The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  Mose held two balls in his right hand and one in his left, and lobbed the balls into the air, alternating hands—right, left, right. Only this time, instead of catching each ball and holding it, his hand immediately cycled the ball into another toss. The balls crossed in the air in a seamless rhythm: toss, toss, toss, toss, toss.

  Watching him, I had the sense of seeing juggling for the first time. As Michael Moschen once put it during a talk on juggling at the Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference (TED) in California, to the untrained eye even the simplest juggling patterns looked like “a mess that this guy’s got his hands around.” Now my experience gave me a new perspective. I could see the rhythm—how high each ball flew and in what direction it moved. I had heard about this moment from other jugglers. They often spoke of the first time they “understood” juggling. The American legend Dick Franco once told an interviewer for JuggleNow, a juggling website, that “the feeling I had was profound,” and “a lot of things came together and made sense.” Tim Roberts saw a juggler on television while lying in a hospital bed as a teenager. “It was like he was in 3-D,” Roberts told me. “It’s the only thing in my life that I’ve understood right away.”

  For Roberts, the moment led to a professional juggling career. My own insight was more intellectual. The circus, I came to understand, was a kind of connoisseur’s art. To fully appreciate it, you have to know the forms, through either experience or exposure. Pascal later confirmed this. “Going to the circus is like going to the opera,” he said. “You already know the story beforehand. You go to hear the performance, to hear how a singer interprets the specific role.”

  But there is also something tremendously basic about the circus arts. They are really just physics; each act is about bodies exerting themselves against unseen forces, about wills and forces colliding. The tension is beautiful: an act seems at odds with everyday reality and is yet natural and satisfying. The lesson applies most concretely to juggling. Balls travel in arcs, and every toss is a little science experiment. This simple power goes a long way in explaining why, even in airports, the work of a juggler can leave security guards dazzled. The circus has a simple, inherent loveliness that is easily recognized.

  My grand epiphanies did not make learning any easier. In the hall, my first run was a mess, the balls popcorning all over the place. After a few pointers from Mose, I made progress, and on my tenth attempt or so, I managed a run of seven scrambling throws. That simple act felt like an accomplishment. By the end of the night, I had managed ten throws—and I felt downright heroic.

  The feeling of competence escalated over the following weeks. From online tutorials and a booklet that came with the balls, I learned the basics: how to throw a ball over the top of the pattern (“tennis”); how to snatch a ball with an aggressive downward swipe (“the claw”). Each new success brought a jolt of positive reinforcement. It was a pleasure unlike the experience of tumbling. Tumbling felt like a sport, like skiing or rock-climbing—I felt the rush of adrenaline. My athletic triumphs were tinged with a sense of having evaded some physical catastrophe. In contrast, juggling was difficult but not dangerous. It was less muscular and more “outside the body.” There was an intellectual and technical component to the exercise. Each new trick was a puzzle to be solved. Success, when it occurred, was easily defined and satisfying, like fixing a bicycle, the appeal of a simple process competently enacted, of imposing yourself on the world in a small but measurable way. In short, juggling feels like play more than practice.

  By the end of the first week, I was juggling all the time. I juggled in the morning, before breakfast, and at night, after dinner. I began taking juggling breaks throughout the day—five minutes here, ten minutes there. This obsession wasn’t uncommon. Almost every serious juggler experiences a similar period. Eric Haines, a Washington-based juggler, once told me he used to sneak out of his room as a teenager and tiptoe down to his basement to practice at night, juggling over a sofa so his parents couldn’t hear the balls land.

  Still, the strength of the feeling surprised me. It was an oddly tactile fixation, unlike anything I had previously experienced. Objects developed magnetism. I wanted to juggle everything. Walking through the kitchen, I would spy an empty plate in the dish rack and desired to see it in flight. Nothing was off limits—pans, pens, books. In the grocery store, I was a mess. Daniel Schultz, an American juggler I would later meet in Berlin, described this particular curiosity well. Schultz noted that juggling gave him a “new measure of the world,” which he called “the jugglability of things.” He’d once found himself in his front yard juggling stove grates.

  With a week left before my meeting with Jérôme, I had nailed down a dozen tricks or so with three balls—including the “robot” and “Mill’s mess” (I picked tricks for their evocative names). But anybody could juggle three; that was child’s play. I wanted to learn four. With time running short, I attempted to teach myself, but this proved impossible: the balls kept colliding in the air. Mose was out of town. I decided to look for a teacher at the National School. Finding one didn’t take long. Hauling open the hall’s rusty door, I found myself facing Yohann, one of the first-year students. He stood in the center of the carpet, in a black tank top, purple socks, and a pair of hot-pink boxer shorts. Eight balls whirled melodiously above him.

  Of all the students, Yohann was the most intriguing, and possibly the school’s finest circus prospect. As a juggler, he was among the best in his year. He could chuck seven balls over his head with the ease of a man tying his shoelaces. As an acrobat, he managed a grace and polish that most other students lacked. On the trampoline, with his shock of black hair spilling over his ears and wafting when he bounced, Yohann catapulted himself with fluidity and economy of motion. “If he keeps this up, he could be one of the greats,” Ryszard commented once, watching Yohann improvise a routine. “There’s a difference between being strong [fort] and being beautiful [beau]. Yohann could be both.”

  At the same time, Yohann had an intensity that could be troubling. Like other jugglers, he sometimes stayed late to train, but his practice sessions lacked those performers’ breezy camaraderie. Instead, Yohann adopted the wild mannerisms of an athlete playing an important match. Between attempts, he paced and picked at the balls’ stitches. If he messed up, he berated himself under his breath. The other students didn’t know what to make of this erratic behavior. “You never know what he’s thinking,” confessed Odilon, a freshman acrobat. “He has this way of just staring at you with these intense eyes.”

  It all made me curious. I had tried to strike up a few conversations with Yohann, but he always seemed disengaged, answering in clipped phrases. I hoped that asking him to help me master four balls would be an opportunity to get to know him better. And, sure enough, when I approached him, he tossed his own equipment aside and readily agreed to teach me.

  “The key is in the pattern,” he said. I stood barefoot next to him on the carpet in the center of the hall. He still didn’t have any pants on. “Unfortunately, the pattern is also the one thing you won’t figure out yourself.”

  He started juggling two balls in his right hand, circling them skyward in an oblong pattern called the fountain.

  “Can you do this?”

  Yes. I showed him.

  “What about the left?”

  I showed him the left. The balls meandered, causing me to scramble a bit, but Yohann nodded. “That’s good. Now let’s put them together.”

  What followed was a small bit of circus alchemy. Starting with his right hand, Yohann began juggling two balls, whirling a fountain as before. Then he juggled two balls in his left hand to produce a second fountain. At first the patterns were distinct, his hands at least two feet apart. But as he brought his hands slowly toward the center of his body, the patterns began to merge. I thought the balls would collide, but the staggered rhythms fit the patterns inside each other like a pair of gears. Yohann taught me a critical bit of juggling wisdom: with odd numbers, the b
alls changed hands, stitching the “X” Mose had shown me in the gym; with an even number of balls, they only appeared to change hands.

  “Of course, that’s just the beginning,” Yohann observed. “Later, there are more complicated patterns.” He cycled through a few quickly. “But you’ll get to that.”

  We juggled for a half-hour or so, long enough for me to realize that four balls would require some practice, and then we took a break. The hall was relatively quiet. The other first-year students had already taken off for the day. From my class, only Maud remained, sprawled in the corner as if she was making a snow angel. Across the hall, Maurice, the school’s docile janitor, was helping a workman bolt a heating duct to the wall.

  In the lazy calm, Yohann and I chatted. I told him about my recent plunge into juggling obsession and the conversations I had had with other jugglers, including François Chat, one of France’s young superstars, discovered by theater director Robert Wilson when Chat was just a teenager. Though still only in his twenties, Chat had confessed that he might give up juggling, because he found the practice too “intense” and potentially unhealthy. When I relayed this to Yohann, he started to nod.

  “Yeah,” he said tiredly, “I wish I could quit myself.” His narrow face had assumed a serious look, and his eyes were pinned on the janitors working across the hall. “I juggle a lot, but I’m not sure it’s good for me.”

  To assuage him, I commented that he seemed okay when juggling at the school—deeply focused, sure, but not unhealthy. He shook his head and looked down. “Here it’s different. There are people around. It’s more of a social experience. At home, it’s easy for me to get locked in.”

  “Locked in?”

  He paused before responding. He drank from his water bottle and pursed his lips, as if debating his answer. Several years ago, he finally began, he had heard there was a juggler from one of France’s most famous companies who had lost control of his obsession. He juggled all day, every day. “His life disintegrated,” Yohann said. “He stopped seeing his friends, stopped going out. He barely ate. Then, one day, he disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” I said.

  Yohann nodded. “He just went missing. For seven years.”

  “Seven years? Where did he go?”

  Yohann shrugged. “Nobody knows. If you ask him, he says he can’t remember. He can’t even remember how he supported himself or what he ate. Just that he was juggling.”

  I asked Yohann if he believed the tale.

  He paused to pick a piece of lint off his boxers, and then said, “You know, I don’t know. At first I thought it was ridiculous. But then I saw him perform. And there’s something going on there. You can see the seven years in his movements. They say he’s never dropped a ball onstage.”

  The history of the circus is littered with apocrypha, with stories concocted to sell tickets or build mystique. Probably this is one of those stories. I can’t say for sure. But it confirmed what I was beginning to understand: some people took the circus very seriously indeed. This applied doubly to jugglers. They were the philosopher kings of the ring, and some of the most passionate, eccentric, intelligent, energetic, and downright peculiar people I had ever met.

  And I had yet to juggle with Jérôme Thomas.

  (illustration credit 8.1)

  A FEW YEARS AGO, in a declaration noticeably lacking in pomp, the French government added juggling to its institutional registry of beaux arts (fine arts). To be among the beaux arts in France is to be taken seriously, and so it was with no small amount of pride that Jérôme Thomas served as the art’s official representative at the induction ceremony.

  The choice of Thomas was natural. Today many critics consider him the most important French juggler alive—the godfather of modern juggling in France. In the eighties, when Gilligan was just beginning to learn his skills, Thomas was part of the vanguard, developing a style that was as much ballet as juggling, as much mime as manipulation. In 1990, with the help of choreographer Hervé Diasnas, he created Extraballe, an hour-long show inspired by the improvisational nature of jazz. It was the first full-length juggling program performed in France. Every year or two since, he has premiered a new piece of “juggling theater,” each an experimental approach to his three-thousand-year-old craft. In Rain/Bow, his juggling ballet, performers moved through showers of white light and paper snow. In Cirque Lili, his solo ode to the circus, he played every character in a traditional show, from the ringmaster to the strongman. For the ethereal beauty of his work, critics are wont to refer to him as a “juggling poet” or a “poet of space.” “He offers us an hour of poetry in the midst of so much tumult,” wrote a critic after an appearance in Shanghai, “an hour of suspension among the skyscrapers.”

  Jérôme takes himself very seriously. He is openly arrogant, even egotistical, and he occasionally refers to himself in the third person, in a way that might be ironic but probably isn’t. People tend to have strong opinions about him. Collaborators tell horror stories of his tirades over missed steps or early exits. This doesn’t bother Jérôme, since he tends to have strong opinions himself. Perhaps more than any other juggler, he subscribes to the notion that juggling is a high art, even a spiritual practice. I first observed this attitude when he’d read about Auschwitz in the bookshop. The full extent of it became clear as I researched him prior to our meeting. In interviews he talked about juggling the way Picasso or Warhol discussed painting. For instance:

  “Juggling is a language—dramatic, poetic, humorous, theatrical. It participates in the mysteries of gravity and the cosmos.”

  “I’ve studied this relationship between object and body for twenty-five years, and it’s ungrateful work, comparable to the study of the violin.”

  “The object is the master. When you fight against it, you don’t get much from it.”

  “One must understand an object like a shell discovered on the beach, listen to it to hear the sea.”

  “The ball is a note—yes, a note of music, a ‘La.’ ”

  On paper this kind of pontification can seem incongruous, like a plumber eulogizing his wrench, but the effect is quite different in person, where Thomas’s words are carried by charisma. I discovered this firsthand when, on the day of our appointed visit, I joined him in the Centre Culturel Aragon, a theater on the outskirts of Paris.

  “You can call it a passion, but that doesn’t do it justice!” Jérôme said, hunched in front of a mirror in the theater’s dressing room, rubbing lotion into his cheeks. He was in his boxer briefs, in the middle of changing for rehearsal. Normally he practices where he performs, in his tent, a small one-ring structure that he had set up behind the theater. But it was a chilly afternoon, and so the cultural center’s director had offered the use of the stage.

  “You understand what I’m saying?” He lit a cigarette, his leg propped on the counter. “You don’t find your passions. They find you.”

  I had come to juggle with Jérôme, but also to understand how his artistry expressed itself in his past and his approach to the work. Like Gilligan, he wasn’t born into the circus, but discovered juggling when he was a boy. One summer afternoon in Angers, where he’d been born in 1963, he happened upon a juggler practicing behind the tent of a circus that had installed itself near the river that cut through town. For years Jérôme had struggled in school. He’d been bored by piano, soccer, horseback riding, and judo. But the sight of the levitating balls captivated him, and he marched up for an impromptu lesson. The juggler complied. He taught Jérôme how to juggle three balls and afterward dismissed him by saying, “Maintenant, démerde-toi” (Now go play by yourself). The line struck Jérôme as an epiphany. “For the first time, someone insisted I rely on my own creativity.”

  Then came the usual obsession. Mornings, Jérôme awoke at four and juggled in the predawn darkness, tossing the balls over his bed to muffle the sound. At night, when he was supposed to be doing his homework, he juggled to the music of John Coltrane and Miles Davis. In the dressing room
, I asked Jérôme if he ever got lonely. He shrugged. “I felt alone, yes, but never lonely. C’était plus grand que moi.”

  The phrase plus grand que moi was one of his mantras. The literal translation is “bigger than me,” but in the Tao of Jérôme, the notion referred to anything intuitable but not comprehensible—an idea, an emotion, the force of a natural or historical event. I first heard him use the term in the bookshop, then in interviews while describing the artistic experience. In this case, he was referring to his progression from an inexorable compulsion to juggle, to Annie Fratellini’s circus school in Paris, and then out into the professional world three years later.

  The year was 1981, and the options for a professional juggler were limited to circuses and cabarets. As a student, Jérôme had worked on a minimalist routine—seven minutes of Weimar-style juggling inspired by Bobby May—which he performed in tour with the circus associated with Fratellini’s school. Afterward, he opted to go the cabaret route, striking a deal with a producer who established him as a regular in the circuit of Parisian parties, discothèques, and lounges.

  The life of a cabaret performer is unconventional, not unlike that of a chef or a rock musician. Shows start late, invariably followed by early-morning dinners and predawn drinks. Drugs are omnipresent. The sleaze factor is high. “It was my darkest period,” Jérôme said. “I saw real human exploitation.”

  But the cabaret life also offers a tremendous upside: time. The hours are minimal and well paid, if inconvenient. During the day, Jérôme studied ballet and modern dance, and enrolled in Jacques Lecoq’s theater school, a Mecca for European mimes. He started hanging out with musicians, especially jazz musicians. Invariably, the influences bled into his work. He had always been interested in the relationship between juggling and movement: As a kid he had instinctually blended the two, in his room and sometimes in front of his bathroom mirror. “My body had a need to express itself,” he said. Now he began to codify his ideas, to develop a style. His juggling became more physical and abstract. He started improvising, playing with rhythm and pacing, and struggled with the existential questions that would later plague Gilligan: What is juggling? What constitutes a trick? How did the codified differ from the creative?