January Archive Highlight - How I Learned to Juggle (Patreon)

As it turns out, I have a habit of leaving things to the last minute - which happens to be fairly incompatible with getting large, last minute gigs and bookings. So it is that January’s reflection on habits, rehearsals, and learning new skills is coming out the first day of February. Still, it’s here, so if you’ll forgive the tardy arrival of yet another reflection on process, I promise to have some more concrete excerpts of work in the coming months (including the month we’re currently actually in).

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From a young age, I wanted to know how to juggle. 

Well, to be entirely honest, from a young age I wanted to be able to do magic tricks, but something about card handling and legerdemain seemed too  intimidating, and I had some vague sense that it was difficult to get into magic without getting very into it, and so I settled on the nearer ambition of being able to juggle something, which seemed like having a pocket full of just enough magic to delight someone without making a whole thing out of it.

(I feel that in this previous paragraph alone I have communicated much of what there was to know about me as a young person, and possibly even most of the insights available about me as a person-person).

In any case, my attempts to learn juggling in the era before “the sun never sets on Youtube” were clumsy and poorly informed, and despite a few friends juggling in front of me and saying “see, do that,” I was roundly unsuccessful. And then one fateful week near the end of High School, I attended a scholarship program, which brought me to the Aspen Ideas Festival. There at an event, I met and spent time in the program with a notable magician, to whom I casually mentioned my diminutive dream deferred; my ongoing failure to juggle. “I can teach anyone to juggle in an hour or less,” he confidently stated, a gleam in his eye, adding definitively; “it’s on my website.” He deftly drew a few small objects from his pickets, lined me up near a wall, demonstrated the basics of the form, pointed out the common pitfalls and poor habits. “Elbows in, soft knees, keep the tosses consistent, passing the same point right at eye level.” Lesson complete, he patted me on the back and set me throwing.

And throwing.

And throwing.

After about an hour and a half we both had places we needed to be, and I had hardly a ball in the air, and perhaps even less grace than I started with. “I’m going to have to change my website,” he muttered to a point right at eye level of a thousand yard stare.

Having neatly shattered two dreams record time, I thought it best to hang up my hands and designate myself a formal no-juggle zone—and up they remained hung until 6 years later, when I found myself working for a Renaissance faire in the summer of 2015. Which is to say, I found myself spending the entire summer, in the woods, too far from the nearest town to walk, with no public transit, no WiFi, and no cell phone reception.

Which is to say, more than a bit in need of a hobby.

My coworker and future dear friend Alex Orthwein (former clown, frequent hospital entertainer, current professional Santa Clause) offered to teach the group to juggle, and waived away my mumbling about broken-hearted magicians and handed me three old balloons filled with rice, along with some familiar advice: “Elbows in, soft knees, keep the tosses consistent, passing the same point right at eye level.” And then as he walked away he added “and if you can’t do three balls yet, just juggle one for a while until you’re good at it.”

And so I taped a piece of paper to the walls of my room, and made three columns:

                            One Ball                             Two Balls                                Three Balls

I started with one, and did as many clean tosses as I could, until I got to 10 in a row. I marked 10 tallies in the first column, then tried with two balls; I only got to 4 tosses before flinging them everywhere, at which point I went back to One, and threw until I beat my high score—at which point I went back to two.

And I did this every day. Gradually, I found that a little forgiveness could go a long away, and began using a “three strikes before regressing to the previous level” approach. After 3 times getting knocked back to one ball, I'd stop for the day. And eventually, my sheet looked like this:

                             One Ball                              Two Balls                                Three Balls
                              100+                                       70                                             55

By that point I’d mostly stopped chasing “high scores” in one ball, and stayed mostly on "levels 2 and 3," but when I got frustrated or felt like I was hitting a plateau, I did still find it useful to drop back to one occasionally to reset and focus. It was a tedious system (though perhaps even more tedious to read about than to do), but I was surprised by how quickly it produced results. I can't say definitively why it did, but my best guess is that my previous attempts had been marred by me trying to throw three balls at once, when really what I needed to do was throw one ball at a time, many many times. Adhering to my little sheet meant my default was to practice the core component, not the final implementation—as it turns out, it really does help a lot to throw the ball at eye level, with easy consistent tosses—and much of learning to juggle seemed to be getting to a point where you could do throw one clean toss automatically, as opposed to only actively concentrating. (Actors, if you've ever gotten lines really and truly down cold, you know the feeling). As an impatient person, using “high scores” motivated me to push little longer each day, and creating a set of “rules” made practicing more automatic, requiring no real decisions except when to start.  

Looking back at this, I see the rules and high scores and understand it to be a version of “gamification" — to date I use a similar tools when trying to build new habits in my personal life, or when practicing music (it’s one thing to say “learn the piano one hand at a time—it’s another thing to actually force oneself to do so). But this month I began to reflect on this sheet as an interesting model for a specific problem that arises in producing long-form one-on-one immersive works.

With pieces like The Telelibrary and Undersigned, the primary way I learned to do them was through sheer repetition - 

gradually building new components or techniques session by session. For each I wrote a few basic lines and rules and memorized them before performing, but most of what has actually ended up consistent show to show consists of things I said or did in the moment to solve a novel problem, and then repeated each next session for efficiency. In both of these pieces, I need to be listening and responding to the participant in real time, tracking their choices and the story beats we’ve built so far, and lining up or preparing the next moment in their experience, so that it can occur seemingly immediately and impromptu as a response to their input.

Trying to replicate this training process for the other performers taking on the multiple roles in Undersigned presents a tricky issue; it took me about 1900 hours of performances across 3 major pieces and many side experiments to find my particular rhythm of “juggling” the many elements of this piece. But since I don’t have the patience (or the funding) to spend 4 years training someone, I’ve had to ask if there’s a more efficient way to arrive at a similar point.

The general pattern for practice in theater is to receive a script, read through the lines together, rehearse individual scenes one at a time, and then attempt them in sequence until you’re stepping through the whole play. In the course of presenting them to other performers, I’ve produced full “scripts'' for both Undersigned and The Telelibrary, but I found the exercise of creating these scripts to be much more about documenting or reflecting on those pieces and their structure than about creating a resource that a person can use to generate a performance. And when a show is as responsive as one-on-one shows tend to be, any “scenes” you may be able to identify don’t really meaningfully exist isolated from each other; the real “show” that exists is the thread you draw together through the time spent in the experience.

As such, I’ve found that simply attempting runs of the full 50 minutes of Undersigned over and over is tantamount to trying to throw three balls at once. Instead, when trying to work with new performers, I’ve been steadily gravitating towards composing small exercises that represent the different elements of the piece, which I can use with performers to “get in reps” and build familiarity with each component before attempting the larger whole.  

Shifting the idea of rehearsal in this way also lets me move away from a traditional structure and division between rehearsal and performance; most “show” days for Undersigned have involved some amount of drilling and prep for me and performers, sometimes even allowing us to partially or completely cover the cost of venue/time for rehearsing through tickets sold for later that day. When performances are spread out over many months, we do lose an element of focused attention, which can slow progress. But when there’s no set date or deadline for when a given performer needs to be ready, I find the flexibility this model creates allows me to chase after performers who would otherwise be far too “booked and blessed” to lock down for an intensive rehearsal period, and lets performers scale their investment based on both their interest and availability. Just as the process of booking Undersigned with venues entails presenting a small footprint and finding unused spaces/dates, this model of rehearsing and collaborating aims to sit comfortably between the many varied commitments of a freelance performer.

To be perfectly candid, none of this feels locked in and set; I’ve yet to have the “lightbulb” moment of stumbling into an easy, accessible practice model, as I did with those rice-filled balloons all those years ago. But in the process of asking “how else could this work?”, I find myself increasingly looking outside the world of theater for the tools, processes, and ideas that can make novel forms and shapes of performance more achievable.

I don’t quite have the magician’s confidence to put any claims on my website yet — but we’ll see what the future holds.