RIT Spring Juggle In '06 Diary

I received an email from my friend Sean Elliott inviting me to join him on a roadtrip to the RIT convention. With only a week before the fest, I finished my Java project (you geeks might find it amusing: it's an English-to-leetspeak translator) and the rest of my homework so I could go with him. Nate, who is also from our juggling club, came along too. He's a juggling newbie so this was to be his first festival. I have a feeling that Nate will now have some incredibly high standards for juggling festivals for a long time. RIT was amazing, especially the show.

We arrived in Rochester from Ohio around 8:30PM Friday. I found Brian Gadomski and talked with him for a few minutes. He had a minor wrist injury several months ago, so that plus his busy school schedule had kept him from juggling a whole lot. I asked him about his WJF routine and he wasn't even sure if he was going to compete this year. It didn't concern him a whole lot, he was just happy to be there and juggle. And so was I! Jay Gilligan and Erik Nillson arrived soon after we had got to the gym. Erik is a professional drummer from Sweden. He would be performing the live music for Jay's performance at the Saturday night public show. He has absolutely zero background in juggling, in fact Sean said he saw Erik learning 3 balls in the gym. Jay gave a great workshop that night on what he does best: being creative. No one can force creativity, but he was able to give us some basic pointers on how to think outside of the box and make up new tricks. I'll save my thoughts on the workshop for another post.

After the workshop, I met Joe Showers and Wes Peden. I have talked to both on Gatto's forum before, but it was fun to hang with them in real life. I had actually seen Wes at SIRCUS one year, but I didn't really talk to him much then. They are both amazing jugglers. Joe is actually my age (19) and has been juggling the same amount of time as me (2 years), but he is quite a bit better!

The gym closed at 10PM, which sucked. I'm thinking it had to do with campus rules or the coordinators would have kept it open all night. Sean, Nate, and I went to our hotel to check in. As soon as we walk through the sliding doors, a midget walks up to us. "Are you guys jugglers?" she asks. Though we are a little surprised, we manage to reply positively. She apologizes for being so blunt and introduces herself as Alysha, the coordinator for the Little People of American convention going on at our hotel. Apparently, she heard that there was a juggling convention going on during the same weekend and wanted to know if we could do some juggling for an audience of kids and little people. We agreed to perform and promised to find some more jugglers to join us. As Nate said, "You only get two chances in life to perform for little people."
Nate has the best one liners.

We got up around 9AM, ate breakfest, and went to the gym. Even though our hotel was five minutes away we still drove because it was pouring rain. That was another thing that sucked. My dirty rained upon glasses plus the lovely glare provided by the gym lights made it hard for me to practice anything with high throws. I sucked it up (hah) and juggled anyways. Sean and I practiced 531 hand offs (more like 75300 I suppose) and 9 and 10 ball passing. Ever since Sean taught me how to juggle we have always enjoyed passing together. We can't do it often because of school, so we pass whenever we can. Joe and Wes did a 3 ball workshop covering just about anything asked. Joe taught me how to properly do 3 balls behind the back (the harder, non-blind version), which I have worked on a lot since I got back from RIT (my record is 6 catches... slow but steady progress). Later on, I got out my camera and shot some footage of Wes and Joe. Wes showed off some solid 3-5 clubs tricks. If you thought he was good on the WJF programs, you should see him now! 5 club 360, then a nice run of backcrosses straight into flats. Lots of neat multiplex scissor catch stuff too. Hopefully a video of my footage will be up by the time you're reading this. Joe showed me part of his club routine which featured a lot of neat 1 and 2 club tricks. It seemed very Jay Gilliganesque (although it was really Dangeresque ;), which was appropriate for the festival...

I took some video of our very own Brian, met a fellow regular of Juggling Talk named Tim (aka nickturbo), and then practiced 7 balls until the games. The festival games were a lot of fun... I guess that's why they are games. Wes cleaned up in quarter and dollar coin juggling, which apparently I was smart enough not to enter. I lasted a whole minute in 5 ball endurance before my arms gave out when they called a pattern change. I got out on Simon Says on a 3-up 360, which rather annoyed me because I was nailing them earlier. The best trick competition was a lot of fun. I'm not sure if it is a popular festival activity but it should be. There was plenty of cool tricks. Wes sat on 2 propped-up clubs while juggling 3 and went into a 5 club juggle. Joe did a weird 441 body wrap. Wes' younger sister juggled 3 clubs on a walking globe. I'm pretty sure she walked on the globe the WHOLE festival, haha. Some of the footbaggers joined in on the fun too. One juggled 3 balls while passing a footbag from foot to foot. Brian won the contest with a 7 ring suicide (He pulled down 6 rings to his neck and thrusted his head through the last one).

The gym closed around 5PM, and the public show was to start at 8PM. We returned to our hotel a second time, constantly being reminded by Alysha to not forget about our promise to juggle for the little people. We ate at Friendly's (highly recommended) with our new friend John (red-haired guy that I had seen at SIRCUS but never talked to until now) and proceeded to the show.

The show was incredible. Admittedly, I haven't seen many festival shows, but still this was my best. Gary Auerbach did some cool frisbee manuevers. Steve Brown did a hilarious yo-yo routine synchronised to the music (it reminded me of Get the Shoe). Wes Peden closed the first half of the show with an amazing dropless routine. He did this one cool trick that is like 3 club mills while batting one of the clubs side to side in a helicopter spin. He pooled (sic) off a lot of solid 4 club moves, including scissors backcrosses (and a great save during that run as well). After he finished with 5 club flats, the audience went nuts and gave him a well deserved standing ovation.

On to Jay Gilligan. If you thought it couldn't have gotten better than Wes' stellar performance, you'd be absolutely wrong. The first part of Nouveaux Nouveaux Remix was all Erik. Erik did a a very funny cooking themed performance. He "chopped" up vegetables for his dish, when in fact his utensils were used for creating some awesome drum beats. This odd looking presentation was complimented by many random rants in Erik's native tongue, making the whole show twice as funny. After Erik had totally made a mess of the stage, he retreated back to his drumset and let Jay sweep up the floor and setup his props. And once Jay picked up a prop, he didn't stop. Jay said this was the hardest show he's ever performed, and there's no doubt about that. Inbetween his seemingly impossible prop manipulations, most if not all of them have never been even thought of before, he threw in some insane technical juggling. Solid 6 ball fountain, halfshower, and 7 ball cascade. Erik continued to bring the comic relief. When Jay dropped on an 8 ring pulldown (!), Erik stopped drumming, picked up a megaphone, and screamed in a manner that sounded like he was asking you to take an order at a McDonalds drive thru: "HOLD ON!!! HE'S GONNA TRY IT AGAIN!!!!!"

The audience gave Jay at least 3 standing ovations throughout the whole routine (one was after a solid run of 5 club quads... quads!). All of them were deserved. The whole show was unbelievable. No one had any idea what would happen that night except Jay. If you have a chance to see him on stage, especially in this show, do it.

We returned to the hotel and juggled for the little people. It was a great time. We juggled for them in the hotel lobby, so the whole atmosphere was very laid back. They wanted to watch and we wanted to juggle. All of us had a great time. Nate and I nailed our passing trick second try, we were pretty excited about that (pass 6 balls, I go into 5, go back into passing). A few other jugglers showed up to "perform," so we made some new juggling friends as well.

(Left to right: ???, Kelly, ???, ???, Sean, Alysha, Nate, myself, and Nick.)

After hanging out in the gym Sunday morning and saying our goodbyes, we headed home. For my fourth juggling festival, I had an amazing time. Hopefully I'll see you at RIT next year (better yet: come to SIRCUS!). Thanks for reading.

My footage: YouTube | JuggleThis
Wes Peden's performance: http://theartofjuggling.com/video/Wes_RIT_Club_Routine.mpg
Pictures by Jason Paul: http://xome.net/gallery/Juggling/RIT-2006/index.html
Rec.juggling photo thread
Rec.juggling write-up thread