So this was my third year at the Asheville juggling festival. Previous years I’ve gone just for the Saturday – a group of us drove up early in the morning and headed back home after the evening show, which makes for a very long day. This year I decided to stay over the Saturday night to get some juggling time on Sunday, as well as getting to stay longer on Saturday night.
Christian, Seth, and Matt, all friends from previous festivals, came down from Pittsburgh and Baltimore, respectively, which was awesome. Saturday started with the four of us in a pass-pass-self box, an auspicious beginning! From there, we tried a Martin’s Mildness/Madness box, but never quite got it working – ended up dropping to a Madness/Mildness feed with Jim’s 3-count on the ends. That’s pretty cool on its own, anyway!
Also tried a pattern Matt and I had discussed a while back – reverse 4-leaf-clover! Take the usual 4-leaf clover, but do it all left-handed, so the feed goes the other way, you walk the circle to the right instead of left, and you’re doing left-handed passes. Way harder than it should be, but a fun proof of concept.
A group of the guys from my club started playing with pass-pass-pass-self-self, which is a pretty fun way to work on some continuous throws and left-handed work – particularly when you do it as a feed!
Then Christian started teaching us Scrambled V – a fairly fast-moving pattern with continuous takeouts. We worked on it for a lot of Saturday and again Sunday, finally getting several really clean rounds of it Sunday afternoon. We also learned Scrambled III on Sunday, which we didn’t get quite as far with, but got the basic structure of. Britt subbed in occasionally when one of us was out/tired, and he’s amazing to juggle with – knows exactly where he needs to be and when, and is apparently endlessly patient. There was a point at the beginning of Scrambled III where I was about to just quit – there was no way it was going to work, I didn’t know what my next step was, and I was just done, and he suggested a minor change in where we started the pattern, and I stuck it out, and twenty minutes later the pattern was working. Lesson to self – this stuff takes time, just because you can’t do it immediately doesn’t mean it’ll never work.
One very cool workshop on Saturday – 2 people, 3 objects. Went with Matt, and got several things working really well – but the most fun part was trying 663 with clubs. It looks like two people juggling cascade and doing continuous steals with one club. I definitely want to play with it more!
Also got to play a little with Galen and Ellen’s clubs with the hole in them – very strange and interesting stuff you can do, but definitely not my wheelhouse. On Sunday, played with pass-pass-self-pass-self in Jim’s, which Seth and I got more than halfway around, but never quite solidified. I blame Christian for bringing that pattern back up – he and I did a lot of it at IJA this summer!
Oh, another new-to-me pattern – Shamrock! Three people, five clubs, one of an odd color. That one just gets handed around the circle – the other four get passed. It’s got a cool rhythm to it, once you sort out what to throw and what to hand off.
Quick HLGCBS:
High: Getting Scrambled V working! And on video – even better.
Low: Accidentally abandoning my club members to hang out with other people for all of Saturday. Sorry, guys.
Goals: Didn’t have anything specific going in, but coming out of it, Scrambled III!
Crush: Britt, for seemingly always knowing where to be.
Bane: Forgetting to eat sufficiently. I do this pretty often at festivals, and it means I feel horrible for a couple days after. Moar snacks!
Surprise: How math-y and technical Ellen and Galen’s process is, to result in such arty and abstract performances! Also, that so many people came down when the Philly fest was happening much closer to them on the same weekend.
I think that’s the highlights – looking forward to the Not-quite Pittsburgh fest in a few more weeks!