The evolution of juggling | Jay Gilligan | TEDxHelsinki

so my name is Jay I've been juggling for 28 years I grew up in America where I learned to juggle at the age of 8 and it wasn't until 10 years later that I came to Europe for the first time and I saw european-style juggling and in european-style juggling actually Finland and the other Scandinavian countries are big influences in that style and I didn't understand anything so I've been juggling for 10 years and in America juggling is really based upon skill so for example whenever juggled if I learned the trick with my dominant hand I'm left-handed so I throw under the leg with my left hand I would throw into the leg also with my right hand so you can see that I'm very skilled that I learned the trick on both sides as well the other tricks in American juggling are looping repeating patterns for example this trick here it just keeps going and going it's the same shape it doesn't change the rhythm is the same as well another big part of American style juggling can be that it's symmetrical so here's a pattern that's the same on both sides and again you can see that it loops and it repeats and it doesn't change and the rhythm is the same to study beat so when I came to Europe and I saw the kind of juggling and again Scandinavian style as well it's similar to European style it looked a bit like this and you can see that looks really strange to me compared to the first style of juggling that I showed you there's a lot of starts and stops the patterns don't repeat they don't happen on both sides it's asymmetrical again in America when I grew up another in the juggle I would begin with a big start and then I would keep juggling and at the end a really big clear finish like this but a lot of people's but here Alysse in Europe and Scandinavia this kind of juggling was very broken down the rhythm started and stopped it was hard for me to figure out so I was really intrigued by this and I wanted to learn how to juggle like a like somebody from Finland for example and along this journey I discovered many different things not only about the kind of juggling that I was doing but by the objects that I was using because one thing that was the same in America and in Europe is the kind of objects we juggled so there's the juggling ball there's also juggling Club which of course you flip and the juggling rig these are the three main props that drug is used I've been juggling this circle of plastic here 28 years I've put in 20,000 hours of rehearsal with this prop alone not the balls or clubs just with rings that's two years of my life constantly juggling this circle of plastic no eating no sleeping two years non-stop juggling I've built a career out of this circle of plastic I make my living with this it's how I eat how I pay my rent and I know it very well I can do lots of different things I know exactly what this piece of plastic will do but it wasn't until nineteen years after I started juggling that I asked myself why why why is this ring like this why is it just shape this thickness this weight this material the only thing my friends and I had ever wondered about before was maybe the color for example I need to have a nice bright color if I have a black backdrop and I'm going to be doing a performance or if I'm rehearsing for example in a racquetball court which is quite popular for jugglers they have a white ceiling and then I would need a dark colored ring but that was the end of my my thought process about this object when I learned the juggle that's just what it was it was just always there as far as I knew and even in 2003 when mr. babish which is a juggling prop manufacturer from Switzerland they released this ring here and you can see it's bigger even then it didn't it didn't spark anything in my mind I had seen bigger rings before but the thing was bigger rings they're not for throwing in the air they're called spinning rings so I could spin a ball on my finger and spin a ring around a part of my body on my arm maybe on my leg because the bigger size makes it easier to get the right rhythm to keep it spinning even then when I saw this ring at all it's a spinning ring I just know that you don't throw this one in the air but then in 2004 mr. babish released this ring and this ring it made me question everything because this ring makes no sense it's it's small it's too small you can see I have very large hands it's too small the weight is very bad if I want to throw a normal ring I put a little bit of a spin on it to keep it stable in the air but this ring it doesn't have enough weight even if I spin it it's kind of light it bounces around it doesn't I don't know why it exists I mean is there really a big gap in the market for small child jugglers who are struggling you know they're true they're on the street corners because they can't use the ax too big or I don't know I never heard about that I don't know so when this ring came out it made me want to do two things number one it didn't really make me want to find out why this ring was this size rather it made me question why this ring was this sized so I wanted to find out the history of my juggling props which isn't really in the juggling culture and for sure in other genres this doesn't seem very revolutionary but juggling is such a young art form that these questions are just coming up now so I wanted to find out why the stream was this size and also I wanted to find tricks juggling tricks that you would do the small ring that could only be done with the small ring and thereby justify its existence and so before I show you some of those tricks I'd like to tell you why this ring is the size it turns out my friend made that ring and his name is Dave Finnegan he goes under the stage name of professor confidence and his motto is a touch is as good as a catch and he wrote the first juggling book that I bought that either in the juggle from and I'm really fortunate to know this man and so I sent him an email and I said hey why why are these juggling wings to size and this is what he wrote me back he was in Taiwan in 1976 I had just learned the juggle in Seattle and wanted to get juggling props made in Asia but had no samples from which to work I had just seen one good ring juggler at the Delaware convention he was a guy named spider-man who cut his rings out of sheets of plastic there was no standard 13 inch juggling ring yet so I was in a plastic Factory in Taiwan and I was telling the proprietor mr. Tsai about rings he had a cookie tin on his desk so I used it to draw a circle then I found another round item in the office and drew a circle inside of that circle we used that as the template for the first rings we made so so a cookie ten two years in my life I would guess in other fields of study or art there's a lot of research that goes into manufacturing optics a lot of planning there's a really popular three-ring check I'd like to show you looks like this juggle the Rings flip one they all go on the head now that's a very standard trick a very standard technique for me as a juggler what would have happened if the factory owner was on a diet I don't know how to smaller cookie ten I don't know it would be very different trick when it go on my head my whole life's work based around being would put the ring around my head it's very strange you already hear the prejudice in my opinion about these props because I say that this is a normal ring and this we call a baby ring or a small ring and this is a big ring but of course jugglers who start out today they just know that there's a 40 centimeter a 32 centimeter and a 24 centimeter ring they don't see the difference the way I do when I set it up I'd like to show you a few of the chicks I found with this baby ring 24 centimeters that can only be done using this ring there's a French juggler Denis Pommier and an American juggler Sean blue who started to combine these smaller rings with the larger rings and suddenly tricks like this became possible so you can see by using the different size rings together it allows me to throw them at the same time that same technique using these normal rings that I started out with they always go the same height so it's very difficult to catch them in the same hand at the same time so this new size of ring suddenly made a new technique possible and as well Oscar ranga of Sweden he started to play with all the three different sizes of rings and I have a few tricks that I made it that you can see this kind of juggling it's very different than the style of juggling I showed you at the beginning with the three balls where everything was looping and repeating it's very much more in one way European so this this investigation led me to make what's called the manipulation Research Laboratory we did three projects and of those projects we studied and tried to find out what were the different shapes we could juggle what kinds of materials could be used in different techniques and now we've collaborated with renegade juggling from California and Tom Kidd well we've made different kinds of juggling objects for example instead of a circle why not a triangle again this might not seem so difficult to grasp well hey we have a circle let's use a triangle a square and octagon but in juggling this is where we're at right now with the art it's really exciting I love it to be alive right now because we get to find all these new things but they're very very basic I think so I'd like to show you a trick you can do only with three triangles it looks like this and you can imagine that's not possible with the rings because there's not the pointed edge to to hook the triangle and so I've been talking a little bit about tricks you can only do with different sized rings or only do with the triangle let me show you one trick as a different example I'll do something with five triangles that you could actually do with five rings or five squares alright so it looks something like this for example take five objects that have a big hole in the middle and take six places around your body so for example we'll go with left foot on the head elbow left hand will do right the elbow and also the right foot and in this pattern all we do is move the triangles or the objects around the body to each hole in sequence so the first thing I can do is change from my left foot to my right foot then this one in my hand goes to the left foot the head goes to the hand this one goes back on the elbow from this elbow on to the head and finally from the right foot back to the right elbow and in this way I can juggle these five triangles but it's not specific to only five triangles it could be five rings five squares but I can show you one more image that you can only do with five triangles looks like this yeah that's it now my friends Denis and Sean they were playing around with these different size rings and they combined them together for example the big ring and the small ring they combined them different sizes what if we keep the same shape instead of changing it to a triangle we keep a circle but we join them together so they're linked and as well combine this with an entirely different shape such as a ball and I've prepared a little choreography for you with that with renegade juggling we've made renegade design lab which is a little boutique juggling company it makes different juggling crops we've taken different kinds of crops and combined them together for example today we've seen the juggling ring which again has a very large hole in the middle and we tried to combine this with other different shapes for example the traditional juggling Club and what it would be if it had a large hole in it as well so the result are these clubs it's a normal charming Club but with a big hole in it of course they can be used in the normal way again but having this hole in the club allows for different techniques that were never possible before such as this one so images like that we're never possible before we're juggling until we started to define and combine the different shapes together all of this investigation into the history of juggling props made me want to find an object that had its own history in the moment an object that would leave a concrete path of where it's been as you nip elated I think I'll show you one option I have for that now I can juggle these balls of string in the normal way I said with three balls but as they move through space they'll leave a record of where they've been and it makes normal juggling a little bit more complicated and you can start to see not only where the object has been in relationship for example to my body if I throw behind the back or for example under the leg but also you can start to see the relationship of my body to the object if I start to try to unwind the string on purpose and in this way we have a record of where all these objects have been the entire time they've been manipulated here's that pattern again I showed you at the beginning so one last thing I'd like to show you and that is out of all this research into using new juggling props and new juggling shapes it's also led me back to where I started that original ring that I spoons of ours with through doing this new work it's allowed me to come back and see this in an entirely new way so I'd like to show you now a little bit of juggling using these new ideas busy true well it is no way another one I'm not dropping it you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 3,106,254

Rating: 4.360672 out of 5

Keywords: tedx helsinki, ted talk, tedx, tedx talks, Jay Gilligan, Helsinki (City/Town/Village), Finland, juggling, ted talks, tedx talk, ted x, English, ted

Id: YB_sfnwbgvk

Length: 26min 3sec (1563 seconds)

Published: Mon May 20 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/longlivelennon]

What the fuck was that ending.

fuck yo stage

[u/irrelevantius]

you should check out his youtube channel then: https://www.youtube.com/user/jaygilligan/videos

he´s the main juggling teacher at DOCH (Stockholms Circus School) and is doing experimental juggling for quite some time

the TED talk has been posted on this reddit before but i still think it´s super awesome and i still hope he´ll be doing more of this stuff as soon as possible

[u/thomthomthomthom]

Out of curiosity - where are you from, Richard? What's your background?

[u/FunkyJive]

He is a great juggler...but terrible speaker. The best TED talks move quickly and end after what needs to be said, is said. This one drags on at a snails pace and really doesn't have any energy behind it. Kinda boring.