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Glass bottles
Greetings, folks. I've been juggling glass for awhile, and nobody seems to talk about it outside of bar flair, so I'm assuming it is unusual or generally considered uninteresting. This is not flair. Just 3 bottle cascade and other such patterns. Held club-style, though I can do it the other way too. I'm working on "bottle" throws/catches, but I'm not there yet.
I am a hobby juggler as opposed to a performer, which means I mostly do it for my own benefit rather than for others, and I have found that 12 oz long neck beer bottles actually feel pretty darn good when juggled this way. They weigh about the same as a club, but they are obviously quite a bit shorter, which is good for low ceilings. They didn't feel right at all when I started with them, but they started to grow on me. 500ml Coke bottles work really well too. They're about the same diameter, but longer, so a little more club-like.
Oh, but don't they break? Well, yeah, of course they do. I don't juggle them over concrete, ceramic tile, etc., and they tend to survive falls onto a bed or even a wood floor fairly well, but they're not indestructible, and bottle/bottle collisions are a killer. Before juggling any bottle (ok, sometimes, I can't resist, but I'm tempting fate), I cover it completely in "duck" tape so that when it does break, all of the parts stay in one place instead of showering the area with shards and slivers. Taping them up is a big pain, but not as much as cleaning up glass. After breaking, they are usually still jugglable, just a little noisy and perhaps slightly squishy. If I continue juggling with them, they become progressively more so, which should surprise nobody.
The tape might help them survive collisions a bit better, but I have absolutely no metrics to support or refute that, so I assume it to be a wash or a trivial improvement for my purposes. The tape gets scarred in collisions, but that is easily patched with a small piece of tape. The object of that is mostly to keep pieces of glass from coming out of holes in it in the event of a break. I have probably less than a dozen broken bottles to show for having done this a year or so. Some went into the trash. Some have an afterlife as outdoor practice bottles.
Large furniture leg tips fit over the mouths, either naked or over a layer of tape, to form a rubberized knob. They change the balance a bit, but not badly. They help prevent noise when collecting if you can arrange for the rubber part to make contact instead of glass on glass.
Bottles are very hard. I don't recommend catching or deflecting them with your head, face, or clavicle. I've tried them all. It's like a one-man bar fight. Collisions are deafeningly loud, except for the ones which result in a break, which are a bit more muted.
Not limiting myself to beer bottles, I evaluate any glass bottle I encounter for use in this endeavour. Sake bottles are nice with their generally smooth transition between body and neck. I have a Bols bottle, which is nice, though that is not surprising since they make a plastic version of those for flairing. I also have a few heavier wine/champagne bottles which are a bit more challenging. The best use of those is probably to build up strength to make the lighter bottles easier to manipulate (working above the trick). The bottles, being larger, would be better for audiences, and, having thick glass, might survive drops/collisions better than lighter ones.
Plastic bottles just don't have enough mass. I can juggle some of them, but they aren't very fun, and if there's any wind, forget about it.
The juggling itself is sort of on a continuum between club and ball juggling. I operate mostly in club mode and in one where I am grabbing the body more than the "handle" and rotating the mass of the whole prop as I lift. This is true especially of the beer bottles, which obviously don't have much of a handle.
So, where to go with this? Heck if I know. There is the obvious party trick value. Mostly, it's just a particular rabbit hole that I have gone down with juggling.
Yeah, like he starts doing at about 1:55.
I can only do every third throw as a double right now, though, so I have a way to go.
Little Paul - - Vorredner #
https://youtu.be/Gf9SxF4zZdw
Is my favourite ever bottle routine (it comes after the fire, but the fire is a set up for some atrocious fake heckling which leads to the bottles)
Massimiliano Truzzi did lots of tricks with glass fish bowls. I'm glad I saw this thread, as it ties in perfectly with an article I'm just starting to work on about juggling breakable objects. It will include Jo Kamm's breakable clubs, balls, and diabolos, Truzzi's stuff, and number of other things.
David Cain
Daniel Simu - - Vorredner #
Cool! I recently got an interest in breakable objects. Don't forget to write about the history of chinese vase juggling :)
The guy in the blue bottles video explained me how to make ceramic balls, a project I hope I find some time for at some point. I heard a story about Sean Gandini juggling 5 ceramic balls on stage for a long run and then breaking them in the end.. Is it true, when was this and can anybody tell me more about the performance?
That performance came up briefly a while back in this thread. I believe we are all still waiting for the Gandini biography to come out.
Little Paul - - Vorredner #
I'm pretty sure there's a review of the show in question in The Catch, if I get time later I'll see if I can find/scan it
Yes, Sean did juggle 5 ceramic balls in the show "Neither Either Both And". They performed it back in 1994, and I think I traveled to York to see this show, probably one of my first.
The whole thing was mind-blowing. An amazing show full of dance, amazing technical juggling, passing, siteswaps, weird sound bites (I recall something about a truck passing school of deaf people?!) and more. As this was the first show of its kind that I had seen, it no doubt had the greatest impact. I did enjoy Caught Still Hanging, but it was never quite the same as Neither Either Both And for me.
I still have the tetraflexagon show programme in a draw somewhere.
Sean's juggling of the 5 balls was as a finale, and it made quite an impact. I remember him running a high and beautifully steady 5 ball pattern, until suddenly they all came crashing and smashing down. Quite unexpected.
Fond memories ...
Colin E.
Little Paul - - Vorredner #
According to the review in The Catch which I've just found (but which doesn't mention the ending, presumably so as not to ruin the surprise) says The puzzle wasn't made any easier by the dialogue. "what is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?" Personally, I don't know and - to be honest - I don't really care
Anyway, I've scanned in the review from Volume 1, Issue 6 (1994) and an interview with Sean Gandini about "nEither Either botH and") and slapped it up here: https://lpbk.net/misc/the_catch_v1_i6_dec-feb-1994_gandini.pdf (1.2Mb pdf)
Includes bonus cartoon illustration of a pleasing but simple columns variation.
Daniel Simu - - Vorredner #
I am so glad you guys are all so knowledgeable!
Little Paul - - Vorredner #
Old is where it's at.
Or at least, where I'm at.
Oh wow - thanks for that LP, I am surprised that my recollection of the dialogue is roughly correct!
Little Paul - - Vorredner #
No worries, trawling through back issues of The Catch isn't exactly a chore!
I had to dig through 2 years worth of issues to find that article, and I managed to only get distracted from my purpose 7 or 8 times by other articles I wanted to re-read (as well as finding Mike Bridges winning photo competition entry, which always makes me smile)
I thought there was a plan to index The Catch and maybe put the archive on-line, or was that just an idea?
Little Paul - - Vorredner #
That idea has been through several iterations. The closest we got to doing anything about it (that I was involved in) stalled when Stuart Ashman said he was in the process of creating electronic copies based on the original DTP files
But that was several years ago, and nothing seems to have come of it.
I've recently tightened up my PDF generation workflow and am getting better at producing small readable scans, although the catch is laid out in such a way (and uses all teh fonts) that OCR hasn't really been worth bothering with so far.
an article I'm just starting to work on about juggling breakable objects
Is it going to have a section about Passe Passe?
/allegedly
When you say bottle throws/catches do you mean holding a bottle as you would if you were drinking from it or something different?
I saw a street performer in Tunbridge Wells do a bit of bar flair in his act. He wrapped his glass bottles tightly with several layers of cling film, you couldn't tell that they were wrapped unless you were up really close. As well as looking better I'd imagine that applying the wrap would be less time consuming than using duct tape because it is generally a lot wider.
You continue to juggle with your bottles after breaking?! Surely it would be very easy for a broken edge to cut through the tape & slash your hand off?
I remember going to a beginners bar flair workshop at a BJC where the instructor handed out a load of bare glass bottles. It did not go well.
Yes, like you're drinking from a bottle.
I will have to try the cling film. I will have to test it to see how it performs in a few breakage scenarios. Fortunately, I have a number of beer bottles.
I can and have, though I don't do it a lot. They are remarkably stable. The duct tape sticks to the pieces and keeps them from shifting in a way that would slice through the tape. I did some high fall testing on one poor bottle (threw it as high as I could, multiple times), and while it was possible to breach the envelope, the results are what you would expect from a bottle made out of safety glass. The cling film might or might not perform differently in this regard. I'm more nervous that glass slivers might fall out of a hole in the tape that I don't know about.
Flair workshop: I can imagine. Wow. Is there an amusing or horrifying anecdote?
Nothing horrifying fortunately or particularly amusing unfortunately. Just a lot of very nervous people & a large portion of the workshop was taken up by cleaning up broken glass.
Workshop leader: "Now you try."
Workshop attendees who didn't bring a practice bottle look around apprehensively.
Workshop leader: "Go ahead it'll be fine!"
Smash.
Workshop leader: "Ok, nobody move."
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