The Mac Weekly

Issue date: 10/5/07 Section: Sports

Media Credit: Will Kennedy Passing clubs requires concentration and timing, especially when one person is tossing them over his shoulder. Nick Carpenter '09 (middle) performs that function in this act. Note: Carpenter's dreadlocks are a lifestyle chioce but in no way indicate clownism.

For anyone looking to get into juggling, Macalester Object Manipulators (MOM)-Mac's juggling club-provides a relatively safe space. The same can't be said for the world outside.

Currently a war of words and ideas seethes between two diametrically opposed juggling camps. MOM's vice president Nick Carpenter '09 explained. "There are a couple of different archetypes," he said. "There is the clown, and people who take juggling very seriously." Clowns will typically interact with the audience, do simpler tricks, dress in costume, and jazz up routines by playing music or doing something like eating an apple while juggling. The more "serious" type will view juggling as a sport, often have a set routine and perform tricks with high levels of technical difficulty. Neither group cares much for the other and accusations of 'fake,' 'hack' and 'jerk' fly across the fault lines.

I spent some time with the jugglers of MOM last week to find out what this conflict is all about and to practice some juggling myself.

Before heading over to the campus center for juggling club last Tuesday, however, I needed a crash course in juggling history which I got from Carpenter and my good friend Wikipedia. The session gave some valuable insight into the juggling community's present dispute and revealed that this activity had some trials in its past.

Appearing in ancient societies world-wide from the Aztecs to the Polynesians-the earliest record of juggling dates back about 4000 years to an inscribed Egyptian tomb-juggling was big in Europe until the Roman Empire disintegrated. An increasingly powerful church branded juggling at best immoral and at worst witchcraft. The church didn't mess around with heresy in those days, so there was an understandable dip in juggling related activities.

Continued...

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