I got started into my magic and entertainment semipro years with a parttime job as a jester in Middle Ages restaurant, on the strengh of being able to juggle three balls and act like a fool.
I can pretty much do anything with three objects (part of my act was to to be “blindfolded” and juggle two onions and one apple, while eating the apple. I would do a club, an M&M and a rubber chicken.
I was pretty good with four but I started getting more into magic before I mastered 5.
I was part of a juggling group and learned how to pass balls and clubs, although it’s been a score of years since then.
If you’re still interested in it, the practice for the Mess isn’t too hard-- there’s a pattern called windmill, and you work up to that by noting one ball, and throwing it under your arm (so if it’s in your left hand you throw it under your right arm). When you catch it in your right hand, throw it over the top to your left hand (a reverse cascade throw). Once you’ve become comfortable doing that pattern with one of the balls, you start doing every ball in that pattern. In other words, you throw the ball in your left hand in an under the arm throw, but before you catch it in your right hand, throw the ball that’s currently in your right hand in an over throw. If you’re doing it correctly, your arms will be circling each other (hence the windmill name).
Then you practice that going the other direction. Once you have them both, you do one round of windmill going one way, then follow it with the opposite direction. Sorry if this is confusing-- I couldn’t find a link to a windmill pattern. You can download Juggle Master from juggling.org (a fantastic resource, and how I learned all of my more complicated tricks), but it runs badly on Vista.
I really do believe juggling is something not everybody can learn to do. It requires you to embrace an essential paradox: giving your complete and undivided attention to two (or three, or four) things at once.
I can only do the standard inside-up-throw, which I taught myself when I was 10 years old. I haven’t actually tried to figure out the outside-over-throw. I did however, learn to juggle with a partner. That was kinda fun. Not sure if we’d still be able to do it or not, but we’d sit there and practice it for half an hour at a time, and get up to about 100 throws before one of us threw the ball to the other too hard in an effort to catch one that got to us too fast and then we’d drop it.
I’ve tried doing 4 at a time but it’s simply too confusing for my feeble brain.
I can hardly hold a single object in sneakers on dry land with both feet on the ground without dropping it, much less juggle… I just wanted to say that right up until the moment I opened this thread, I read your name as “SiouxChef”–a play on “sous chef” and thought you were a Native American guy who liked to cook. :smack:
I can juggle three clubs & four balls. Four balls is pretty iffy nowadays, as I’m out of practice, but back in the day I had it down pretty solid. I was making good progress at five–had it where I could consistently get through five or ten cycles before the pattern started to degrade and balls flew everywhere.
I taught myself the three-ball shower in high school completely on my own. Learned about the standard cascade pattern from Silverberg’s Lord Valentine’s Castle some time later, and said, “I bet that’s a lot easier than what I’ve been doing!” And it was.
It seems to be taught in an increasing number of schools these days (around 6th grade or so), and I believe most kids eventually “get” it. I’ve heard that a basic level of proficiency (e.g. 25 throws of a 3-ball cascade) is sometimes a graduation requirement.
You may not have been totally serious in that comment, but it’s a subect I’ve always found interesting…
I’ve taught thousands of people (no exaggeration) to juggle. Never found a person who couldn’t do it with sufficient practice. Of course, some took a while before it clicked.
These days I teach people to fly airplanes, and I’ve been struck by the similarities. It’s all about multi-tasking, which brings me to your second point.
I don’t think it’s correct to say you are giving your undivided attention to several objects at once. When I juggled five objects in my stage act, I was not giving complete attention to each simultaneously. I was looking at the peaks of my tosses, and very briefly examining each object in turn as they crossed the apex of their throws.
That’s what the human brain does: it moves quickly from one task to another, which gives the illusion of simultanaeity.
And with sufficient experience skills become so ingrained (especially rhythmic tasks) that one can do them while doing something else. Such as riding a unicycle while juggling, which also I did in my act. But again, while my body may have been doing two things in real time, my brain was quickly bouncing back and forth between them.
People learn all kinds of complex skills, and I think it does a disservice to place mystique around this ability. Hitting a baseball is every bit as difficult as juggling - more so, I think. It’s just that playing baseball is a common experience for many of us. Juggling is not, so we create erroneous reasons for why it’s “harder”.
I can juggle 3, learned at about 25 or so. Cascade. Taught myself with big scarves to start with. Start with one, work on your tosses, add another scarf, finally add the last one.
Ok, I just did a search. I did a cursory look at this program, and it’s very similar to how I learned. It’s not high buck production, but it’ll do the trick. I will pretty much guarantee you if you go through this series, and follow her directions, you’ll be able to juggle by the end. It may not be pretty, but you’ll get the rhythm of a cascade and a drop. After you get the rhythm, you’ll refine your skills, and maybe move on to bigger and better things. Even if you don’t–at least you’ll be able to juggle. Stay with the scarves until you get the rhythm, don’t start with balls.
Actually, scarves won’t help you get the rhythm at all. They fall at variable rates due to their aerodynamic properties. Juggling is very task specific due to the timing involved. If you want to learn with balls, practice with balls.
That’s not to say juggling scarves will hinder your learning. It just won’t be of much help.
There’s been some research on this by Robert Hautala, I’ll find a link later if you like. Or you can maybe Google it.
Also, Peter Beek did some interesting research into dynamical systems theory using juggling as a novel task. He quantified the necessary timing elements of 3-ball juggling, and found that scarves don’t follow it. Essentially, they’re unpredictable rather than rhythmic.
Well, for me it helped a lot. When I would try to learn with balls, I was too busy trying to catch them careening all over. There was no opportunity to develop *any *rhythm.
Balls tend to roll all over the damn place, scarves pretty much land at your feet, increasing your actual juggling time, as opposed to looking for stray balls under the couch time. They are also much slower in the air, and much easier to catch. I made the transition to balls, and I believe that most people can, if so inclined.
This suggestion and this video series I linked to is very rudimentary, I know. It was directed at all the people in this thread who have tried and said, “there’s no way I can ever do it.” I was testifying that this worked for me, and I believe it works for most people.
No, it’s not ball juggling or club juggling. But if they try it and are successful, (and I believe scarves have a pretty high success rate,) it’s a little farther than they were. Which might motivate them to try to tackle more skills.
Time-on-task is the biggest factor in successful practice. I believe he found that people who practiced with beanbags had the highest success rate because they didn’t roll away when dropped, and more practice time was attained.
And I don’t mean to belittle your personal experience. Scarves may very well have worked for you.
As a professional performer and teacher of juggling (meaning, I did it for a living) my goal was to teach many people quickly and effectively. That meant I had to use the best techniques I could find.
At one time, about ten years ago, I read just about every piece of research ever conducted on juggling. There wasn’t very much, but I went carefully through what was there. That and my experience over the years has convinced me that scarves aren’t that helpful if your goal is to eventually juggle balls.
But that might not be important, really. Part of the fun is the process, which in the end is very personal. But I believe in efficient teaching, so I try to share my experiences when this subject comes up.
In a nutshell, the most important aspect of juggling is the timing (see Beek’s work on dynamical sytems theory). Catching is incidental, in my experience. So throwing and catching one ball is usually a waste of practice time. As is changing the fundamental timing of the skill with scarves. It’s throwing one object in relation to another in real time that is the crucial element.
However, motivation is another matter. Maybe success with scarves gives people a mental zing that inspires them to try harder when they move on to balls. I’m not aware of any studies on this, but one tries to keep an open mind.
Apologies for the hijack, but this stuff is endlessly fascinating to me. I’ve never tired of learning how we learn and how best to teach.
Interestingly enough, when I am thinking back to when I originally learned, I went from scarves to bean bags to balls to misc items. So, you are more than likely correct in your timing point that you are making. Scarves aren’t the same thing as balls. Which aren’t the same thing as clubs or rings.
To me, I had made cursory attempts periodically through the years, but had always failed. Scarves made it easier for me to make the connection.
Maybe this is similar to training wheels on a bike. It doesn’t teach you how to actually ride a bike, but it’s much easier and gets you pointed in the right direction. It also gives you confidence and a sense of accomplishment. Some people never need training wheels, they just hop on and go. Some people need training wheels for a year.
