Watching masses of people heaving clubs at one another during the Portland Juggling Festival last weekend, one wonders: How exactly did Reed College, an exclusive liberal arts college tucked away in the Woodstock neighborhood of Southeast Portland, become a destination for jugglers and other circus artists? It’s hazy. The best I could figure was this: In the '80s, Stuart Celarier, a Reed student who got into juggling after reading a book called Juggling for the Complete Klutz, took Reed’s juggling class for his PE requirement. After he got credit, kept going week after week, just because he thought it was fun and wanted to keep getting better. 

The class, which still goes down every Wednesday at 7 pm in Reed’s gymnasium, currently under Celarier’s direction, was and is a strange public class/college class hybrid, where students take a class for credit, but also where members of the juggling community come by every week to learn, practice, chat, and work out new routines. 

In 1992, “we had a lot of great jugglers, and we’d get together on Wednesdays and juggle, but we weren’t really coalescing as a community,” says Celarier, who may accept the title of creating the Portland Juggling Festival if pressed, but is quick to defer to the people who juggled and organized with him along the way. “I wanted to make sure that happened. It wasn’t just about having a festival, it was about getting Portland to step up and be hosts. I was the festival director for three or four years, and I made sure to pass that on to someone else.” 

“We had some great professional jugglers in the Portland area, but the festival really catalyzed that, launching it on rocket fuel. There have been people we’ve invited to come to the festival who ended up moving to Portland because there’s a great juggling community.” 

The festival, whose 33rd incarnation went down last weekend, is two events in one. The first, the one you buy tickets for, was a two-hour show in the Reed Auditorium that exhibited circus skill performers from Portland and elsewhere. On exhibition: hoopists from Miami and Portland, a local contact juggler sporting a suit covered in googly eyes, a staff-based act that was half circus arts, half engineering exercise, a clown-y thing, magic, a classic two-hander glow in the dark act, swordwalking, a local guy in street clothes juggling a bunch of balls at once (the crowd, populated by other local circus arts types, went apeshit for their comrade), and a giant yo-yo guy. It was packed, the acts were fabulous, everyone had a great time.

The other event was more nebulous. In short, the festival hired a tamale truck, set up a bunch of workshops, collected waivers, and people from all over just sort of… ambled around Reed’s gymnasium and juggled all weekend. Saturday’s session started at 10 am and ended at 2 am, Sunday morning. Hundreds of people were working on stuff, alone, in groups, or in pairs or in workshops, over and over and over and over for hours at a time. 

I scan the faces of the jugglers going at it to see what they are feeling. If it were me, fiddling with balls for a while and eventually dropping them, I would feel frustrated. But these jugglers seem fine with it. Serene, even. Part of the process, keep it going. One young man was wearing a T-shirt, emblazoned with a motto for the practicing juggler: “AGAIN ONLY BETTER.” 

TJ Carlson, the current director of the festival, embraces the infinite grind that juggling makes in its adherents. “It’s fun because no matter how good you get, you can always get better. There’s more balls, more tricks, more passing patterns. People are always happy to teach what they know, we don’t try to keep secrets, we want to spread out knowledge, show you what works.”

“You get in a state of mind that’s just relaxed, calm, happy,” he says. Does getting stressed out about tricks make it harder, I ask? “I don’t feel most people get stressed out by it, because we look at it as a challenge. Trying to learn a new trick sometimes takes years. Sometimes you get it right away, but it’s always just, ‘how can I get better? What basic foundational things, what other patterns do I need to learn before I can learn that pattern. How can I get there?’” 

Speaking to most of the jugglers at the event, juggling emerges as a flowstate-type activity. Karen Zink, a juggler, unicyclist, and surgeon from Portland, became obsessed with unicycling at the age of three, when a performer picked her out of the audience and rode a unicycle with her perched on his shoulders. This would have scared the living daylights out of me, though Zink was thrilled.

“A lot of it is connecting with other people and being social,” Zink says, “but what’s amazing with juggling or unicycling is, you can chat with people and have fun, but you also have to put a lot of focus on it—in a way that, you can’t really be worrying about other things in life while you’re juggling or unicycling. You can’t be focusing on your career, or housework, or ‘I have to do laundry.’ You have to be focused on what you’re doing at the moment. It’s nice because so much of what we do in the modern world, we’re always trying to multitask. Whereas, jugging and unicycling takes enough of your brain power that you have to be there in the moment or you can’t do it.”

I asked Zink if performing surgery, another meticulous process where a lifetime of repetitive training leads up to decisive moments, requires the same mindstate. She does not hesitate. 

“Yeah,” she says definitively. “When I’m in the middle of doing surgery, I’m focused on that. I can have conversations and chat with people, but I can’t worry about something else because I'm just there doing what I’m doing. It’s one of those things where you have to practice to have a good level of skill. It’s a little more life or death, though.” 

“Calm. Peace. Peaceful,” Riel Gold, a contact juggler (juggling without throwing, where you slide balls and other things across your body) from Portland who appeared in Saturday’s show, says when asked what the ideal mindset for performance is. Gold was introduced to contact juggling in the movie Labyrinth, where a professional juggler played David Bowie’s hands. During a long winter in New England, they broke down and bought the equipment and taught themselves, day after day, flying in the face of tedium to expertise on the other end. 

“Relaxed, but also resilient,” they say. “My style of performing is calmer, prettier, involves more illusions than the big juggling tricks. It involves a lot of breathing, a lot of courage, a lot of pretty things.” 

Gold’s performance is silent, set to a backing track. Their face, which sports a nifty handlebar mustache offstage, is covered in a mask, their entire body adorned with googly eyes. This darkness represents the zone where their focus can flourish, but not everyone is living in that zone. Some of the acts engage in patter with the audience, keeping the itch of over-analysis at arm’s length by executing another practice action at the same time. Whatever works. 

One of our artists wouldn’t cop to peace-seeking when asked about what’s on his mind while juggling. 

“Don’t mess up,” Jay Gilligan, a Sweden-based juggler who was Saturday’s headliner who also appeared at the very first Portland Juggling Festival back in 1992, says when asked what is going through his mind when he juggles. 

Gilligan has been a professional juggler since his teens, has toured with Cirque Du Soleil and in a solo show off Broadway. 

“Juggling is hard to do and it never gets easier,” he says. “I’ve been juggling for 40 years and it’s hard every time. That’s frustrating. You’d think there’s a learning curve where, I’ve done it for 25 years, it’s on lock, I can trust it. It’s never like that.” 

After digging as to the why of his origins as an artist, Gilligan related a deeper, stranger story. 

“When I was in kindergarten, the world’s youngest unicyclist was in my class. I thought that was cool,” he says. “There was a kid who went to a garage sale one day, found a unicycle, and bought it. He was part of 4H, pigs or cows or whatever. He took the unicycle to one of the meetings, and all the kids were like ‘ooh, I wanna ride it!’ So this one woman said, ‘oh, maybe we can make that a 4H Project,’ so she ran a 4H unicycling class for about 30 years in Northwest Ohio. So I learned to ride unicycles through this community organization. And when you’re riding a unicycle, what are you gonna do with your hands? So I learned to juggle.” 

By the age of eight, Gilligan was performing at community events. At nine, he was touring around the state, and then across the country, managing to be a regular at the now defunct Hacienda Resort in Las Vegas. 

“I was obsessed,” he says, when asked about where he acquired the focus to become a professional juggler before graduating high school. “I don’t know why. There was just the kindergarten thing of seeing a unicycle wheel, thinking ‘Oh, wheels are so cool, I’m fascinated by the wheel,’ but as soon as I learned, I just didn’t stop. This was the early ‘80s—there’s no internet, I’m living in Ohio on a farm, so it was a way to pass the time. It was just fun. It's still fun.” 

“I think juggling is the most difficult, unforgiving thing you can perform,” he continues. “Some people might argue it’s acrobatics, where you can fall and break your neck and die. The thing is, they don't, except in rare circumstances. In general, there is a bigger margin of error in acrobatics than you realize.” The whole discipline is, after all, built around not falling and breaking your neck. But in juggling, the elimination of life and death from the equation makes for a hungrier art. 

“In juggling you have a split second to catch all the things, and you can’t really change that. I can’t get bigger hands, I can’t slow down gravity. You’re stuck with the task. That doesn’t mean I suffer, that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it, but when I'm performing I’m just like… ‘I should not mess this up. This is my job'.”

A lifetime in the art has given Gilligan the opportunity to think through juggling inside-out. 

“There’s another aspect, for me,” Gilligan says, “where it’s like, what is the definition of success? I had a show a couple years ago where I was playing around with some language stuff. Normally the success of a juggling show or act is based upon how many times you drop. The less you drop, the better you are. If I drop nothing, I'm good. If I drop once, I’m okay, twice, three times, so on… that’s how people judge something. I wondered, wouldn't it be more fun, if instead of counting how many times I drop, to celebrate how many times I catch something? Because that’s literally, like thousands of times, and you can still have the one mistake where it’s like ‘well, you know, they weren’t that good.’ I’ve done a lot of trying to redefine what it means to succeed with the performing.”

“The traditional approach is predicated on ‘I’m better than you’,” says Gilligan. “In the traditional circus, you’re gonna have someone out on stage, and they say 'I’m gonna juggle these five balls, these five clubs, and the reason you should watch me is because you can’t do it'. I find that conversation with the audience to be… really limited. It’s a short lived game for me. I come on stage and I say, ‘I can juggle, you can’t, so I’m awesome', so I juggle three balls. Then you go ‘Do four!’ and I say 'Ha-ha, joke’s on you, I can juggle four balls really good.’ You say, do five, I do five, you do six, I do six. You can always yell one more time than I can do. The audience can always win that power dynamic.”

Watching Gilligan’s performance after speaking to him about all this, you could see what he means. His set, which ran for about twenty minutes, was built around using a small sampler he had at the back of the stage, in which he personally shifted the music between several soft techno constructs on the fly. His many clubs and balls, of different sizes and colors, some made from yarn, were lined up on the lip of the stage, in order and ready to perform. As he went on, though, the clubs and the unwound yarn fell to the stage when he was done with them, scattered all about, conspicuous and messy, the labor of juggling building up in front of the audience. While every other performer, still working to perfect their craft, played to impress, Gilligan was actively exposing the wrinkles in his art, letting mistakes and detritus build up around himself, transcending the perfection the form demands. 

The last pattern was honestly very beautiful: Gilligan gave a little introduction about what people ‘consider juggling,’ stating that most people say that you have to juggle at least three objects or it doesn’t really count. He said, “I will submit to this restriction for you now, and proceed to juggle three balls in a standard, classical pattern.” But as it went on, the balls began to unravel. Into strings, into ribbons, into boas, into confetti. A simple act of juggling perfection, slowly unwound into chaos, the unknowable. The audience was riveted, and let loose with a standing ovation when he finished.

“I feel like what I’m doing is art, that I am an artist,” he says. “I can’t put into words what I express, because if I could I would be a writer or a singer or a storyteller. I juggle as a means of expression.’

“But I still hate to drop. It sucks.” 

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