Thursday workshops on hold

We've been unable to get a better time slot on Thursdays so have stopped the workshops. If we can find a local space available around 7pm on a Thursday we'll look to restart them.

Thursday workshop moves to later time

From November 7th the workshop will run from 8.30 to 10pm and will cost £4. The free Monday club swinging class (see previous blogpost) continues to run on Mondays, 7-8. Full details on workshop location are on the Thursday workshop page

Learn Club Swinging this autumn

In addition to our Thursday juggling workshops we're running FREE Monday CLUB SWINGING classes in the dance studio at the Black Prince  Community Hub / Lilian Baylis Old School site (directions here). Check out some of the videos earlier in this blog if you aren't sure what club juggling is.

The classes start next Monday 1st October with a drop-in introductory session to find out about club swinging and run weekly from 7 to 8pm (though Ali isn't available on Monday 8th so that'll be more of a practice session rehearsing the moves taught in the first week). The main block of classes will run weekly from 15 October to 19th November giving a chance to progress week by week.

The teacher is Ali Dando, an experienced teacher of club swinging. We'll also have some swinging clubs available for people attending to use.

The course are free thanks to support from 'Give it a Go' so please come along and give it a go!.

A successful first workshop

Thanks to the twenty or so people who came along to the first Southbank Jugglers workshop last week. I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's workshop, partly because gorgeous Gandini Juggling have donated a load of beanbags, rings, scarves, balls and clubs for people to use at the workshop...including these Pushmi-Pullu clubs!

 People enjoyed checking out their moves in the full width mirror

 and generally jumping around while juggling clubs, whirling diabolos, spinning poi, hula-hooping and having a go at loads of stuff.

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.