The Juggling Equipment Blog

Hello everyone, during the last month we have already received competition entries for our juggling picture competition. some show skill, both in juggling as well as photography. BUT, has the winning entry already submitted? there is still time to get out and do some juggling and photography – winning two brand new finesse 4 diabolos is worth it – thats for sure.

so, get out there, find a friend with a camera and make the pictures.

to read all the details of the competition get over here.

Good luck and all the best.

The Italian juggler Moon has started releasing daily videos of his new research – cubes manipulation.

The cubes’ opacity and and texture gives it some kind of a crystal ball appearance.

Apparently using them for body contact is a bit hard, so Moon is building and breaking structures. Interesting…

Right now there are 4 videos, this is the first one -

Check out Moon’s YouTube page for all the other cubes videos and his other cool videos.

Circus trap is a Polish project founded by the European union (if I remember correctly).

It is sort of a youth-circus-workshops camp that brings together about 20 something young people who are into the art of circus from eastern Europe (and Israel) for 10 days of workshops and fun.
More technical stuff you can find here.

Our Israeli delegation was led by Aaron Tobiass. He knew the organizers and was our contact guy (and did quite a good job I must say). Alongside him and me there was also our leading female juggler – Neta Oren.

I must say that neither I, nor Aaron&Neta, didn’t really have a clue about what’s going to happen there. We assumed it would be like a long juggling convention in which all the jugglers teach each other juggling stuff all day, but still, nothing for sure…
Ohh well.. we took the chance and took off  to the unknown and landed in the best country in the world (and a part of our origins) – Poland!

We knew that it’s going to be a lot of training, and so it was. Our train from Warsaw to Iława took about 4 hours. That could have been fun if we could have slept in those fancy train compartments.  Of course, we had to be the nice tourists, so we stood or sat somehow in the middle of the passage, right on the way to the toilets so that people can wake us up every time they feel their bladder is calling for help.

Aaron reflecting

After that exhausting training session we finally arrived at our (surprisingly correct) station.
waiting for us there were the two organizers – Aneta and Michał.

After a short ride we got to a place somewhere in the middle of nowhere called “Kacze Bagno”, which can be translated as “a small duck’s lake”. The place itself looked somewhat like a larger version of FarmVille. There was the big house in the middle of that ranch – it had all the rooms where we slept and practiced, showers and toilets, and kitchen. Outside there were just big fields, some of grass/jugglers, and some with other crops.
As we were isolated, with no connection to any internet/civilization anywhere around, we played a bit volley club, did a group introduction, got the next 9 days’ time table and went to sleep.

One problematic issue was that there wasn’t really  one common language for everyone. I guess it should have been English but about half of the campers couldn’t speak it or had difficulties, which didn’t make things easier…

The sleeping/training hall

Our daily schedule went like this:
8:45 – Warming up
9:30 – Breakfast
10:30-13:30 – Workshop (part 1)
14:00 – Lunch
16:00-18:30 – Workshop (part 2)
19:00 – Supper
21:00 – Country night

Being more detailed:
Warm-ups – Neta told me they were fun.
Breakfast, lunch and supper – The food in general was very good! long live the cooking lady!
Workshops – As if the basic language barrier wasn’t enough, almost none of the workshops’ leaders could speak English… Only the translation consumed about a half of the workshops’ time, I guess that was quite mentally exhausting…. More about the workshops on the next part.
Country night – Almost every night each group had to make some kind of exhibition about their country. Most of the time it included learning common words, traditional food and alcoholic drinks, and general explanations about each country’s culture and stuff.
Luckily, we were chosen to open the first “country night”, and so began our Israeli night.
To be honest, we weren’t prepared at all for preparing such an event, but, we had our advantages since it was the first night and no one really knew anything about Israel. After resolving some unclear issues it was time for happy time which included our unique dish – Bamba and our national dance – Hora, which was led by Neta.

Some other issues before this post ends -
The weather was pretty much perfect all along the way, I started my quest for internet, all the other campers were really nice and kind, and lastly, there were some creepy flies traps which I would name as “x-flies”.
Stay tuned for more adventures on the next part of circus trap.. part… trap…. it’s a palindrome…!!!

Ori skyped me with a wonderful site that fits perfectly into our sites and sights category – Nathan Rae’s blog with his experimental weekly video – 1 year, 52 weeks, 52 movies.

Not all the videos are about juggling, mind you, there are other sides to life (although most of them are directly connected to juggling). But since Nathan is a juggler, a lot of the videos he made during the last half year have a juggling theme to them.
All of you interested in juggling and filming will find a lot of interesting information regarding movie making and editing, since that is what Nathan seems to be doing in his life.

for starters you should head over to this page, which will give you an overview of the project, what rules it follows, the latest movie released and some of the best and most viewed so far.

another page on his site shows all the videos in order – which is nice if you want to catch up with all videos made in the last half year. click here to see the archive.

You can follow his weekly movies through his blog or through his Youtube channel. Do yourself a favor and subscribe to both of them, some things in life are free.

Just to give you a taste of the kind of movies you might find there here is one of them, with a nice combination of concept, shotting and editing. enjoy!

Paweł Witczak from Poland amazes us with lots of extreme hardcore 5-7 balls siteswaps! WOW!

You should check out his other extreme videos here.

Enjoy -

Wes Peden shows us again his great work searching and researching clubs .
There was a lot of work put into making this video, and even more work probably behind the scenes in creating the unique flow sequences with the clubs.
Other than that.. just watch

So finally I’ve gotten around filming and editing some tutorials for you guys. Hopefully I’ll be able to post some once a week to this blog for you to watch and learn from.

645 tutorial remake part I:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xObvkfKUQC8

645 tutorial remake part II:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hst6ZE9MdvI

Enjoy!

Well… the title says it all… or not!

Anyhow…… this video is an open stage performance by the Hungarian juggler “Python”. I met him last year at the previous Hungarian convention and was impressed by his skills.
In his act he projects  fun and joy while showing us some smooth moves.  Good coordination with the music too. Check it out -

this week on sites and sights I will give you some information regarding siteswap. Basically what siteswap notation is a simple method to note down and create a common “language” among jugglers fro juggling props in different height without breaking the basic rhythm of the jugglers hands. A few years back while still studying architecture I took a mandatory course about pattern. This was a big issue for architects back on the sixties and my faculty thought it might still be of interest, which it really wasn’t. We had to write an essay for this course about pattern and I decided to write one on how you could note down juggling – a repeating action, in numbers. I didn’t make anything up really, I just copy-pasted. My tutor thought the system was problematic for some reason, which was really funny at that time.

There have been advancements regarding the way we look at juggling patterns and the tools we use for creating new ones over the years with many jugglers creating tools to note those juggling moves. But the best tool I know to learn about siteswap and juggle them is the Juggling Lab. Juggling Lab is a Java application for creating and animating juggling patterns. It evolved from the JuggleAnim juggling applet, and extends JuggleAnim by providing greater flexibility and user interactivity.

to enter the program go to the Juggling Lab applet, you will need to have JAVA installed and if everything went right will you will on your screen the applet. the applet consists of 3 areas:

-  the left box area is where you can control the features of the program, it is in itself divided into 3 parts, controlled by the tabs on top. I will not go into a long “how to use it” tutorial since the program has enough tutorials to help the needy. Here is one that will get you started to understand the different functions of the program.

- the middle and right box display an animation of the siteswap you have chosen and a siteswap timeline.

now off you go to juggle.

So, the best show for me at the convention was the Experimental show.
It wasn’t too long, the MC was hilarious and the numbers were outstanding.

Back to  my food issues – Except the pasta, I wasn’t really interested on something else, so I went to the best place in the world at that time – Dominos Pizza.
Open for maybe 23 hours a day, fast and kind service, not too expensive, and most importantly – greeeaaaaat pizza!!
I think they might have run out of pineapples after my 6 days visits in a row….
Quality time

Before my first visit at Dominos, I went with two of my happy friends – Dekel and Ayal to the big hall to see what’s all about. We took the special EJC bus and drove away to the unknown.
The big hall was divided to several small areas for workshops and downstairs there was some squash courts for practice. It was more comfortable than the 24 hours gym, but still.. quite a bit of walking (or waiting for the special bus)…..

The Gala show -
It was a bit disappointing for me… several acts looked like… not “Gala” enough.. I mean, costume wise, or performance wise. Adding that the hosting that for my opinion was too long. Some numbers really I liked were Jens Sigsgaard (3 balls), Jeanine (contact), Ines Brunn (bicycle acrobatic) and Grigoriy Lovigin (balls conductor).
All in all I guess last year’s was better, and actually unreachable considering the amazing numbers it had.

On the last day the convention had its traditional parade and games.
The parade was awesome, probably the best I’ve experienced. The atmosphere was great, the weather was perfect and the city was (and probably still is) beautiful. Props to the marching drums band and the local people who spilled water on us all the time.
The games were also well organized and opened with flaming bow and arrow shootings!
It even got happier for me after Bar Mualem‘s multi winning endurances….. yeah…!!

If I would rank this EJC among with the others I’ve been to, I guess it wouldn’t take the 1st place, or even the 2nd.. I think it has something to do with the general atmosphere… the energy level in the gym and in the shows wasn’t high enough, maybe because many jugglers went outside to juggle on the grass and take advantage the sunny days… ohh well……..

More on the post EJC coming up……….