Photo credit Florence Schroeder
By Kimzyn Campbell
Issue 2 of YANA, paper pages celebrating emotional juggling, is here and is as opulent as issue 1–but now serving more textures and layers, both in paper form and in metaphorical purpose. This magazine is a work of art to hold in one’s hands, an egg harboring Easter eggs full of glossy and matte pages that mingle with vellum, while color and patterns ooze from articles and monochromatic text and photography counterbalance them. It is a perfect environment upon which the theme is balanced- landscape and healing- as seen through the eyes of its 15 collaborators and their many projects in this multicultural feast with texts in Portuguese, Turkish, French and English.
Photo credit Florence Schroeder
Some of the projects are audio/visual, others are sculpture and photography, and multimedia options are peppered throughout the pages. For example, Aaron Bikis and Anni Küpper created a video (accessible via QR code) to ward off COVID depression, and they do so by exploring club juggling in a spacious wilderness. Their print piece is gorgeous photography taken from the video scene and an explanation of their motivation. Later in YANA, 16 tiny images with QR codes lead you to 16 different juggling videos by various jugglers–creating a multimedia smorgasbord of epic juggling proportions.
Other standout projects abound, such as Motionblob, a fascinating moment in juggling PhD research, created by Ozgur Kavurmacioglu. He decided to map his own juggling with capture motion photography, replicated digitally to make 3-D like images/objects that represent the patterns themselves. If it sounds mind blowing, it is nothing compared to how it actually looks, hypnotic amorphous blobs that manage to be both geometric and organic, showing the cyclical nature of juggling patterns and its minute deviations.
There is heart moving poetry and imagery, beautiful sketches of juggling hands without the balls, and vellum portraits, as well as ambitious projects–including a photo documentary of the birth, life and death of three juggling clubs from Collectif Protocole during Periple 2021, a 6 months long performance through France.
Photo credit Florence Schroeder
Perhaps most notable is how YANA’s second issue begins, with a note from editor Florence Schroeder about reaching out to female jugglers to ask them why they stopped juggling and discovering the depth of toxic masculinity that has permeated juggling cultures around the globe. Schroedersays, they are “Confronting the juggling community with its dark sides in order to open the road to healing.”
This is followed by a punch in the gut text collage as female jugglers are objectified and ridiculed with racist, homophobic and misogynistic insults. So thanks to YANA for continuing the conversation, and hopefully initiating change about how to do better in our communities. The point really hits home with two short interviews by Florence Schroeder and Wes Peden, one with a young girl who is excited to begin her juggling journey and another from a professional in the museum world who gave up juggling in spite of her initial joy about it after years of terrible treatment from her juggling community.
What happens next is transformative, rather than continuing on to document the certainly endless supply of poor treatment women have received over the years in juggling, the contributors featured are predominantly female jugglers and their work. Not exclusively. This is not a witch hunt looking to eliminate men from a cherished landscape. This is just playing catch up, much like the “Top 40 Jugglers” has attempted to do for the past few years by including Black and Brown jugglers and women jugglers after years of neglect, but better, because this catch up is in the authentic voice of the creators themselves. Ciara Thornburn, Lucy Tan, Anna Fisher, Annie Küpper, Margot Seigneurie, Teresa Santos and Katerina Alderlisten to name a few, but rest assured that the list of jugglers from marginalized communities is endless and I have no doubt more will be featured in future issues.
The wrap up is the sweetest multimedia touch of all, a playlist (one of two) called “Juggling to the matriarchy” full of danceable, juggleable tunes further assuring that any juggler will find hours of inspiration in this moveable feast of a magazine.
Kim Campbell (they/them) is an editor, a writer and a dog trainer who has spent a career focusing on the arts, particularly literature, theater and circus. Kim is the former editor of CircusTalk News and American Circus Educators magazine, as well as a current writer for the Chicago Reader and the web publication Third Coast Review. In addition to writing about circus for many circus publications, they were a resident for Circus Stories, Le Cirque Vu Par with En Piste in 2015 at the Montreal Completement Cirque Festival. Kim founded the Chicago based circus company Semi-Circus and is a member of the American Theater Critics Association. In 2019, they were on the jury of FIRCO in Madrid (Circus Festival Iberoamericano), in 2021 they were on the voting committee for the International Circus Awards, and in 2022, they were on the jury of the Circus International Film Festival.
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