my homie Haavard! it’s messed up that he can do this AND that he’s like whatever i’ll turn the camera on and nail it. pimp.
Petter! the finger spins to roll is a great idea!
Gustaf!!! look at that costume!!!
Hi,
i’m at jays house in ohio about to leave for the airport. crazy crazy month!
jay has a juggling studio here and last night i went there to train technique and work on some solo stuff for the first time in a month. it was weird to think that. i mean i have been juggling every day this month but doing nothing that i normally work on in my solo practice or even using the same props. i was a little scared that i would suck but it was okay. i worked on some basic tricks i want to get solid and did some rehearsal for the berlin juggling convention which i will go to in a week! everything went surprisingly well besides for 7 clubs. that wasn’t so tip top but after 3 days i think it’ll be back where it was before.
one thing that i get all the time with my training is when i’m working on a trick or running sequences a club rolls over me in a weird way or i do some stupid catch by accident and it inspires me for a pattern. either using the thing that just happened or something close to it. i make the pattern and it’s kinda cool but also kinda lame so i make a variation of it which is a little bit better but the rhythm is sorta stupid but the shape of it makes me think of something else then before you know it a half hour is gone and i have 10 extremely mediocre 3 club patterns. i’m sure i have make at least 7,000,000 of these in my life. totally useless but so exciting in the moment. i always feel like i am close to something awesome. maybe one time a year i get a cool pattern this way but it’s mostly just a waste of time. or it’s a waste if i have other stuff to do. it’s super fun hobby juggling but i got to make these hours pay my rent yo!! ; )
here’s a fun fact. i have 50 hours of video from shoebox tour. 23 shows filmed from 2 cameras each and sometimes three. plus extra stuff from between shows and rehearsals. it’s going to be a damn cool video when it’s all put together!! stay tuned for that in some months!
and hey!! patrik is graduating! so all yo people that wanted to book patrik and wes before but couldn’t because he had school can now do so!!! we got hot stuff you haven’t seen so start a convention/buy a theater and write us an email!!
You can now purchase the hard copy version of Synthetic from Renegade Juggling! Cover art by Hannah Wiker.
http://www.renegadejuggling.com/Wes-Peden-Synthetic-p328.html
the new juggling video maker!!! thanks for buying my movies guys!! should be able to see the juggling even better on the next ones!!!
Hi!
I’m on Shoebox Tour America now which I have advertised like heck here and on Facebook so I wont do that anymore (www.shoeboxtour.com)!!! so far we have been to Minneapolis, Madison, Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. I’m in the back seat while we drive to Charlottesville with not very very much to do so I thought I would write a bit about the tour and stuff.
Jay and I made this years show while we were living and performing in Germany. We got back to sweden in January and were doing other projects till a week before the tour when we started rehearsing the stuff again. In Germany we had created all the juggling and the pieces but hadn’t really learned how to do it all every time. We worked for that week to find out exactly how everything is done and learn it.
One thing I have found with all the juggling projects I have done is that it is insanely hard to nail juggling that I don’t believe in 110%. If i’m not sure if a trick or sequence is actually cool I get so stressed out in my head about it that I can’t focus on catching it. Also if it is a bad trick you are wasting your time to learn it because even if you nail the trick it’s still lame! It scares the crap out of me to think i could be wasting my time like that! When I am working on tricks for shows or videos I try to film the juggling as soon as possible to see what it looks like so I don’t spend time learning how to do it every time only to find out later that it looks ugly. Terrible!!!
Back to our rehearsal week. After going through the whole show and learning the order and tricks and everything we went back through it all and fixed all the things that felt weird about the choreography and tricks. After we did that I felt so much more relaxed while we were running it since I didn’t need to think if I liked everything we were doing or not. I knew we had gone through it all to make sure everything was good and something we wanted to do.
Before the first show in Minneapolis were running all the juggling with Erik, the insane drummer who is touring with Jay and I, and it was pretty nuts. After running the hour show in silence it’s so crazy to play it with sick beats and samples composed specially for the juggling! It was awesome and gave so much new energy to the show! I haven’t played so many times with a live musicians and never with Erik who is a genius and really knows how to play to what he is watching. It makes you feel so free in your juggling when you don’t need to worry about staying with recorded music.
The show that night was awesome. 220 people came which actually went over the fire safety limits of the room! So cool that that many people heard about the show and came to see it! We were performing in an art gallery with huge paintings all around us. Really really good space! The crowed was super cool and clapping all the time for everything. It wasn’t the best juggling we have ever done but the people were super into it so it felt fine to re try tricks and jam it out with Erik. Really nice feeling in the room the whole time!
Minneapolis is also were the Jugheads (cool youth juggling group) are from and i
I got to hang out with some cool boys and girl from there afterwards at the Cheesecake Factory! It’s fun to talk to the jugglers in America and get a feel for how juggling works in their live.
The next show was in Madison and the juggling went much better there! I felt like I learned tons from the first show and could fix a lot of the way I was thinking for the second one. We had a couple days in Madison without shows and one of the days I had some time to juggle outside. I first grabbed clubs because there were a few tricks I had been messing around with in Sweden that I wanted to keep figuring out but when I tried them with PX3’s it just didn’t work and felt like rape to try to do these Delphin tricks with PX3. If i’m going to juggle PX3s I should do PX3 tricks not try to push other styles into those clubs. By the way, Play Juggling has been super super cool and sponsored the tour! It’s awesome to have all their props for the show with all the bright colors and possibilities you get with lots of props to work with! It does mean though that I’m not super used to the props since now it’s PX3, MMX, and Play rings. Anyway for this jam session I grabbed some MMX and tried to make some stuff. Again though it was a bit weird since I’m used to bean bags which have really different properties. I did find that the little bounce MMX balls do off the ground is pretty cool when you throw them down hard or let them fall from 3 or 4 meters they bounce 3 of 4 centimeters up again. I liked that a lot and found a few tricks with bounces off my body that wouldn’t work with beanbags so I started to have fun with ground and body bounces and made a sequence from it. I filmed it enough to remember it later but I got called for dinner before I shot it the way I want it for showing. I’ll film it betterbefore the end of the tour though and most likely post it here.
From Madison we went to Chicago for a show in Mark Faje’s apartment. None of us had seen his place before so we were a little worried but when Jay had talked to him on email Mark said he had a basketball court set up in his place so we were hopping it would be big enough….. we walked up to the third floor through these skinny ass stairs then got to the door for apartment 4b. BOOM!!! HUGE! Completely nuts how big this place is! It’s at least the size of 2 full-size basketball courts placed side by side. Street art all over the walls with a stage in one corner and a bar in the other. Amazing! Apparently it used to be a community center but now Mark and two room mates own it. The show was okay but there were some drops that were a bit muddy to get out of. Last years show had a lot of improv in it and a lot of stuff that was built on solo juggling that we linked together but we didn’t throw actually too each other very much. With that type of work it’s very easy to jam out of a drop and back into what you were doing or make something col out of the drop so it doesn’t kill the tempo of the show. It’s harder when you have a throw by throw plan for the whole show and a lot of stuff were you throw to each other. Got to have a good plan for how you get back into the piece in a fun smooth way so that it doesn’t dent the show. After the Chicago show i started to think about that more and made little plans for how to get stuff back to Jay while he was still juggling or how I would pick something up in different situations to keep the flow and stuff. It was a cool show though and Doug Sayers came from Iowa! what’s up!
The Next day we were hanging around Chicago meeting some of Jays friends and shopping. I got some airmax and it was my birthday! : ) 22 and everything!
May 10th was the next day and we had two shows in Detroit. Before we did either of them though we went to the graduation art show of a friend of mine that i used to go to juggling club with in Rochester. His piece was a set of props that he made from a research project about juggling. They were these cool wooden shapes that fit together in sets that would fill wholes in the body. Like if you hold your hands then bring them in front of you so you make a hole with your ams and body. Three of his shapes would fit together to perfectly fill that space. He had different people doing performances with these shapes and he wanted me to do a improv with them. I did about 10 minutes with the shapes and balls. I was a bit stressed since I had never used the shapes before but it trued out kind of cool and I found a few nice things with them and the balls.
After that we went to the first real show which was in this factory with a section converted into a space for performances and other activities. It was cool but kind of low and I kept hitting the ceiling on the 5 club tricks.
We had another show at 10 that my graduating art friend had set up,Chase is his name. It was at his college in this cool studio room that was super tall with badass while walls in the corner where we were playing the show. I really like performing for college student and that show we did the best we had done so far in terms of nailing the juggling. It was quite a small room with just enough room for the show and the maybe 40 people that came but they were all super into it and i had so much fun doing it! Also the props really popped out with their bright colors on that white wall and we got great video from that show! I’m filming all the shows and there will be a edit of them all together at the end available on my site : )
The next city was Pittsburg where we stayed with Mark Hayward and Lenore Thomas. Super super super the coolest people! We had 3 shows that city, the first one was at this place called the Waffle Shop which is restaurant and internet TV show where we did a 40 minute set with some old stuff and some new stuff while Erik played on the walls, floor, heating element, chairs, and window ledge. It was a pretty weird pretty good show. We played at 11pm and it was right next to a bar with this huge window on the side of the stage so all the people from the bar that went out to smoke were watching through that. That was cool. oh, and it was live streamed on the net!
The next show was at an elementary school the fallowing day and the day after that we were at a college. In both shows the juggling went awesome! it’s so fun to juggle when it works! Also it’s so much less exhausting when a show is going right and you don’t have to work your ass of to save situations all the time. Just fallow the plan! The shows have been cool to because afterwards sometime people come up and tell me they like the videos I do online or that they just bought Zoo 3 and were into it. It’s nice to here from a real person since most of the time you just see these faceless youtube comments. It makes me want to keep working when I meet people like that. Not that I just do the juggling for that but it makes me feel like there is a market for it when I see excited people!
I like playing the shows on tour so insane much it’s crazy. It’s really different to play juggling for people who came to see jugging then to perform for a corporate event or in a variety show were you are this thing that comes with dinner. It’s great! The only thing on tour is that I miss the studio juggling. I still really love training and making new tricks and sequences everyday. I don’t miss it so much on days when we have a show and I don’t have time to miss it on days when we have two shows but if we have a day or two off I get antsy. I’m not at all complaining, I love the tour! best job ever! I just mean that i’ll also be happy to get back to Stockholm and juggle 8 hours a day : )
Hope to see you guys at one of the tour stops!
BYE!
hi!
i kind of had my best technique practice ever yesterday and i feel pretty happy about it still! normally on a good day of my 7 club training i can get a run of 100 catches. maybe every third day or something if i’m practicing the whole week. my record was 136 but yesterday i broke it and got 140! so i was super happy and it was only after 5 minutes of 7 clubs so i still hand energy. i kept training and ended up getting another 2 runs of over 100 and then broke my record two more time! the first getting 144 then the last was 160! i also broke my 6 club fountain record with 270 : )
i feel kind of like a little kid while writing this but it is kind of exciting when stuff starts to work and it happens all at once! now it’s just to learn to be chill on stage with it.
Tonight Jay and i are playing a show at the convention in Brianza, Italy. I’m excited for that!
have a good day guys!
More Fun Than Visiting a Zoo - Volume 3 - Remix
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m so excited it’s finally done and you guys can see it! It’s an hour long with another hour of extra tricks! You can buy the full film for 10€ at the link below!
