The first day of the Jerome Thomas Workshop at the IJA Festival was spent on a three ball cascade. That’s right, three hours on a three ball cascade, no tricks, no site swaps, no crazy patterns. Jerome made it clear from the start that he was going to have us work on the fundamentals of juggling with his “Cubit System”.

We actually started by learning how to stand in formation during the class. He had us all stand in a circle at first and then had us move to facing stage-forward distributed evenly around the stage. This proved to be quite useful later in the class when he was trying to provide instruction or observe our juggling. It is something that I will incorporate into my juggling teaching in the future.

One of the major concepts for the first day was “binary” vs. “trinary” juggling. I have a feeling that something was lost in the translation, but the idea is that there are two possible rhythms for juggling and he described them as “binairio” and “trenario” (from Italian, I think). There are several ways to understand this concept:

Binary – Known to the Russians as “Smooth” juggling, this rhythm has less time with the ball in the hand and more time with ball in the air. The juggler strives to have as little dwell time in the hand as possible and generally there are two balls in the air and one in the hand. The musical rhythm is legato.

Trinary – Known to the Russians as “Hard” juggling, this rhythm has more time for the balls in the hand than in the air. The juggler strives to have as much dwell time in the hand as possible and generally there are two balls in the hand and one ball in the air. The musical rhythm is staccato.

Binary and Trinary juggling can be done at different heights, widths and directions. These modes for juggling are the basis of Jerome’s juggling system – through the use of binary and trinary juggling you can accomplish many effects and being comfortable with both modes is critical to strong technique and creativity in juggling.

We practiced most of the first day on variations of binary and trinary juggling. Jerome also described the approach to warming up for practice and how to set up a practice routine. More on that in the next post.