The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

Like magicians and comedians, jugglers live with constant requests for impromptu performances. Understandably, they tend to find these demands tiresome. One called such a request the “dancing-monkey routine.” The majority, however, accept the attention for what it is: a byproduct of the profession, akin to the autographs a movie star has to sign. In a small but redeeming way, the requests even speak to the essence of the performer’s appeal: juggling is simple yet magical, accessible yet perplexingly captivating; it’s the circus distilled.

  Gilligan’s own attitude depends on his mood, and in the airport that day he must have been feeling generous, for he plucked the rings from the table and, with a quick instinctive look to the ceiling, began to juggle. The rings ripped through the stale air, cresting near the neon lights, then charging earthward. The official watched, entranced. Soon a woman, her teenage son, and a businessman were watching, too. The whole terminal, in fact, was staring in silence. When Gilligan finished, a small but enthusiastic round of applause rose from the crowd. The officer, beaming like a headlight, slid Gilligan’s bag across the counter. “Well, all right,” he said enthusiastically. “You really are a juggler!” Gilligan heaved the duffel onto his shoulder and forced a smile. He no longer found such requests to perform flattering. Now he was tired of missing his flights.

  THE WORLD IS FULL of professional jugglers. No comprehensive census exists, but an informal estimate based on professional records, booking websites, and a lot of poking around on the Internet would put the number between thirty and fifty thousand. Although Jay Gilligan is a professional juggler, he’s different from most because he is a professional “art” juggler, one of the few Americans who can say that.

  “Five years ago, I counted for some reason the number of American jugglers doing modern stuff like I do,” Gilligan announced over his shoulder while the rush-hour crowd of the Parisian Métro jostled around us. “I think there were six. Today, it’s basically me. Oh, and Michael Moschen.” (Moschen is the godfather of modern juggling in America and the only juggler to win a MacArthur “genius” award. Incongruently, Moschen also played the part of David Bowie’s glass-ball-manipulating hands in the movie Labyrinth.)

  Gilligan glided to a stop in front of a scratched map bolted to the Métro’s glistening bricks. Raising a long finger, he traced a line around the base of Montmartre, Paris’s bohemian butte to the north. Our destination was Accro’Balles, Paris’s most popular juggling store. Gilligan, who was in town to teach some workshops at the National School, had heard that the store was carrying a new type of larger ring, and he wanted to see it for himself.

  I had tagged along to talk about juggling. As a result of my conversations with Pascal, I had decided to study the circus differently. Rather than analyze the impact of the circus as a whole, I hoped to investigate each of its arts individually. This strategy seemed appropriate given the divergent histories of the arts and also the present state of the circus. Long considered cogs in the wheel of a larger show, many artists of the various disciplines had recently “liberated” themselves from the ring to practice their skills as separate and distinct forms, or what the French called “complete arts” (des arts entiers).

  The repercussions of this shift in focus are wide. In the conventional circus model, most artists adhered to certain “codes.” Unwritten and sometimes unstated, these rules nevertheless dictated everything from how long an act should be (five to seven minutes, as I noted previously) to what a performer should wear (the brighter the better). But now performers were free to reinvent themselves and their disciplines, to pose questions never before possible: What’s the difference between an acrobat and a dancer? How can a clown be funny but also tragic? What is juggling? For the artists answering these questions, it was a thrilling time. As one modern acrobat told me, “It feels like our art is just being born.”

  Among jugglers, Gilligan was at the center of this shift, and in many ways he epitomized it. When I met him, he was twenty-six years old. Like most jugglers, he had grown up practicing a conventional and technical form of the art that consisted of throwing balls in the air and catching them when they came down. But with the passage of time, his work became unabashedly avant-garde. In interviews, Gilligan spoke openly about juggling as “art.” He experimented with patterns of movement and modes of presentation, incorporating dance and acting. He stopped performing bits and started presenting full-length shows. In one, an hour-long piece featuring a musician with a guitar and a laptop, he wore a gray scientist’s smock and simulated a scientist’s lab onstage, where he’d discover objects, nudging them experimentally across his body and occasionally tossing them in the air. (“Jay doesn’t do tricks,” British juggler Luke Burrage explained to me. “He does moves.”) Gilligan seemed an ideal spokesman for the changes in the form, and one who could help me answer such questions: What does it mean to be a juggling artist? How can a simple physical skill be “artistic”?

  In the dim hall of the Métro, Gilligan stood a head taller than everyone else and appeared to be endowed with a heavy, pliable bulk. He dressed like a BMX racer or a bassist in a rock band, with sagging jeans and tousled hair. He has a relaxed way about him and moves with a rolling, loose-limbed gait, like a man emerging from a hot tub.

  “What happened to the other modern jugglers?” I asked him. He shrugged and said, “I guess they decided it wasn’t worth it.” He recited a list of names followed by phrases like “He’s on a cruise ship now” or “He’s gone corporate” or “I think he’s in Vegas.”

  For a traditional juggler interested in living by his trade, those are indeed the three prevailing options. Among younger traditional jugglers, work on cruise ships tends to be the most coveted. There are difficulties with such a job, of course, but they are mostly technical. For example, although newer ships come equipped with stabilizers to counteract the roll of the swells, jugglers working on older vessels might find the height of their throws varying by as much as a foot each. But cruise-ship jugglers perform in as few as two shows per week for upward of $1,500 per week, all the while enjoying sunshine, shuffleboard, beaches, and bikini-clad dancers.

  Of course, not everyone likes to travel, and for the more domestic set there is the “Vegas gig.” This term is technically a misnomer, since the gig applies not just to Las Vegas, but to cabarets around the world. In Paris, the best-known venue of this genre is the Lido, a swanky cabaret on the Champs-Élysées that features jugglers in their topless reviews. (Someone once described it as “naked women and a juggler.”) Some of the world’s best jugglers perform there, including Anthony Gatto, the self-proclaimed and critically confirmed “Greatest Juggler in the World”; and Vladik, a nineteen-year-old Ukrainian American with a slithering and corporal juggling style in the vein of Cirque du Soleil’s Viktor Kee. The balls roll across his body in trajectories that seem to defy gravity. I met Vladik, who stands five feet seven in thick-soled boots, for an afternoon walk along the Seine. He finds that the “cabaret gig” is a good one, but far from perfect. Though the work is well paid, it’s also exhausting—with at least one show a night, sometimes two—and somewhat limiting artistically. “I don’t really have to practice anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve been doing the routine for years, so it’s basically automatic.” He was lifting weights, but “only because I want to do the routine with my shirt off, and so I’m trying to get a six-pack.”

  The third opportunity, “the corporate gig,” is also known by the slang term “corpos.”

  “So the guys from Microsoft get together to plan the next big teambuilding hurrah,” Gilligan says. “They’re trying to think of something entertaining, and somebody raises his hand and says, ‘Hey, I saw this weird modern circus thing on TV. Circus Olé, I think it’s called. Maybe we could get one of those guys.’ So they call me.”

  Gilligan doesn’t do “corpos,” though. Nor does he like performing in cabarets or on cruise ships. Just entering Las Vegas makes his “skin crawl”; he calls the city a “graveyard for Cirque du Soleil.” />
  Instead, Gilligan performs his modern juggling shows in theaters. He is based in Sweden and works mostly in Europe and the Far East. In the six years before our meeting, he had juggled in England, Holland, Spain, Ireland, Finland, Norway, Italy, Scotland, Belgium, Korea, and Japan. The preference isn’t purely professional, he claims; there’s also a cultural element. “In America,” he said, “I got calls to do birthday parties or to work at a nightclub. They offered me free parking and a pitcher of shitty beer.” He paused as a train wheezed to a stop in front of us. “I’m not saying I’m above it,” he said as we boarded. “It’s just kind of amazing to come to Europe two weeks later and play in front of six hundred people who know you before the show.”

  I asked him to analyze this discrepancy.

  He thought for a few seconds, then replied loudly to be heard above the din. “You know, I think people in America have a preconceived notion of what a juggler is. They think of a kind of clown act, of guys performing a glorified party trick on the streets. The idea of a ninety-minute show of a juggling clown doesn’t seem that interesting.” He shrugged. “To be honest,” he said, “I can’t say I blame them.”

  ON JULY 1, 1912, on a clear moonlit night in London, Paul Cinquevalli, England’s greatest juggler and a living international legend, enacted what might have been juggling’s artistic apex: He appeared as a featured performer during the inaugural Royal Command Performance for King George V and Queen Mary.

  At the time, juggling was at a popular peak. A staple of the circus as well as the booming vaudeville and music-hall circuits, jugglers featured prominently on stages across Europe and America. As popular as movie actors or rock musicians today, jugglers were major cultural figures, with newspapers reporting their travels alongside those of generals and princes and describing the prestigious venues where they performed, such as the Wintergarten in Berlin and B. F. Keith’s Palace in New York.

  And no star was bigger than Cinquevalli. Born to Polish aristocrats, he had joined a wandering troupe of Italian acrobats as a boy and worked his way up through the circus, first as a trapezist, then, after a nasty fall in Saint Petersburg, as a juggler. His routine was centered on his feats of strength. With the neatly waxed mustache of a sportsman, and his muscular frame revealed through an athlete’s singlet, Cinquevalli hoisted men above him in chairs, heaved whiskey barrels and bathtubs into the air, and caught a forty-eight-pound bowling ball on the bones at the base of his neck. What made him truly famous, however, was his creativity. “Cinquevalli is a wonder incarnate, a perambulating mass of amazement,” said a critic in Adelaide. “You leave the theatre conscious that the English language does not contain adjectives big enough.”

  For his performance for King George V and Queen Mary, Cinquevalli devised a particularly ingenious routine. He called it his “human billiards” act. With the help of a Regent Street tailor, he crafted a baize topcoat for himself, decorated with five “pockets” containing miniature sacks of cords dangling from brass hoops. According to a captivated critic, “The balls fly into the air like cannon and then descend, only to glide hither and thither, in and out of the pockets, actuated only by a series of sharp jerks on the part of the player.”

  From high above, the king and queen watched from the royal box. Queen Mary tittered happily throughout the show. According to reports, three million roses decorated the theater for the occasion, tied to the railings and sprinkled across the front of the stage. Never again would a juggler reach such heights.

  Today, it’s hard to imagine that such a scene ever occurred. As Gilligan pointed out in the Métro, most people perceive juggling as a “glorified party trick,” something quirky people do for fun. Before we can understand how the image of this craft fell so precipitously, it would first be instructive to examine how it originally reached such a pinnacle.

  Like most circus arts, juggling has experienced a long arc. Its origins can be traced to the third millennium B.C. Most ancient societies practiced some version of the skill, usually at an amateur level, in accordance with local customs. On the steppes of China, for example, peasants spun plates on sticks and manipulated spears and swords in an effort to while away the hours of their interminable winters. (“It was a bit like going out and tossing a Frisbee with your friends,” Mark Golden, a historian of classical games, told me of similar practices in Greece.) A few professionals survived by the craft, but they lived hard lives as they performed for change in plazas and at crossroads and the occasional banquet. In his Symposium, set in 421 B.C., Xenophon describes the appearance of a juggling girl at a dinner presided over by Socrates. To the tune of a flute, the girl danced with twelve hoops and “flung the hoops into the air—overhead she sent them twirling—judging the height they must be thrown to catch them, as they fell, in perfect time.” According to Xenophon, the guests were impressed. Socrates himself considered the routine proof that “woman’s nature is nowise inferior to man’s.”

  And yet juggling persevered, which elicits the question of why its appeal is so enduring. In some sense, the skill’s early popularity speaks to its simple drama and basic beauty: the rhythms are captivating, and the circular patterns are appealing to the eye. (As Luke Burrage likes to note, each juggling toss creates a moment of tension. “There’s a question posed: Is he going to catch it?”) But there might be a deeper reason as well. In societies around the world, juggling has long been hailed as a meditative, even magical practice. The first recorded images of jugglers were carved into the fifteenth tomb of the Beni Hasan necropolis, overlooking the Nile in central Egypt. These images, dating from roughly 3000 B.C., were dedicated to a priest, and the tomb contains decorations depicting women—slaves, likely—juggling leather balls stuffed with reeds. These women jugglers are first standing and then mounted on piggyback, the action building as in a cartoon strip.

  Janice Kamrin, a Cairo-based Egyptologist with the Smithsonian Institution, told me that when an important figure died, the Egyptians liked to bury the person with objects and images that had brought the person pleasure in life. They believed that the joys might be transported to the afterlife. The images might also illuminate the burial process. In their mortuary cult, Kamrin noted, Egyptians used round objects to represent celestial spheres—planets, moons, and stars. It’s possible that the pictured jugglers performed at the priest’s funeral. With their nimble tricks—tossing and catching the balls, which looped steadily—jugglers might have represented a universe in balance. In a symbolic sense, jugglers held the world in their hands.

  With the advent of the Dark Ages, jugglers in Europe were scuttled just like everyone else. For almost eight hundred years, professional juggling became a lost practice, save for a few minstrels who included juggling in their repertoire. This remained the situation until the beginning of the circus proper in 1768. The majority of early circus producers, including Philip Astley, the father of the form, considered juggling too “small” to fill a ring, and instead encouraged the skill as a kind of spectacular condiment to flavor other acts. One early poster, for instance, testifies to “juggling on the rope.” John Bill Ricketts, the father of the American circus, juggled four oranges while standing on the back of a galloping horse.

  Only in the 1860s did the juggler begin to assume the spotlight, thanks largely to the advent of music halls in Europe. Founded as British beer and song halls, the venues evolved into full performance halls, featuring nightly variety shows, mostly built around singing, but with room for other acts. For jugglers, the music halls proved ideal. Theatrical lighting and the contained space of the stage made their work seem bigger and more spectacular, while also fostering an intimacy that played to the juggler’s solitary endeavor. Immune from the effects of wind, rain, and other inclement weather, jugglers could develop more subtle and complicated tricks, such as “bounce juggling,” made possible by the levelness of the stage and the discovery of rubber.

  The demand for jugglers skyrocketed. Because local European performance traditions were still reco
vering from the Dark Ages, many of the early stars came from abroad, especially from Asia. As early as 1832, Lau Laura, a Chinese specialist in balancing, contortion, and the manipulation of balls of twine, made a much-discussed appearance at London’s Drury Lane Theatre. Fifty years later, Awata Katsnoshin, the official juggler for the Mikado court in Japan, performed a stick-and-ball routine at Niblo’s Garden on Broadway.*

  With the boost of exoticism that captivated European audiences in an age of imperialism, juggling continued to prosper, and by the 1880s it had reached what many consider the golden age of the craft. Across America and Europe, any self-respecting circus or music hall included at least one juggler on its bill.

  In 1885, Benjamin Franklin Keith, a retired circus performer, provided another boost when he created the first vaudeville theater to run continuous performances, in Boston. The new venues that followed provided a glut of professional opportunities. At one point thousands of jugglers were occupied in America alone. To distinguish themselves, jugglers began to diversify. “Weight jugglers” heaved and balanced heavy objects—anchors, cannonballs, and chariots. “Foot jugglers” popped balls, barrels, and people into the air while lying on their backs. There even emerged a sort of “juggling theater,” in which jugglers wove their tricks into theatrical narratives, with characters and plot lines. The Rambler Comedy Juggling Company performed one such act in 1900. According to an article in Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture, the men, who were costumed as waiters and guests in a restaurant, juggled “lamps, loaves, knives, forks, dish-covers and serviettes.” Writing about the Rambler routine, a critic noted “the musical quartette with the wine bottles is distinctly original.”

  During the golden age of juggling, which lasted roughly from 1880 to 1920, what audiences treasured most was creativity. Audiences wanted a juggler who could surprise them by developing a new character or skill to earn their affection. And in this regard nobody was greater than Cinquevalli. He was quite simply the most original juggler the world had ever seen. Dressed in his trademark billiard jacket, Cinquevalli had a repertoire that included an array of tricks involving an impossible number of objects—coins, cigars, umbrellas, barrels, billiard balls, cups of hot tea, turnips, lighted candles, daggers, bottles of soda water. In 1893, he finished training himself to catch an egg on a plate—a feat that had taken nine years to master.