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SO THERE ARE VARIABLES Michael Moschen is one of the most innovative jugglers in recent history. He's famous as the pioneer of "contact juggling," a form of object manipulation that uses crystal spheres in constant motion. His other work uses traditional juggling objects in new and often unconventional ways. It bears little resemblance to the technical juggling you've seen in most circuses or on television. For example: http://www.michaelmoschen.com/movies/player_threeball.html I love this short piece. Moschen's presentation is at once impeccable and funny. It's less immediately impressive than conventional juggling, like tossing seven clubs in the air. Then again, the difficulty of this routine is disguised. Moschen is fluid and this makes it look easy. The theatricality of his performance is cute to us, perhaps cuter than it should be. There's a brilliance of form here, I think. And there's something subversive, toward the end of the clip, about allowing the ball to fall to the ground and bounce. The most compelling part of the routine is when Moschen moves from three balls to just one. With only one ball in the air, what's left to work with? A lot, Moschen seems to be saying. Think of a traditional juggling act. A juggler starts with three balls, then moves up to four and five, or depending on his skill level, six or seven, eight. Moschen's routine is nothing like that. He never goes above three balls. He ends with one. Imagine there's a saxophonist playing a single note on her instrument. The pitch is fixed beforehand. What's left to work with? Lots—articulation, vocalization, duration, intonation, inflection. Volume, vibrato, contour. Think of the note's emotional character. Think of its tone quality. Think of the note in time: subtle gradations in dynamics, changes in feeling, the length of its decay. Now imagine our saxophonist plays a second note. How much time elapses between one note and the next? Are they played with the same attack, the same intensity? What are their harmonic, melodic, and metric implications? What is the intervallic relationship between them? The musical relationship? The psychological relationship? Do they mean the same thing? What do they mean together? Imagine a simple kiss. One pair of lips on another pair of lips. Consider: the orientation of those lips, their softness, the degree to which they're parted. The openness of their mouths, the smoothness of the skin on their faces, the heaviness of their breath. The angle of inclination of the neck, the slack or tension in their posture, their relative body positions. The force of the kiss and the direction of that force. The nature of the relationship of the people kissing. If a man kisses a woman, what are his hands doing? The rest of his body? His eyes? What are his reasons for kissing her? A kiss can express love, impropriety, frivolity. Anger, irony, coarseness, hate. Bad kisses can be honest; good kisses dishonest. A kiss is sometimes "just a kiss"; other times it's much more than that. Kisses can be nervous, anticipated, despised. So there are variables. A lot of them, way too many to be enumerated. Most variables we pass through life wholly unaware of, which is how it ought to be. Why become so absorbed in minutiae as to make the activities of life inappreciable? Still, we make choices in everything we do, constantly, without much forethought or reflection. Again consider: Whether we're juggling or we're kissing or shopping for groceries, there are variables. Many of them are of practical consequence. These can be manipulated to creative effect. -murrayjames 11/01/08 |