After a pandemic pause, the Boulder Circus Center’s annual Juggling Fest was in full swing again this weekend.
The festival included three days of juggling workshops, yo-yo lessons, bowler hat tricks, demonstrations and competitions.
There were about two dozen people tossing clubs, balls, and rings in the air and back and forth Sunday afternoon during a juggling workshop. On the final day of the juggling festival, coordinator David Wang insisted anyone can learn to juggle in less than a day, and there’s no wrong way to do it.
“Philosophically speaking, I like to think of juggling as a pretty broad thing, and any sort of object manipulation for fun and creativity is challenging,” said Wang.
Juggling, said Wang, has been fascinating spectators for decades, and draws people in from all sorts of backgrounds — engineers, artists, business owners.
“The juggling subculture is one that people misconstrue as we’re all performers, but most people here just juggle for fun,” said Wang. “People find it in different ways.”
Wang found his path to juggling by chatting with a street performer who invited him to the circus center, and now Wang has connections and friends around the world, sharing clips and tips as they explore new styles.
The Boulder Circus Center and the juggling festival are the work of Cindy Marvell. She started the center in 2004.
Marvell has traveled the world juggling, even performing at the Kennedy Center, and learned from her father, a physicist, when she was a child.
“I never thought it would lead me to this,” Marvell said.
While Marvell shared her juggling journey and demonstrated different props and techniques, she wore a seemingly unbreakable smile.
Is juggling the subculture secret to a happy life? Watching the other performers at the workshop, Marvell said it seems to help.
“It is a happy art because it makes you feel you can do the impossible,” she said. “And when people feel like the impossible is possible they can get around the limitations in life.
“Juggling has been likened to trickery or some sort of magic, but there’s a sort of a phenomenal magic to it, a natural magic, it’s one that just makes you believe anything is possible.”
