Dimensions of juggling

I was talking with my friend John Haffner (Haffnium72) a long time ago about how to perceive juggling props. I gave some more thought about it and concluded some things that may be interesting to people who are creative with juggling or like to present juggling. It's about each prop having a different dimensional niche and how to exploit it.

If you take each of the three basic props, balls, rings and clubs, you can see that each one is progressively more dimensional. We can categorize balls as one dimensional, rings as two dimensional and clubs as three dimensional. I know that each of them has three dimensions or it could not exist, but still, you can view a ball as a single point, a ring as an object with visible height and length and a club as an object with height, width and depth.

Beginning with clubs (starting big and working our way down) we can create a lot of new ideas. Clubs can be rolled over various body parts, flipped, spun, rotated, NOT flipped, balanced or stalled in almost every way. When I teach my workshop, X-treme one club moves, the idea is to create ideas with clubs, then translate them to rings and balls because I think it's easier to create with an object with all dimensions filled. The up the back hand off I do can be done with rings and balls, as can the body wrap, but I thought of them with clubs because it was easier to execute those tricks. Kick ups with clubs have many more possibilities than rings or balls because of the different ways to get clubs from your hands to your feet and back up. Also, in terms of presentation, clubs are viewable from every angle. Straight on, from the side, from above or underneath, clubs can always be seen and you can usually determine rather quickly how many are being juggled.

Rings have two dimensions and are mostly viewable from the side, unless your doing flat fronts or pancakes. When presenting rings to an audience, it is most common to keep the ring perpendicular to their line of sight for maximum visibility. If the juggler is standing facing the audience, the ring needs to be thrown in such a way to keep it perpendicular to the viewers sight. 360s and 180s are best seen from the side view. This takes away some of the possibility with presenting ring juggling. It's also a little harder to determine how many rings are being juggled if you see it from the side. As for creating, rings, due to their unique structure, can be placed some areas that clubs cannot. If we were using plates or frisbees as the two dimensional object, this would not be true. Still, rings have many explorable opportunities especially with body placement, but other moves executed with clubs become almost impossible (ring alberts?). Not knocking ring juggling, but I feel that creating with clubs is just a bit easier. Ring juggling still has lots of possibility, but requires more "dangerous technique".

Now balls have only one dimension, like a singe point in space. That is good in some ways. Being smaller, it's easier to accomplish moves like mills mess or intricate three ball work like Stefan Sing can present for instance. Also, the single point can be moved over your body in the form of head rolls or other contact moves. When creating, patterns are more common, as well as involved body motion with the juggling, rather than tricks with the actual balls. When presenting balls, unless you're doing pirouettes or backcrosses, facing the audience is more commonplace. If you face the side and start doing multiplexes or siteswaps, the effect is lost because most of it looks the same. If you watch from the front though, everything involving the juggling can be seen, including outside throws, different height throws, multiplexes and patterns. It's not limiting, it's just different.

Next time you want to make a routine or just a new trick, try to consider the dimensions of your props and something you can do to present it in a better way. I find this helpful when working with balls, rings, clubs or even mixed props. If I'm trying to make a trick with three rings and a club, I'll try to make the rings work like the club or the club work like the rings. I could be doing a fountain all in outside throws to present the rings and club or throwing pancakes with the club. Both are visually appealing and nice experiments with the props I think.

That's my online workshop.

P.S. As an interesting (for some of you) side note, possibly the most interesting thing to juggle would be a hypercube, or an object with height, width, depth and time dimensions. A hypercube would be able to be in multiple places at the same time, or disappear and reappear at intervals. Pirouettes would be obsolete because hypercubes could appear well after you've completed the spin, so I know a lot of jugglers that would be happy. It wouldn't technically be juggling as much as it would be manipulating this hypercube, but imagine if you could put lights in it! Glow hypercube!!!