Mariora – Juggling Star of the 1930s and 1940s

By David Cain

Mariora Matei was born on May 3rd, 1917 in Altona, Hamburg, Germany to parents who hailed from Romania. Her father, Florian Matei, was an acrobat and gymnast. Her older brother Jean was born in 1909 and was performing professionally by his late teens under the name Jean Florian. Mariora made her stage debut on June 1, 1934 at the Café-Vaterland, Hamburg, Germany, at the age of 17. Her first performance in London was in January 1937 at the Finsbury Park Empire, at the age of 20. Their father traveled with the siblings at the beginning of their careers. Mariora just used her first name as her stage name.

Mariora was quite talented, perhaps even more so than her older and more famous brother. She performed six balls while balancing a tennis racket, six rings while spinning a ring on her ankle, juggled three and four tennis rackets, spun a ball on top of another ball that she spun from the sides, and did ball and mouth stick work.

1937

Mariora

Mariora and Mr. DR Lee, General Manager of Tivoli Theatre.

The following article from an Australian newspaper describes some interesting facts about Mariora’s life. One of them is how Mariora learned to juggle because of “a lack of balance” that caused dinner plates to fall when she held them in her hands.

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She could beat Jack Crawford with her racket!

By Alfred Morton

She can do more with a tennis racket and balls than Jack Crawford could ever hope to do, but she knows nothing about tennis. She can waltz around a room with Royal Doulton china over her nose, ears and forehead, but she can’t get a plate across the family table without dropping it… She can ride a one-wheeled bicycle across the stage, but if you put her on a bicycle, even a tricycle, she will collapse to the ground.

Her name is Mariora and she is in Melbourne at the Tivoli, living up to a reputation as a juggler which experts around the world say is as high as that of Cinquevalli, Rastelli and her own brother, Jean Florian.

Jean Florian has toured this city twice. He may be here now, but his younger sister Mariora beat him to the contract. She is Romanian, this agile young woman who balances huge objects on her tiny chin and keeps half a dozen plates spinning in the air at the same time. She never drops a plate unless it is her mother’s or because she is uncomfortable with her mother visiting. “Somehow I can’t handle plates like ordinary people,” she says. “Unless I have them on my chin or throw them in the air, they seem to be in the wrong place and I just drop them. It’s very embarrassing when I’m dining out.”

When she was little, she was always dropping the family’s dishes. In order for Mariora to do the dishes, she always dropped a cup or two. So she got out of a lot of washing up, but she also earned a lot of scolding. That was one of the reasons she started juggling: to correct her apparent lack of balance.

In fact, her intense practice of throwing things around and catching them made her the worst dishwashing expert. But it laid the groundwork for a career that has brought him fame in the entertainment world and a constant ticket to travel around the world.

Yes, his habit of dropping plates at home was one of the reasons he became a juggler. There were two others: his father and his brother. His father, Matei Florian, was a gymnast in a vaudeville troupe. He hoped Jean would follow in his footsteps. But Jean became a juggler and went out into the world to make a name for himself.

He sent letters home to young Mariora that exuded the glamour of the strange new places his profession took him. Mariora then decided that one day she, too, would travel.

He borrowed an old tennis racket from a friend and some balls. He didn’t know what they were for, except that they were used in “some kind of silly game.” Hours a day for eight years he practiced with the racket and balls, and had perfected a juggling spin that astonished his indifferent father.

So he began to build a repertoire. She would sneak plates out of the kitchen, the ones that were chipped or broken, of course, and soon became adept at throwing them into the air at all angles and catching them again.

Mariora made her debut in Hamburg. Jean was doing a season in London and the family would not tell her about Mariora until after the success or failure of that first show. But Jean found out and flew in from London and sat in the front row without anyone else knowing.

That night Mariora did not make a mistake. The contracts poured in.

She visited Bergamo once, in 1918. Bergamo has almost sanctified the memory of Enrico Rastelli, of whom there is a large statue in the market square. And it was said that any other juggler who dared try to put on a show in Bergamo would be expelled from the city. They did not want any imitators.

Mariora’s reception at the station was not particularly warm, it is true, but townspeople who had never heard of Mariora now rave about her. And now she has the open door to enter a town that for years has been taboo for jugglers.

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Mariora

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Advertising for Mariora in Australia.

Below is a video from 1939 showing some of her skills.

In 1947, she married a Brit named Roy Short and appears to have retired from performing. She and Roy had a son named Gerald Short. In 1958, the family moved from England to Australia, where Mariora lived for the rest of her life. She passed away in Queensland, Australia in 2005.