Ad Durolipontem

[pozorvlak]

Right, that's my train booked for Cambridge. I'll be arriving at some time after 4pm on the Saturday, and leaving shortly after 9 on the Monday. I'd love to stay for longer, but I have Stuff To Do in the Weej which makes those times about the best I can do. Well, I suppose I could technically have got an overnight train down on the Friday night, but I'm getting too old for such things.

Recall, in case you'd forgotten, just how far South everything in England is when you live up here.

A while ago, azrelle told me about this juggling video, which was apparently a bit of an internet meme for a while. It's a three-ball routine done by standup comic Chris Bliss. The juggling's not particularly technically difficult, but the performance is great. But it prompted something of an adverse reaction among jugglers, many of whom said "What? That's all easy stuff! There's nothing difficult there!". Jason "World Juggling Federation" Garfield then took this further, and did this five-ball version of the routine. The contrast between the two is, I think, instructive: Chris Bliss' routine is a great example of how to build a good routine out of technically simple juggling*, whereas Jason's is an example of how technically incredible juggling can get boring. I'm not one of those jugglers who patronisingly claim that civilians can't appreciate difficult stuff (I've seen a guy do seven balls in street performance, and the crowd went WILD), but I think it goes to show that technical juggling on its own is not enough. If there's no technical ability there, then showmanship gets pretty thin, but if there's no showmanship then the best juggling in the world is pretty unpalatable.

In maths (and juggling, kinda) news, we've had Persi Diaconis giving a series of lectures for the last week, on the theme of "harnessing chance". Some of this was about randomness in everyday life - how random is a coin toss, really? (there's actually about a 51% chance it will come up on the side it started) And how many times do you need to shuffle a pack of cards before it's close to being uniformly random? (7-8 with an imperfect riffle shuffle, or about 250 with a naive shuffle :-) ). The rest was about probabilistic algorithms, and in particular the Metropolis algorithm. It was really interesting, and inspiring to see someone with such a wide range of research interests (he also lectured on group representation theory while he was here, and constantly mentioned other areas of mathematics, physics and CS that he was involved with). And he's a really nice bloke. And a magician and juggler :-)

* Edit: mostly simple, anyway. I don't think anyone would claim that three in one hand is easy :-)

Comments

[kake]

The first video is fantastic. If he choreographed it himself then he deserves all the praise he's getting. (I don't know anything about juggling, but I do know about music.)

I didn't find the second video boring, but the choreography was so ill-suited to the music (and the way the delivery kept going slightly off the beat was so annoying), that I turned the sound off after about a minute and watched the rest of it in silence. It was a lot better like that.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

It's pretty much unheard-of for one juggler to use another's routine (riffs and parodies are fine, though), so I'd be very surprised if Bliss didn't choreograph it himself. I could be wrong, though.

Garfield's routine: yes, I'm not quite sure how he failed to realise that precise beatmatching is the main point of Bliss' routine. As for the tricks, I see people juggling five balls* every week :-)

* Albeit not in one hand :-)

[totherme.livejournal.com]

Is doing a routine to music (with a dancers eye/ear for rhythm, etc) a common thing in the juggling world, or was Chris' thing quite novel? If the latter, have folk learned from the whole thing, and started doing properly musically choreographed technically impressive stuff?

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Doing a routine to music is standard. Doing it that well is pretty rare, I think. Actually, there was a fantastic glow club routine at the BJC public show where they had the juggling and the flashes of the clubs choreographed to the music - seriously impressive stuff. Maybe not quite as precise as Chris' thing, but not that far off.