Happy Easter and World Circus Day!

Today it is Easter and we had a day of from rehearsals. It is now less than a week until the show! I feel much better from the cold now and look forward to next week. Today I spent some time in town trying to sort out the last pieces of my costumes, but I bet I will find something else that is missing during the week.

Since it is Easter I bought some chocolate Easter eggs that I have seen almost everywhere since I arrived in Sheffield. I got two different types: one with chocolate mousse and one with some sweet milky white thing inside. They were both good and very sweet!

I also found out that the World Circus Day is celebrated the third Saturday of April every year. I didn't do anything special to celebrate it, but I had some energy to do some more five ball practicing.

Happy Easter everyone!

YouTube clips from BJC Simon Says game and Fight Night

I have not been feeling well and have caught a cold since I came home from BJC, The British Juggling Convention. I guess juggling to much and sleeping in a quite cold tent was not a good combination. Today I was not at the course but spent the day lying in bed sleeping and surfing the Internet for juggling things, and found two YouTube clips from BJC that I wanted to share.

Simon Says Game at Juggling Olympics
The first one is the Simon Says Game from the Juggling Olympics where you can see me juggle in white shirt and black pants in the front. I made it all the way to 3:12 when I dropped one ball trying to do a one ball pirouette...


Fight Night Finals
The other video is from the final of the Fight Night. I still think this is so entertaining to watch. It reminds me in some ways of sumo wrestling that I liked to watch on Japanese TV even though I didn't understand much. Sumo and Fight Night both shares this quick rounds and attacks.

Edit: It seems like the videos didn't work for some reason so I will try to fix it and update this post. Meanwhile search for: BJC 2014 Fight Night and Simon Says (Game) at the BJC 2014

Full time rehersals and performance tips

This week we are having full time rehearsals for the final show. It is quite different from the other parts of the course because the focus has shifted from learning to presenting. During every day of this week there is a "presenting time" when the teachers from each subject come in and "hand over" the different acts to the director. So far we have been doing aerial, clowning and juggling (and acrobatics for those who chose that).

This is the first time for me to be directed in this way, but I like it. Sometimes it is like the director is pointing out the obvious, like "remember to look at the audience", but it is so easy to get lost in your own performance that you actually forget to do that. It is also nice to have the director as the eye of the audience, and to me it also feels safer do be directed rather than trying to find out if things work or not by yourself.

To tips for performances

• Make things clear - everything you do has to be clear to the audience to avoid confusion.
• Do it more - this is connected with the previous tip to make it clear. If you are jumping - jump more. If you are happy - be happier. Sometimes it feels like you are doing it a lot but from the audience point of view it may not be completely clear.
• Look at the audience - Try to look at the audience at unexpected moments to invite them to share whatever you are doing

Fight night photos from BJC

I want to really emphasize how fun it was to watch Fight Night at BJC, The British Juggling Convention. Fight Night is a game played among jugglers with the goal to hit the other people's patters so they drop their clubs. Too bad I didn't manage to take any good photos of this funny sport with my mobile camera - it was all happening to fast for it to capture those moments. Luckily i found that at the BJC Facebook page (click for link) Richard Brown had posted some good photos that caught the drama of Fight Night.

Fight Night rules:

All participants juggle three clubs in an designated area. To get a point, you have to make your opponent stop juggling while you continue. This is done by using your clubs to hit their pattern, usually after throwing a high throw. Go get a point, you need to continue juggling for some time after the opponent has lost his clubs. It is allowed to juggle any three clubs to get a point; this means that if you during an attack manage to steal one of your opponents clubs to continue juggling you will still get a point. If both of you drop your clubs after an attack, noone gets a point. Fist to three (or any other number) wins!

Variations:

Fight Night can be played either man to man in pairs, or in "gladiator style" where everyone is just in a mess trying to be the last man juggling.

The seeding for the Fight Night

Fight Night in galdiator style during Juggling Olympics

Photo credits: Richard Brown

New Equipment Motivation

It is funny how new equipment makes you practice more. I really like my new juggling balls.

BJC British Juggling Convention

This weekend I visited the British Juggling Convention, BJC, to spend a whole weekend of juggling and juggling related activities. It was my first juggling convent ever and it was really fun.
Then convent is open until Thursday so if you want more information visit www.bjc2014.co.uk.

The BJC 2014 took place at Darton college in Barnsley. To me this was a nice venue (even though I have nothing to compare with) because the school felt modern and there was a lot of good spaces. There was a 24 hour-open juggling hall, and main space, an auditorium, lots of space outdoors and classrooms for workshops. The visitors could either come for the day, or camp around the football pitches next to the building.

The camping area.

I was busy juggling and doing other things most of the time but at least I managed to take some photos:

From inside the juggling hall on Friday

 The main juggling hall was full of jugglers most of the time. It was fun to practice with so many jugglers around us, but i could also just sit and watch what everyone else was doing. All the jugglers where really nice and happy to pick up and throw back your juggling equipment when you lost it somewhere in the hall. Jugglers are nice people.

At BJC with friends

Here I am with some friends. Behind us there is the area where there where some workshops and shows and things. I participated in workshops of three ball multiplex throws, genocide diabolo and lasso spinning and they where all very good and inspiring. The multiplex one was quite easy speaking of technique, but gave me some nice ideas about three ball juggling that i hadn't thought about before. The diabolo workshop was fun because I hadn't done this type of trick where you let go of the sticks in this way. it was quite hard and I never managed to do the trick, but I got a good start with an encouraging workshop leader. The lasso workshop was unexpectedly fun, and I was glad I did it because I don't think I would have tried lasso or figured out how to spin it myself.

At the same time as BJC there was also some other mini conventions like The Balloon Modeling Convention, which was a room full with baloons! We entered a competition where thay drew what the participants would try to make and how many minutes they got. We had 17 minuets to make a Mignion. I have never really done balloon modeling so here is my result, and I am quite happy with it.

Just a picture of people hanging around.

 There was also a traders room of which I didn't take any pictures, but it was like being a child in a toy store there! I have never seen so many props at the same time and it was so fun and nice to actually be able to touch, throw and feel everything! It was a thousand time better than just looking at things on the Internet, which is often the case for jugglers. It is also so hard to find out what you like just by looking at pictures and reading descriptions, compared to actually hold the equipment in your hands.  I got some juggling balls after trying almost all of the balls in the traders area. I realized that I like quite firm balls that are not like beanbags but with a softer surface, so I bought that kind.

From the fire show

 I saw a lot of performances and shows too.
The first one was the Youth Circus Five Rings Circus cabaret. They had made some research of the circus history in the Newcastle area and then done a show inspired by this. I liked it because it was a quite unusual approach to creating acts. My favourit act from they show was a unicycling act about a video game galled "unicycling wars".

I also saw a fire show that gave me a lot of inspiration for fire spinning. They had all the fire equipment including fakit fire, poi, staffs, fans, whips and clubs! The final was great with "fire work" staffs.

Late in the night there was a renegade show which was a little bit random but fun to watch too.

Giant baloon made my the audience waiting for the Gala show to start.

The best show was the Gala Show that took place in Sheffield city hall. The show was fantastic and all the acts was awesome! There was two Swedes performing; Gustav Rosell who did some funny clothes and ball juggling and Emil Dahl who did arty juggling with white clubs. My favorite was the MHD Crew who did a very nice group diabolo routine.

Five ball challenges

There where also "Olympics" which was some funny games for everyone. I couldn't take photos of the one I participated in. The best things with these was that everyone could participate. There was one "Throw the diabolo in the box" competition, "coin juggling", "unicycle gladiator", "club balancing" and many other funny games. It was also possible to take impressive photos with so many jugglers doing the same thing.

Unicycle gladiator

Club balancing game

 The most entertaining game to watch was the "Fight Night" game. The rules where like this: Try to make the other person stop juggling while you continue and you win one point. First to three wins. The equipent used is clubs and the two participants are juggling three clubs each. Then they make a high throw, and while the club is in the air, they had the time to try to use the other clubs to hit the patters of the the other juggler. If they both lost their clubs after an attack, noone won a point and they had to restart. The audience was very engaged in the fights and it was fun to watch because it was quick, dramatic and dynamic. I am up for recognizing this as a sport!

 After visiting BJC as my first juggling convention I really liked it and could recommend a visit.

Busy and BJC

It has been a very busy week since this is the last week of spezialisation before the full time work on the show starts.

Last weekend I had some time to be touristic and went to Kelham Island Industrial Museum, and it was the best museum in Sheffield so far. I will make a post where I show some pictures and tell you more about it.

I am almost done with my tightwire piece and have been working on the same idea for weeks. In aerial, we restarted this week since we due to time restriction in the show needed to do aerial in groups. Our group has changed theme some times but now I think this will be fine.

I have spent the evening packing and preparing for the British Juggling Convention! It is gonna be so much fun!

Four person juggling routine creation and thoughts about cooperative acts

The day before yesterday our schedule said supervised acrobatics practice, but none of the jugglers nor me are taking specializing in acrobatics. Instead, we managed to create a four person juggling act! I am very proud of it and I liked how we could cooperate in such a good way. It definitely needs some more practice to make it smooth but as we practiced yesterday and today we have already become a lot better. I hope it will fit into the show, but our juggling teacher seemed like he liked it, so as long as the director likes it. I hope he will be positive because he has asked the teachers to make some bigger group performances this year.

When I spoke to a friend who did the same course last year, he said "I wanted to do doubles trapeze, but there was no flyer who wanted to work with me. They all wanted to be by themselves". I think cooperative acts are underestimated, because in group acts there is more than "just" a skill: It is the cooperative work and connection in the group. I think that in a cooperative act there is more about the relation between the performers, while in a solo acts it is more about the relation to the object. And human relations almost always win over objects.

Another reason that I like cooperative acts are that I can easily see and understand that there is a lot of determination, work and cooperation between the performers, and that is a skill I value highly. To me it is more impressive to see a group of people doing something of medium difficulty together, than to see one person doing something more difficult alone. Of course I understand that it takes a lot of time to master object manipulation or aerial, especially since I am interested in circus, but everyone has some personal experience how hard but wonderful it can be to work together with someone else.

Creating things and acts together can sometimes be hard, and sometimes it is a lot easier than doing it alone. I think we created our juggling routine very time efficiently and surprisingly smooth. We are all very different in skill level and how we usually perform juggling, but in this case our differences helped us. To me, I was happy to see how my juggling friends were especially good at finding transitions between the tricks that I hadn't though about. It is a lot harder to come up with new ideas alone simply because noone force you to do it and there is only your own limits, but as a group we had to find solutions that worked for everyone. Sometimes it means compromising and sometimes it means exploring new areas.

From my own experience, it can be scary to put so much time and effort in creating something together with someone because it also means trusting the other person a lot and spending a lot of time with them. But during shows it feels so nice to share the excitement, preparation, performance and joy with someone else.

The act I am most proud of is a cooperative act with poi together with my friend and poi partner.
And I feel so alone doing poi without the other poi spinners in Luleå.

I am so proud of a partner poi routine Evelina and I did together. It also happens to be Evelina's birthday today, so Happy Birthday Eve!

Cave story

The weekend before last one I went to the Peak Districts to walk, but due to rain we went down to Speedwell cavern instead. I realized that I probably don't have any better pictures than these two as it was very difficult to take ant good pictures inside the cave.

Speedwell cavern is a cave in Castleton and was originally a lead mine, but as they dug into the natural cave system the cave was flooded and they had to close the mine. Nowadays, it is possible to take a guided tour where we first had to walk down over 100 steps down, and then continue the tour on boat in the old mining tunnel. It was a little bit claustrophobic with the small tunnel that we half filled with water, and I think the water made it both more scary but also exciting.

Sitting in the boat going through the cave

Inside the cave, we could go off to a platform and watch from where all the water came from. We could also see "The Bottomless Pit" which the miners though was bottomless since the water level never rose no matter how much stone they threw there. They thought the devil was sitting on the bottom eating the stone, but now divers in the cave have found out that the water could go away though some holes on the side of the cave, almost like this thing in sinks to prevent the water from flooding over in bathroom sinks.

Tried  to take a photo of stalagmites

It was definitely a good decision to go inside the cave instead of walking in the rain. I recommend Speedwell cavern as it is unique with the water and the combination of mine and cave.