Video of the Week: Poi - Katra & Annika

Video of the Week: More of Less Juggling

There's loads of playfulness with two and three clubs in this short video. The elements of club swinging in the video also give me a chance to say that we'll be running a 'Give it a Go' weekly club swinging 'bootcamp' in October and November to give you the chance to get the fundamental moves learnt and practised. More details coming soon.

Two weeks until the first workshop

It's just two weeks to the start of the workshops on Thursday 6th September.

The website's up and running, as is Twitter and an email address. The venue's booked.

Now we're starting to get some workshop equipment together.

The photo shows the pile of props we've accumulated to date, plus Malte and Niels from Spot the Drop have said they'll donate some unwanted props they have in Germany and send them to us, while London based Gandini Jugglers are going to have a root around to see what they have. If anyone has any juggling/diabolo/poi/hulahoop items sitting unloved in cupboards we'd love to give them a new lease of life.

We're starting to get some leaflets out and about. The Mayor of London's Freesport scheme provided 10 posters and 100 A5 leaflets that can be overprinted, so I spent an enjoyable couple of hours trying to get the black text to fit in the spaces provided in between the blue headers on the leaflets and now feed each leaflet one at a time into my printer as it won't accept a stack of A5. Hopefully we'll end up with 80 decent leaflets to put out. I've also run off a couple of hundred simple black and white A4 leaflets which aren't as elegant but are a damn site easier to produce!

I'm hoping that various local bodies such as the Kennington Association, Vauxhall Society, Councillors, TRAs etc. will email their local list with details of the workshops. The list is taking shape and early next week I'll send out the details to them with a request that they forward them.

Video of the Week: Tr'espace Diabolo Duo

The spinning diabolo is a historic Chinese game than enjoyed great popularity in Britain in the early 20th Century. Over the past 20 years there's been a resurgence of interest and the boundaries of what can be achieved have been pushed ever further. Here's Tr'espace, one of the great acts of recent times, with Roman Muller and 'Nella Von Zerboni

Video of the Week: Spot the Drop

I love leapfrog steals and Malte and Niels, aka Spot the Drop, do a fine one in their show. Here's a photo I took while they were performing at the National Theatre last week:.

and here's a short trailer to show a flavour of their work.:

It was a pleasure to have them stay with us for some of their time in London, before they departed on the next stage of their frantic touring schedule.

Video of the Week: Club Swinging

One way or another I hope we'll be nurturing club swinging at Southbank Jugglers workshops from this September. Meanwhile here's some fine work to take inspiration from:

Workshop Review: Spinning@TheRagFactory

This Tuesday evening workshop, just off Brick Lane (details here), was busy last night with hula-hoop, poi and stick spinners, plus a couple of solo jugglers. The Rag Factory is nowadays a gallery space, with three long and fairly narrow spaces (shown below), all with quite a lot of lighting hanging from bars. 

The height is generally limited to begin with, and beams and the lighting bars encroach on the glazed higher roof sections, and I found it too cramped to comfortably run through the usual tricks I practice when juggling clubs.