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!