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Free online Contact Juggling Videos!
Contact Juggling [CJ] is one of the most hypnotic and fascinating forms of the art of juggling. Unlike normal juggling, in which objects are thrown, spun, or balanced, in contact juggling, as its name implies, objects remain in contact with the body. The standard object used is a transparent ball, which is usually plastic,but has the look of a magical crystal ball. This ball is rolled in patterns over the hands and arms (and sometimes chest, feet, and head). There are endless variations, and there is no throwing or catching, so the effect is extremely graceful. It tends to have different effects on different watchers - some people are indifferent, while others simply cannot tear their eyes away. The clear balls pick up light from the surroundings, so if there are brightly colored lights nearby, the balls will twinkle and flash as they move.
The introduction to James Ernest's book explains:
"The illusion created is one of a free-floating, weightless ball, subject to unusual laws of motion. A good contact juggler can make his own movements seem almost unrelated to the movements of the ball; the attention of the audience is always fixed on the ball. Contact juggling is, above all, graceful and absorbing."
While manipulating these clear balls is the most common form of contact juggling, it is not the only one. Any manipulation that keeps an object in contact with the body is contact juggling. This includes things like Harlem Globetrotter style basketball rolls and the habitual pen-spinning of bored students.
CJ with clear balls has been around for at least ten years, but my observations suggest that it only begun moving from incredibly obscure to moderately obscure in the late 90's. At my college, for example, no one else had heard of CJ when I got there in 1994, but by 1997 several arriving students were practitioners of the art.
Under Construction.
MM is a genius of physical coordination and choreography. Besides his many other talents, he is an amazing contact juggler. To learn more about him, check out this bio, this Christian Science Monitor bio, this Boston Pops Bio, or this little subpage of a Labyrinth fan page devoted to him. None of them are very comprehensive, but you should be able to glean a bit of information about his life and times. He is the performer in the video mentioned above, and has appeared on Letterman and PBS.
Great! Contact Juggling is an enormous amount of fun. If you love watching other people do it, you will love doing it yourself. James Ernest writes, in his book:
"It is the mesmerizing quality of contact juggling that truly seperates it from other forms. To take a single ball and cause your audience to sit quietly amazed; to do something so simple and obvious and still hear, "How is that possible?"; this is the beauty of contact juggling. Juggling chain saws won't make them sit silently, and they won't ask you how you do it. Just why. And, unlike producing a tiger from a fish tank, you can actually tell them how you do it, and they will still want to see it again."
But be warned - CJ is (in my experience) a difficult and frustrating form of juggling, with a high initial learning curve. It is not like three-ball juggling, which anyone can pick up after a little practice. It may be weeks or months before your contact juggling looks smooth and graceful, and the heavy balls can be wearing on the body - especially when you drop them on your toes. Ouch. But don't be too discouraged. Once you pick up the basics, you will be able to quickly learn new tricks and to "jam", creating new moves on the fly. And once you are good at CJ, it is an enormous amount of fun, and you will find yourself "practicing" for the sheer fluid joy of the movements.
One ball will be plenty in the beginning, although it takes three or four to do some of the more advanced patterns. Also you will probably find that your first ball gets pretty dinged up, and you may want to save that as a practice ball and get a shinier one for performance (or just showing off). Your ball should be made of plastic, such as silicone, lexan, or acrylic. It is very important that the balls be transparent, because then you cannot tell when they are spinning. It is this invariance to rotation that gives CJ its magical floating quality. The ball is actually rolling along your fingers, but it looks like it is just floating because you cannot see it turn.
The balls can be dropped on carpet, grass, and other soft-ish surfaces without damage. If they are dropped on harder surfaces, like concrete or metal, small scrapes and dings will appear. Small marks can be polished off with a special cloth. Unless you do unspeakably terrible things to your ball, it will not break.
You can get a ball from one of the juggling stores listed in the next section. They cost around USD $15-$30. Or just get clear, colored, or ultraviolet acrylic balls from Amazon.
If you cannot afford to get a ball, or you need to get started right away, try an old lacrosse ball, as they are about the right size and weight. Unfortunately, because the transparent nature of the ball is so critical to the way CJ looks, doing tricks with a lacrosse ball (or an orange in the cafateria) will not look anywhere near as good. Still, it works alright for practicing. Pool balls are too small, but better than nothing. Actual crystal balls are too heavy, too fragile, and don't grip well enough, but can be played with for brief periods over padding.
The author of another CJ site has a page about CJ balls.
Once you have The Ball and The Book, and perhaps A Video, all it takes is practice and dedication.
Now that videos are easy to make and host on the web, this page finally gets to show contact juggling in action!
TODO: Videos from yahoo video searchSince I don't really go to jugglefests or read juggling magazines or any of that, I don't have good access to this information.
Because they are spherical and transparent, CJ balls have interesting optical characteristics, . If you hold them in front of things, they magnify and distort the image. Contact juggling in front of interesting surfaces produces interesting results. I discovered this with the aid of a psychedelic wall poster that glows in black light. Moving the ball in front of the poster produces cool visual effects, such as in the above photo. CJ balls look especially good where there are neat sources of light around, such as christmas lights, party lighting, and bonfires.
This page just touches the surface of what a good CJ site could be. Fortunately, since I don't have time to push those boundaries, some other, more enthusiastic people are doing it. Contact Juggling's internet presence has grown rapidly since I discovered there were no good sites many years ago. Good job everyone!
Patri is an SF Bay Area dilettante. When he was a teenager, he saw James Ernest (author of the book) perform, and was mesmerized. He bought the book and tried practicing with a lacrosse ball. Despite his best efforts, it never looked any good. He gave up until his senior year of college, when he met someone with an acrylic ball and discovered that the problem wasn't him, it was his balls. He began contact juggling compulsively, and it has been a beloved hobby and means of relaxation every since. You can learn lots more about him at his homepage.
Besides myself, the following people or pages have contributed information to this page:
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by Patri Friedman, so don't violate my intellectual property rights
until the Millennium comes and renders such things unimportant.
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page. Last Modified: 10/2004