American Circus Educators Magazine Spring 2018 (Issue 1, Volume 12) | Page 42
P o i n t o f // J U G G L I N G
View:
Flow Arts started emerging in the early 2000s.
The few people at that time that was leading the
culture were Prisna & Sean from Flowtoys, Burning
Dan from Flow Temple and Isa from the Temple of
Poi. They were the first few to coin the term ‘flow
‘arts’. The first flow arts festival, Firedrums, was
held at Pismo Beach in 2004 to gather flow artists
and fire performers together in a creative space.
The festival continues to be held in northern
California during the summers. At first, as the flow
arts community was establishing itself by mapping
out techniques from disciplines like spinning and
contact—taking especially from poi, staves, and
hoops—traditional toss juggling was not really a
part of the community.
MARVIN ONG (@grandmasterong) is a
prominent figure within the juggling and flow
arts communities. His Master Ong’s Prop Shop
juggling festival brings together hundreds of
flow arts practitioners every year.
42
Marvin Ong
In my view, if you enjoy it, just
do it—don’t get caught up too
much in what others are doing
or not doing.
When I attended my first Firedrums event in 2010, there
were probably only 10 jugglers out of 600 attendees. By
2015, juggler Wes Peden was a main headliner for the
festival that year, and the number of jugglers attending
had grown to probably 150 or 200, give or take.
Like in music, juggling technique is passed on first by
one person who is interested in a specific technique
and then developed across different apparatus,
different teachers, different regions and styles. A lot
of the cross pollination of ideas and techniques that
now characterizes flow arts was happening even in
the beginning times. Firedrums would fly in European
teachers and fire spinners and so forth to come and
share and teach the local American community. A lot
of European practitioners identify themselves solely
as “jugglers” without the distinction of flow arts and
juggling we maintain here in America. In Europe it’s
mainly juggling and contemporary juggling. As I have
traveled to these places to learn, there is a lot of
traditional juggling happening in Europe, but there is
also a lot more fusion of dance and juggling, creating
contemporary juggling that focuses on movement
research as well as the visual and aesthetic qualities of
the discipline instead of increasing the numbers of the
objects. A lot of this style of juggling can be found in
France. Le Le Lido in Toulouse, for example, is famous
for this kind of research.
From a technical standpoint, learning from a coach,
teacher, or even a peer is way better than just
experimenting by yourself. From getting a sense of
the numbers of ideas and what is possible to changing
the standard of what seems impossible, witnessing a
technique in real life changes the perspective that a
skill is possible, which causes the speed of learning
to increase. However there is one major downfall to
continuously learning from someone and skipping self-
exploration: one might lose sight of the joy of ‘play’
and exploring one’s own creativeness. But this is a
double-edged sword, because the more technique you
have, the more you can explore. Juggling this balance is
instrumental to keeping the artform alive and evolving.
Social media has definitely changed juggling a little—
some of the technique that was once hard to learn now
can easily be found online. The Home of Poi forums
were one of the earliest resources available, with lots of
amateur YouTube tutorials by enthusiastic flow artists.
I came into flow arts when Facebook groups started
to take off, such as Tech Poi, Juggling Rock, and many
others. Facebook groups remain very active resources
today. Instagram seems to be the most popular platform
over the past few years. YouTube channels such as Nick
Woosley’s PlayPoi are still out there, but they seem to
have lost a little traction these days. A lot of the really
heavy practitioners don’t end up posting much content
online. Social media doesn’t present any dangerous
trends to the juggling community.
43