Rather than talk about the practice routine that Jerome specified, I would rather talk about Jerome’s approach to club juggling. It was clear that Jerome spent a lot of time practicing and perfecting his technique with ball juggling but I was not sure how much he knew about clubs. On the second day of the workshop he told us that he had worked with clubs early in his career for about a few years, but had not figured out the best way to work with them. So he gave up on them for many years until just recently when he picked them up and discovered what he felt was the key to his style of club juggling.

The key to his method has to do with the use of time when the club is in your hand rather than in the air (or at least that is my interpretation of it). He described it as “below the line” where the line is the level of your hands in juggling position (perpendicular to your body). By using this space “below the line” once you catch the club you can create dramatic movements while still juggling a basic cascade (either singles or doubles).

I have a few examples of the technique in action. The first is the basic “below the line” juggle that Jerome demonstrated to us. It uses single throws and a “trinary” (see previous post) tempo for the juggling (since the club needs to remain in the hand as long as possible). Caleb took this video of me doing the trick – I should point out that I was not able to master it during the three day workshop – it took a fair amount of practice after the workshop for it to become comfortable.

The swinging movement of the clubs results in my hands moving parallel to each other while I juggling – this creates an interesting effect because it runs counter to the normal opposition we expect from juggling movement. My left hand is still fairly weak – I will have to keep working to get the movement to be even between my hands.

The same thing can be done with double spins, but the extra time can be used to exaggerate the movement. My left and right hand are a little more even with this one.

There are lots of variations on this movement – including small flourishes done by your side:

I have also figured out how to do a fake of a backcross which should be funny for shows: