this night, Julien marched to a box in the center of the floor, peeled off his shirt to expose a muscular torso, and began stretching his arms across his body like an Olympic swimmer preparing to dive. Alex, meanwhile, had constructed a fortress of crash pads and began whipping his silicone balls against the cement floor. His drumming simulated a metronome: bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum.

  I asked Ryszard why he thought the jugglers were crazy.

  “They are always here,” he said, not diverting his eyes from the two. “I think sometimes they break into the building at night. Maybe they cut the lock, then fix it in the morning.” I didn’t know what to say to this bizarre comment, although I was amused by the image of Ryszard waving a flashlight in the courtyard after dark, on the watch for nefarious jugglers. Anyway, the two strange students were out as instructors. Fortunately, I had another source. Shortly after arriving in Paris, I had learned that an old friend from college, Mose, was also in town, teaching English. When he came to my apartment, he spotted the pyramid of dusty balls on my mantel and popped all five of them into the air with astonishing ease. He was a juggler!

  The day after my encounter with Jérôme, I called Mose and asked if he could teach me to juggle in three weeks.

  “Sure, that’s no problem,” he said. “I mean, it depends on how good you want to be.”

  I asked him if I could learn to juggle five balls in the time I had available. After a pause, he answered that it had taken him a year to learn to juggle five balls. “You should probably stick with three.”

  We agreed to meet the following Friday. For our first lesson he proposed an unexpected venue: the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), one of France’s most prestigious universities—Harvard, Princeton, and Yale rolled into one aristocratic ball. Every week, Mose had heard, the school hosted a juggling club, technically for the students but open to anyone. It was purportedly the biggest gathering of jugglers in the city.

  As part of the aforementioned “liberation” of the circus arts, circus skills, once purely professional, had been made available to the French masses. All of the circus arts had experienced this broadening, but juggling had really exploded. Almost every college hosted a juggling club, and most decent-sized towns had juggling meetings, a preposterous notion just twenty years before. I thought visiting the club would be a good opportunity to explore the movement. Learning to juggle among unskilled newbies seemed sensible.

  Alas, that’s not quite how it worked out.

  IN 1977, shortly after moving from a Stanford education to a job as a river rafting guide, John Cassidy had a brainstorm that would alter both his life and the history of juggling. Several years before, Cassidy had learned to juggle from a hitchhiker. This wasn’t unusual. Juggling was in the midst of its boom. Membership in the International Jugglers’ Association, founded by a group of magicians in 1947, had exploded. In 1975, The Wall Street Journal dedicated a front-page story to the association’s annual convention in Youngstown, Ohio, and membership promptly doubled again.

  In many ways, juggling was the most accessible circus art. Compared with other circus skills, it was relatively cheap and required minimal equipment. (“Find three balls behind a tennis court and there you go,” was how juggling historian Alan Howard once described it.) Juggling also held a social appeal, especially among supporters of the counterculture. “It was something you could do sports-wise that didn’t necessarily involve competition,” Tim Roberts, an American juggler and circus administrator who grew up during this period, told me. “It was progressive. Everyone could participate at their own level. It was this perfect activity.”

  In California, Cassidy knew about this trend—his own lesson from the hitchhiker had been a part of it. He also knew, however, that juggling remained outside the mainstream. For the masses, the skill was still esoteric, like yoga or meditation. But then, during one of his rafting trips, he decided to teach a few of his charges how to juggle, using stones by the river. Dentists, lawyers, salesmen, teachers—they all loved it! At every opportunity they would pile out of the boat and practice.

  Inspired, Cassidy made juggling lessons part of his guiding routine. With a group of ambitious friends, Cassidy compiled in a book a collection of illustrated lessons for the juggling amateur. Entitled Juggling for the Complete Klutz, the book promised to teach juggling to anyone who could “scramble an egg, find reverse in a Volkswagen or stumble onto the light switch in the bathroom at night.”

  Technically, Klutz wasn’t the first “how-to” book for the craft, nor was it the first effort to bring juggling to a wider audience. Cassidy’s book was, however, the first effort to address directly the aura of impenetrability surrounding the craft. That was reinforced by its casual title, and by three small beanbags attached to the spiral binding.

  The book was released in 1977. Initial interest was small. But as word of mouth spread, sales skyrocketed. Within a year, Klutz had landed on the New York Times best-seller list. The manual would go on to sell more than two million copies, and it still sells well today. With the proceeds, Cassidy founded a publishing company specializing in the sort of “experiential reading” he brought to juggling (e.g., The Klutz Book of Balloon Twisting). Meanwhile, Klutz altered forever the American public’s perception of juggling, catapulting the skill into the mainstream. As Penn Jillette, the speaking half of the famous magic duo Penn & Teller, famously quipped, “When you pulled out three balls in 1973, what was going through people’s minds was, ‘I saw a deformed midget do that once.’ But when you pulled out three balls in the ’80s, it was, ‘a guy in my dorm room used to do that.’ ”

  Today there are no official statistics about the number of practicing jugglers, but informal estimates put the world total as high as ten million. Juggling conventions, once quaint affairs held in church basements, are now major events. The European Juggling Convention (EJC), the Woodstock of the discipline, annually attracts upward of sixty-five hundred jugglers and fans. The festival takes place over a long weekend. Days are consumed with workshops and leisurely matches with strangers. Nights fade into shows and booze-fueled banter. The highlight of every festival is the juggling competitions. Some of these are what you might expect, with prizes for “best routine” and “most objects juggled.” Others are more peculiar. In “Endurance Juggling,” contestants vie to see who can juggle the longest. In “Combat,” a juggler tries to knock his opponent’s balls while somehow maintaining his own pattern. Matches can last hours.

  In their diversity, sociability, and outright absurdity, these activities testify to the spread of juggling as an amateur practice, and especially to its rise as something you do instead of watch, as was once demonstrated for me with comedic clarity on a Sunday morning in New York. I was watching the New York City Marathon near the eighteen-mile mark and admiring the flow of panting humanity when—lo and behold!—a pair of jugglers came jogging around a bend. They wore mesh tank tops and kept up a steady flow of three orange balls each, rotating in front of them.

  At conventions, where the practice is common and completed at varying speeds, such men are known as “jogglers.” How far juggling had come. In surprise and delight, I found myself whooping the New York duo on. “Yeah, joggling!” I called. “Wooo-hoo! Go, jogglers!” I thought the men would appreciate the recognition, but they must have thought I was mocking them, because as they hustled past—chests heaving, balls awhirl—one of the two cut me a nasty look. The other just joggled on by.

  OF COURSE, not everyone has the time or the resources to rent a Cessna and go convention-hopping every weekend, and for the less fortunate souls there are juggling clubs, such as the one whose meeting Mose and I attended in Paris. Like the juggling conventions, juggling clubs are ubiquitous. Tokyo has four, London ten. In America, where many of the nation’s 191 juggling clubs are associated with and sometimes funded by universities, these clubs double as social organizations. In Europe, most clubs are more straightforward: they provide a high-ceilinged room and, if you are lucky,
a box of juggling equipment. Fortunately, the club at the ENS provides both, and after fishing five balls and three clubs from a trunk labeled “Help Yourself!,” Mose and I wandered onto the gymnasium floor.

  “So … I guess we should start with the basics,” Mose suggested, dropping his armload of objects to the green parquet floor. I had never stood in a juggling crowd before, and it was an odd feeling. There was an unfamiliar verticality to the room’s energy. The objects in the air pulsed like a swarm of hummingbirds, and the space echoed with a cacophony of clicks. Few of the jugglers at the “amateur” club seemed like beginners. Searching for a position on the floor, I spotted three jugglers working with more balls than I could count. Across from us a young girl, no more than ten years old, worked with four clubs. Such professionalism was disheartening.

  Mose stooped to pick up a single ball. “Most people think juggling is about catching,” he said. “In fact, it’s the opposite. Get the tosses perfect, and the catches take care of themselves.” To illustrate his point, he demonstrated the ideal toss, lobbing the ball from one hand to the other, his arms bent at the elbow. “There should be a lightness to it,” he said, watching the ball drift in front of his eyes. He told me to pay special attention to his hands, which rotated in alternating outward circles: the right hand should move clockwise while the left hand rotates counterclockwise. “It’s like The Karate Kid,” he explained. “Wax on. Wax off.”

  I gave it a whirl. Retrieving a ball from the parquet, I lobbed it back and forth while focusing on the height of the tosses.

  “That’s good,” Mose said. “Now let your shoulders relax. Work on keeping your hands low.”

  I did as I was told, tossing and tossing again. The act’s rudimentary rigor reminded me of the first days of dance class at school, and of the hours spent drilling the basic ballet steps, the tendus and the dégagés. I had raised a foot a few inches off the floor, replaced it, raised the foot, replaced it. Our instructor had told us that it was necessary to establish the essential “vocabulary of movement” before progressing to more difficult fare, and I found juggling similar.

  But juggling was also similar in the persistence it required. Mose made me throw the ball for what seemed like an hour. It came to feel less like a lesson and more like occupational therapy. The ten-year-old girl eventually stopped juggling and, with open curiosity, watched me move the single ball back and forth, over and over.

  Finally, Mose granted me a reprieve. “Lesson two,” he announced merrily, reaching for another ball.

  Lesson two was all about rhythm. To keep the objects from colliding in the air, jugglers stagger their throws, tossing alternately with each hand.

  “Wait for the first ball to reach the top of its arc, and then throw the second,” Mose said. “Toss, toss, catch, catch.” With each toss, he scooped a ball into the air. Because of the delay, they created an “X” in front of his eyes. “Toss, toss, catch, catch.”

  I gave it a try. The motion was easy at first. I threw the first ball, waited for it to reach the top of its arc, and then tossed the second. Whereupon I was hit with juggling’s basic dilemma: With two balls in the air, which one should you focus on? The ball going up or the ball coming down?

  I chose the ball coming down. Lurching toward it, however, I failed to make a proper second toss. Instead of loping upward leisurely, the ball zipped forward almost laterally, striking Mose in the thigh.

  Mose scolded me with his eyes. “What did I tell you?”

  He retrieved the ball graciously. “Tosses, not catches.” The golden rule.

  I tried again. It went better. The first toss arrived noticeably higher than my second, but the balls knit their ideal “X,” each hovering for an instant before cascading into my open palm with a satisfying smack. Mose encouraged me to count the rhythm aloud. “Toss, toss; catch, catch,” I repeated, tossing and tossing, catching and catching.

  In discussions, jugglers regularly mention the satisfying “circularity” of the activity—the movement of the arms, the casual drift of the balls. There is a meditative quality that jugglers like to cite, as in the book Zen and the Art of Juggling. On paper this seemed like New Age drivel, but, even working with a lowly two balls, I understood the claim better. There was a continuous rhythm to the motion, a drumlike feeling, that made it easy to achieve what psychologists refer to as the “flow state,” when you feel yourself being absorbed by an activity. There was even something relaxing about it, and I was basking in this calm when Mose plucked a water bottle from his backpack and took a swig.

  “Right on,” he said, drawing his sleeve across his lips. “Now do that for another half-hour and you’ll be ready for lesson three.”

  JUGGLING WITH MOSE brought to the foreground a question I had been pondering since the beginning of the year: On a purely physical level, what was happening inside me when I learned to perform in the circus? What was going on in my body and head that allowed me to acquire these new skills? In essence, how does the repetition of an action translate into physical efficiency, and eventually into art?

  Later, I went to a professional—Marie-Claude Després—for some answers.

  “Technically, I’m a body person,” Després said. “But of course it’s all relative. Two-thirds of what I do takes place upstairs.”

  What Després “does” is physiotherapy, the nebulous profession of manipulating bodily behavior. She was based in Montreal, and her client roster had included professional hockey players, ballerinas, and rock stars, all working in the upper echelons of their fields. Before going into practice for herself, Després spent six years as the head physiotherapist for Cirque du Soleil’s Quidam, where she counseled jugglers (“lots of neck problems”), clowns (“like actors”), and enough Russian acrobats to guard the Kremlin (“so adorable, the Russians”). I asked her how circus performers become practitioners of such unconscious exactitude. Her response was one of the more elegant metaphors I ever heard on the subject.

  Human beings, Després told me, are essentially complex machines operated by computers. Our bodies are the machines; our brains are the computers. And, just like a computer, a human brain has two types of memory: the hard drive and the working consciousness.

  “Your hard drive is here.” Després tapped herself on the back of the head. “This is your cortex. It’s where information is stored—memories, movements, anything unconscious. The other type of memory is your prefrontal cortex. That’s up here.” She skimmed her fingers to the top of her head and buried them in her cowlick. “The prefrontal cortex handles all the processing, anything happening in the minute. Like this conversation.”

  What matters for the circus performer is how these parts relate. As we navigate through the workaday world, the two types of memory are in constant conversation: old information gets retrieved, new information is stored. As he or she practices, Després said, a circus performer refines this conversation. The movement is basically “downloaded” from the prefrontal cortex to the cortex, from the performer’s short-term memory to her long-term memory. First a connection is made; then each repetition deepens the impression a bit more; in time, the connection forms a habit. “Eventually, all you have to do is initiate the movement,” Després explained. “You start the throw, and the long-term part of the brain immediately takes over the rest of the action.”

  In popular lingo we refer to this as the development of “muscle memory,” but it’s an inaccurate term. Circus performers aren’t just training their muscles; they are training their minds, too. With each toss or tuck, they’re creating the interior conditions for exterior achievements.

  Of course, circus performers aren’t the only masters of muscle memory. Chefs learn to chop with lightning flourishes. Piano players measure their finger movements by the millimeter. All of us employ it every day when we parallel-park a car or walk and talk on a cell phone simultaneously. But circus performers show us how precisely a person can train himself. Argentine juggler Marco Paoletti once told me that in his tr
aining sessions he aimed not to perform a move successfully but, rather, to discover a “consistent feeling” connected with each, a sensation that he could access onstage and use to reproduce the movement. Over tens of thousands of hours of practice, he had amassed an encyclopedia of these feelings. This was his juggling, this index of interiority.

  “Whether I’m holding a ball or not,” Paoletti said, “the movement should be exactly the same.”

  IN THE ENS GYMNASIUM, I watched the jugglers pack up their equipment and drift to the exit. Mose had already disappeared. I kept tossing two balls until I eventually grew bored and decided to track down Marc Espie, the lanky, Einstein-haired director of the club. We were talking about juggling as a social discipline—“The school thought we might be troublemakers, but of course we’re mostly nerds”—when Mose appeared again, jogging.

  “Sorry,” he said, out of breath. “There was this dude with glass balls doing some crazy contact in the hallway.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. We resumed practice: three balls.

  The idea, Mose said, was to create the same “X” in the air. He suggested that I start with a “flash,” a single throw and catch of each ball. He demonstrated the move: “toss, toss, toss; catch, catch, catch.” “As each ball reaches the top of its arc,” he dictated, “throw the next one.” With my own three balls, I tried the pattern jugglers call the cascade, and found it surprisingly easy: right, left, right. True to Mose’s plan, the interminable two-ball scooping had carved a track in my brain.

  “Of course, that’s just the beginning,” Mose said.

  To really have the sense of juggling, I had to create a continuous flow, not just a sequence of catches. This flow is what jugglers refer to as a “run.”