Video: Jugglers use mathematics to create new tricks
Circus Geeks: Beta Testing, Udderbelly at Southbank Centre, London, Tuesday 26 May 2015–Sunday 21 Jun 2015
In a gigantic upside-down purple cow – a tent that houses Udderbelly, an annual 8-week festival of comedy, circus and family entertainment on London's Southbank – Jon Udry stands on stage, empty-handed and perfectly still, juggling nothing whatsoever.
"This is very a useful technique," insists his partner-in-crime, Arron Sparks. You'll see when we come to do three-ball patterns later on."
This impromptu juggling class from the company Circus Geeks is probably not the most useful I've ever seen, but it promises to be the funniest. Their Beta Testing is a juggling show, TED talk and Royal Society lecture, rolled into one, and between the gags it does actually deliver on its promise, revealing the science and mathematics underpinning the modern juggling scene.
Juggling has probably been around since a bunch of primates let go of their branches and wondered what to do with their hands. And yet this venerable entertainment is being transformed out of all recognition by recent technology.
Online video has made a huge difference: "When I started," Sparks says, "there were bootleg VHS cassette tapes going round of all the old Soviet jugglers performing their classic 7-minute routines. It was all you ever saw of them, and we'd pass the tapes from hand to hand as we all tried to replicate this incredibly hard juggling. Now, thanks to the internet, moves can spread much more easily. You never come across just one video: inevitably seven kids have already posted their own versions and explorations of what you've just seen. It's probably a golden era of juggling at the moment."
Write and remember
Another key technology is notation. Bizarrely, for an activity so mathematical and so rhythmical, no one seems to have even proposed that routines should be written down before the juggler Dave Storer started noodling around with musical notation in 1978.
Three years later the American cryptographer Claude Shannon (widely considered the father of information theory) began writing an article called "Scientific Aspects of Juggling" for Scientific American, but he never finished it.
A coherent and simple way to note down and communicate juggling routines was finally discovered in 1985, not once but twice. Undergraduates Bruce Tiemann and Bengt Magnusson at the California Institute of Technology turned some notes by Paul Klimek of the University of California, Santa Cruz, into a working system they called Siteswap. At the same time in Cambridge, UK, mathematicians Mike Day, Colin Wright, and Adam Chalcraft hit upon an identical scheme.
Siteswap is a way of transcribing juggling patterns in numbers. "Things get interesting when you combine new numbers together," Sparks says. "The number 531, for example, describes a pattern where one ball is being re-thrown every five beats and one ball is being re-thrown every three beats and one ball is being thrown every one beat. And we can combine all these different techniques to create new juggling patterns."
Give me a 63141
Novel patterns have been discovered just by experimenting with the notation. Edward Carstens of the University of Missouri in Columbia has developed a version of Siteswap called MHN (multiple hand notation), which codifies tricks performed by any number of jugglers in unison.
"It's a really easy way to communicate juggling patterns," Sparks enthuses. "You can say to someone across the other side of the world, 'Can you do 63141 in flats with the juggling clubs?' and they can understand you straight away."
The arrival of Siteswap notation saw juggling flourish as a mathematical and physical pastime in colleges and universities worldwide. The wonder is that no one thought of it before.
Today the ability to codify, communicate and repeat human movements is an essential tool in the entertainment industry: games, films and TV all rely on it. But as this timeline on figuring out how we move reveals, the way we move has proved the very devil to write down.
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