Scottish Juggling & Face Painting Convention 2005
Getting There
Rach and I set out in her car, with Jonny. Roger and Tim made their own way there, and the girls (Kate, Emma and Amber) didn’t turn up till the next morning. On arrival we got our convention passes (a peg quite disappointing) and I bought 2 groovy t-shirts for £10! Approx 16 people from the Isle of Man attended the event, including the wonderful Hazel and Kayman.
For the whole convention, my wife Rachel had a migraine and didn’t feel too well, so I didn’t get involved as much with everything this year, as I was torn between looking after her and trying to practice some juggling routines for some performances coming up in the weeks following the convention.
No Captain Duncan or Lorna or Kirree this year, which was all disappointing, but lots of new faces! My aim was to improve my 3 balls in one hand juggling, and improve devilsticking, and learn some diabolo tricks, and learn 5 ball juggling, and learn some ring tricks (from a 10 page article I printed out). Unfortunately there were so many people juggling in the main hall and in the corridors, that it was very hard to find a place to practice my juggling. I eventually settled for upstairs, but soon that was crammed full of jugglers too!
Public Show
Britta was compere this year. She did a good job, and held the show together well. Due to various things happening in the buildup to the convention, some of the acts that have done the same routines for the past few years at this show weren’t present. This resulted in a much more original show thankfully! The Public show was at 3pm in the Science Centre. It is normally at night-time in a venue where we have to catch the subway, so it was good having it so near. It was well attended by the public who could watch for free.
| 1) |
IAN (FIDDLE PLAYER)
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He was good, but after one song, we weren’t prepared for him to launch into another 5 minutes! |
| 2) |
GRAHAM BENSON:
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Dressed as Britney, performing club juggling and swinging. It was definitely a sight to behold, and his 2 daughters were so embarrassed! – Excellent stuff. |
| 3) |
DAVE BARNES
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Diabolo on a string routine. Something different and unexpected and enjoyable. |
| 4) |
RUTH
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Mein Herr Sock Poi Routine The highlight of the whole show (once again) was the lovely Ruth, who danced and swung sock poi in an excellently choreographed routine to a song from the Musical “Cabaret” |
| 5) |
SURFING PENGUIN
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Excellent once again from John, with good accompaniment by Ian the Fiddler.
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| 6) |
FABULOUS KRAPROBAT BROTHERS
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Entertaining and anarchic. Good to see this act finally! |
| 7) |
BASKETBALL JONES
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basketball manipulation act, ending on a giraffe unicycle juggling 3 balls. entertaining. |
| 8) |
MARIE BENSON
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singing 2 fantastic songs. So if you ever want to find out if the wee girl ever found her red yo-yo with the yellow string, or how the choirboy ended up in bed with the vicar, then book her fast! |
| 9) |
ROB (tePooka)
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Contact Juggling Routine – I don’t normally like contact juggling much, but this was a routine that Rob showed some of us at a STREETNET workshop last year, when he showed us how we could develop our own routines to music, so it was good to see the full performance piece! |
| 10) |
2 ACROBAT GUYS
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Funny and entertaining |
| 11) |
DANCING
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The Couple who did their dancing. |
| 12) |
CHRIS AND IDA
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Seen this act at Circomedia Showcase last year. Very entertaining and moving and playful. |
| 13) |
PASCAL (HIP HOP HATS)
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Seen this act at Circomedia Showcase last year. Very entertaining. |
| 14) |
LUKE BURRAGE
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still annoyingly better than most jugglers at everything, but still fantastic to watch! |
| 15) |
DONALD GRANT
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another fantastic diabolo show from Mr Diabolo
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| 16) |
MATT HALL
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this years top guest produced 2 awesome acts as the finale. These were brand new, and went down a storm. Fantastic guy made a lot of friends at this convention and constantly wowed us all with his skills.
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An excellent show, different from all previous ones due to venue (no UV available due to bright daylight shining into the atrium for instance!) and lineup. Well done everyone! My personal favourite routines were Ruth’s Sock poi, and Matt Hall.
Ceilidh
No shortage of girls to dance with for me this year! I danced with Hazel twice, Kate and Amber once each. At half-time some people went outside and did some fire juggling practice. Stopped halfway through and never really restarted as jugglers started playing gladiators! I managed to join in and win about 7 games out of the 50+ that I played. The band were great, and the drummer at one point managed to keep a beat going while juggling the drumsticks!
Renegade
No renegades on the Friday night as no-one could be bothered organising it. I co-hosted a renegade last year with Andy Blackett, so I passed on doing it this year, and Jonny decided to go for it as Compere for the Saturday night. He seemed to be expert at winding the entire crowd up, but it produced a whole load of extremely funny heckles! At one point, when he began listing all of Matt Hall’s credentials before announcing his name, I stood up and said “it’s me”! It got one of the biggest laughs of the night, as I sat back down again and ushered Matt to take my place on stage! Matt congratulated me on the heckle the following day, which is excellent as he had drunk a lot and still managed to remember me! Matt Hall did another new first-time in public club juggling act which was awesome. Ewan did some flair bartending stuff. I did the ball juggling bird impressions act. Andy Blackett did some jitter ring stuff while having a blue carrier bag on his head. We were all relieved when he took it off as he was starting to look very faint indeed! Pascal did an even more impressive routine than the one at the Public Show (probably because there was lots of audience interaction which he managed superbly!) There was a large UV section of the show, at which point Jonny left as Compere, and James took over. I had never seen UV diabolo (and string) routine before! Definitely time for bed at 3am when the renegade finished!
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FOLLOW / LIKE / SUBSCRIBE / ENJOY!!
You can hire Steve the Juggler aka Stevie Vegas – for more details try…
Juggler for Hire section – (based in the United Kingdom)
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Sunday Morning Brekkie!
Breakfast was excellent, complete with the traditional jelly and sponge fingers! Newspapers in abundance for everyone to read.
World Record Haggis Juggling
Luke did a whitewash breaking each of his previous world records for 5, 4 and 3 haggis endurance. I was down to the last 4 with the 3 haggis juggling, and then dropped after 5mins 34seconds. Andy was next to drop, then Rob and Luke decided to give up at the same time so they now jointly hold the record. The whole haggis juggling event was being filmed by the Discovery Channel from Canada.
Games
- Gladiators: We had a few rounds of club gladiators, which I did ok at.
- Balancing: Luke won this one eventually
- Handstand Endurance: One girl did a slightly unusual handstand to win this event!
- Coin Juggling: I was down to the last 3 jugglers, and could just smell that money, but Luke won it as per usual! I lost 40p!
- 3 haggis gladiators was fun (especially seeing as the haggis by this time were all very squishy!)
- Diabolo in the box on Jonny’s head was won by Donald Grant (who else!)
- Buddy Gladiators saw me and Andy Blackett team up and nearly win on the second attempt. More difficult than we had thought it would be!
- Devilstick propellor (one stick only) gladiators – I won! woo-hoo. I couldn’t have done this event two years ago, so I was very happy! I won a chocolate digestive.
- Stredging:Jonny and I successfully defended last years win and we each got another chocolate digestive!
RAFFLE: this happened while the 3 haggis endurance was going on (an excellent idea!). I won the very last prize (a club juggling step by step book (I have loads of them in my juggling store!) I gave it to Roger who had just recently learned club juggling.
SUMMARY: A good convention, which I would have enjoyed a lot more if Rach had been healthier for the whole event. Graham and Britta did a wonderful job once again (especially considering that they are the organisers for the British Juggling convention coming very soon!) The public show was awesome, and Matt Hall really was a fantastic person to headline and to take part in everything.
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