When many people juggle American clubs for the first time after having only juggled the much more common European clubs, they often comment on how large the Americans are. Modern American clubs are slightly smaller than their older predecessors, which are smaller than a category that can simply be called “giant clubs.” Most jugglers have never seen one of these …
10 Female Juggling Stars of the Past
Looking across the gym at the most recent IJA Festival, a sizable proportion of the jugglers are women. This hasn’t always been the case. In the first forty years of the IJA’s existence, female performers were a fairly rare sight. However, female jugglers have an incredible and very important history in our art form. The earliest depiction of juggling we …
A History of the Plastic Toy Bowling Pin Juggling Club
If you’re like most jugglers, you cringe every time you hear someone refer to juggling clubs as bowling pins. Even worse is when you hear another juggler call them pins, which, thankfully, happens only very rarely. As creator Casey Rentmeester so comically pointed out in the meme below, the two really don’t look that much alike. It is true that …
William Everhart – The Father of Hoop Rolling and Hoop Juggling
As the IJA prepares to bring its festival to the state of Ohio, we look back on an Ohio native who single handedly invented a form of juggling well over a hundred years ago that is still being performed today. William Everhart was born in 1868 in Columbus, Ohio (USA). At the height of his career, he performed all …
Interview with Junming Lin
About a year and a half ago, someone sent me a youtube link of a juggler. This is an almost daily occurrence for me, as it may be for many of you reading this. However, the technical ability displayed in just the two runs shown on the video were definitely world class. The juggler was Junming Lin and the two …
Steven Ragatz Interview
At this year’s IJA Festival, Steven Ragatz will be presenting a special Act Creation Workshop on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 1oam to 12:30pm. The cost is $100. Your juggling act should be more than merely a collection of tricks executed in sequence. This workshop explores the design and execution of a contemporary juggling act, from initial inspiration to …
Creating a Juggling Combination Trick
Combination tricks are among the most difficult tricks in the world of juggling. The act of taking unrelated skills of juggling and manipulation and merging them into one trick is quite old, dating back at least as far as the Middle Ages. By far the most famous combination trick is the Brunn Finish, popularized by Francis Brunn. The basic idea …
The Historical Juggling Props Museum
Part 1: Getting Started It all started with an email from Alan Howard. He remembered that I had said something years before about wanting to get a Van Wyck juggling club if one ever came available. Edward Van Wyck was the first maker of retail juggling clubs, starting in 1895. His workshop in Cincinnati, Ohio is about thirty minutes from …
Juggling With Boomerangs
Many jugglers have taken an interest in boomerang throwing over the years due to a number of commonalities in the skills. They both involve throwing and catching objects in a skilled manner. They both are skills that can appear easy until the average person tries them. One person who mastered both skills was 1983 IJA Champion Allan Jacobs, who was …