I met this gentleman a few years back in Baltimore and was intrigued with his setup – which involved a large, clear hemisphere – and his work with silicone balls. By sheer happenstance I came across a YouTube video of his and that was all it took to push me over the edge to share his work with you here.

Greg Kennedy is a two-time Gold Medal-winning IJA juggler with a particular interest in working with surfaces. From his website:

In an effort to redefine people’s preconceptions about juggling, Greg Kennedy fuses logic and creativity to synthesize new forms of juggling manipulation. In the early 1990′s, Greg spent several years working as a professional engineer, in addition to his juggling career. His fascination with the geometry and physics of object manipulation lead him to ground-breaking work with original apparatus, expanding the realm of juggling. “He is a visionary who can see the possibilities in props and movement that are obscure to the masses,” writes Bill Giduz, Jugglers World magazine.

Clearly building upon the bounce juggling innovations of Michael Moschen from the 1980’s, Kennedy has subsumed and expanded upon those early building blocks to create dynamic routines that utilize unorthodox surfaces.

Whereas Moschen blazed the trail with his triangle, Kennedy combines his juggling and engineering prowess to give us hemispheres, circles and – my favorite – cones.

While some of his ideas – by their very nature – seem to emphasize the props, his best work has created a stunning balance between simplicity and visual beauty, allowing the motion of the balls to speak for themselves. Of course, the balls wouldn’t achieve the level of stunning beauty that they do were it not for Kennedy himself as facilitator, and towards that end he rightly blends a perfectly understated sense of movement and pose into his routines. Movement is essential and most of his routines would not achieve the sense of balance and visual appeal that they do were it not for Kennedy’s certainty of movement, restraint and placement – yet he is able to achieve it all without calling undue dramatic (that is, overplayed or unwarranted) attention to himself.

The above included cone juggling video – wherein Kennedy juggles up to 7 balls – is not a performance clip, but it nevertheless gives the viewer a glimpse into his work – and for someone who loves bounce juggling (like me and Cliff) it looks like a hell of a lot of fun. The second video is a performance clip from his 1997 IJA performance of Orthogonal.

Read more about Greg Kennedy on his website ( www.innovativejuggler.com ) and by watching the rest of his videos – available on his YouTube page.

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