Though the difficulty rating is surely wrong - this is one of the tricks you learn on the way to juggling 5 balls and by the time you've got to 552 you are almost there.
I used to practice this pattern obsessively - the 3 different heights of throws are hard to get right but when you do the pattern clicks in and it feels great!
Ugh, no way. There's way more to three ball juggling than just Mills Mess (no apostrophe, his name was Steve Mills and it's not possessive but just a title).
Mills Mess is the start of learning that there's more to three ball juggling than just a couple of over the top throws, not the end of it.
Agreed. After mastering the basic cascade, Mills Mess is a great beginner pattern to learn next, but there are way more challenging ones. Burke's Barage is another more challenging pattern.
MUCH more difficult to learn than Mills Mess. The needed move is so much faster and your arms 'follow each other' less, whereas Mills Mess the hands sort of snake around.
Early in my real juggling days, learning mills mess, followed by Boston mess was eye opening. I'd self taught a three ball cascade and four ball columns a decade beforehand, waiting in a hospital ward. Learning those two messes, which for all their complexity, are just the same three ball cascade, opened my mind up to how much 'movement' could change what you were doing, and how it was perceived.
Boston Mess and Cherry Picker are hard but very satisfying patterns once you get them figured out.
There's a level you can reach in juggling where it's like you're watching your hands do something that even you don't know how they're doing. The muscle memory outpaces your perception. It fees like magic.
I was taught the juggling notation site-swap around 25 years ago, and it's one of those things that sticks with you despite the fact that I don't have the coordination to juggle.
What really impressed me at the time was the ability to take something as complex and time-dependent as juggling and reduce it to a simple notion of numbers such as "53444", and that another juggler could take that string of numbers and produce a meaningful juggle from it. I seem to remember that even numbers implied a same-hand throw and sticking to odd numbers would mean only cross-hand throws, but my memory is a bit foggy on the details.
That a seemingly complex juggle could be reduced by abstraction to just a couple of numbers was mind-blowing ( To be fair, I was ~12 at the time. ).
In addition there was software which could then take any such string and reproduce the juggle, and that was even cooler. I definitely spent the next few weeks playing around with different patterns in that software. One of the other fascinating things was trying to plug random numbers in, they'd seldom come out as anything particularly interesting. You'd end up with a lot of patterns where balls were same-hand juggled to different heights.
I learned quickly that I was less interested by the juggling and more interested in the mathematics which let you reduce it down to a small sequence, and that random data rarely holds genuinely interesting patterns even if they first appear so.
Site-swap notation is in terms of "beats". The number is how many beats will elapse for that throw before it lands. The beats alternate hands, so any odd number means that ball is scheduled to land in the opposite hand. The standard cascade is 333, meaning each ball thrown will land three beats later, and in the opposite hand.
The constraint on a useful site-swap number is this: you can't have two balls scheduled to land on the same beat, which would mean arriving at the same hand at the same time. Or more generally a ball can't land when that hand is otherwise occupied.
Advanced jugglers can do that stuff physically (catch simultaneously or in an occupied hand), but it's not the purest version of juggling. More generally, advanced jugglers can do many positional and timing variations including simultaneous catches or throws, that aren't covered by the standard basic site-swap notation. There are extensions to the notation, like using parentheses around two numbers to show two throws occuring at the same time, and if the numbers are different they will land at different times.
The mathematics of siteswap are fascinating. The linked article points to the canonical Internet source for siteswap information: http://www.siteswap.org/
There you will find many articles on the subject and several varieties of the software you described to visualize or verify patterns.
I've fond memories of getting very deep in finding new siteswaps, through the night and into dawn, many nights across Europe in 2008. I'd keep a notebook going and email friends back home once a week or so, just with a dot point list of numbers.
Siteswap notation is really cool. At the same time, it's important to also realize that it's a distillation of juggling that deliberately sacrifices capturing much of the performance information inherent in actually throwing balls in the air to impress an audience.
Very much like how sheet music doesn't capture the nuance and expressiveness of a performance. It's a useful tool, but being able to read sheet music does not a musician make.
This reminded me of this guy I was friends with starting in kindergarten, really smart kid, everyone kind of thought he would go on to study physics or something. Then sometime around 14 or so he started juggling and got so obsessed he would constantly practice during every break and even on the train to/from school. I think he's working as a circus artist now? Always kind of fascinated how you could get so absorbed in a topic, especially given my own propensity for rapidly cycling interests.
Heh, to some extent, this is what I did. School was easy (low standard of eduction), school life was boring (team sports or nothing), so I found something that interested me. I learned to juggle, amongst other things. Got decent, then learned to perform.
I performed most friday and saturday night in late highschool, assorted gigs I got through contacts or from audience members. Graduated school, worked long enough to build some savings and buy a flight to Europe, and hit the road with a backpack.
I stuck with it on my return for a while, but ended up leaving it for 'normal' career.
Funny thing is, Anthony Gatto was brought up in a circus family and went on to become the world's best technical juggler (based on endurance at high numbers, incredibly difficult technical tricks, and overall consistency rather than just a few one-off record attempts), but eventually got bored of juggling and decided to quit and start a business doing concrete countertop installation.
I did a bunch of juggling in college, and several of my friends went on to do circus arts professionally. Generally they went into more acrobatics oriented arts than juggling; seems like juggling itself is not quite as interesting to audiences as it is to the jugglers.
Oh, and to tour other point, I noticed a gap between juggling and juggling performance. There's an article elsewhere in this post on Gatto, that sums up quite well how audience perception of difficulty is quite limited. This impacts a juggling performance severely, but has no impact on someone who likes to juggle. I suppose the same could be said of a lot of things though, without a technical eye, a lot of Olympic competitions are impressive, but I can't tell good from better.
I remember learning about Gattos shift of career. He was someone me and my friends would watch with admiration. When we learned he'd stopped, we were disappointed, but didn't question it.
I don't question any career change (done it 4 times myself) but I do find it interesting when someone moves from working with their passion (and you have to be passionate to get world-class at anything) to what is almost certainly just a paycheck gig.
I mean, he could be passionate about concrete benchtops, but what are the chances?
Your passion can also be soul destroying, or body destroying. Friends who have left the industry often site career-ending injuries, or that they were on track for a permanent disability.
I've been teaching my kids juggling recently and it's really rewarding. I initially got into circus skills in the 90s when my family would regularly visit Mushy Pea in Manchester, a shop which inspired quite a few kids in the region, I suspect. There was a carpark outside our house when we were growing up and I could be spotted most weekends riding my unicycle round and round for hours. I was never great at anything, but it's one of those skills that has a fantastic ratio of impressing people to actual effort and skill (Rubik's Cube is another). Eventually I could juggle four balls, clubs, knives and rings and I've never really forgotten the muscle memory. I think it's brilliant with kids because they can see, with even a single ball, how quickly it's possible to improve with practice - it pays back quite quickly in a way that many other hobbies really don't. But once a kid knows practice does actually make perfect, it's a lesson they can take to all other walks of life, even when it takes much longer to notice yourself getting good.
Sad to discover from this site that my Mills' Mess is only a Half-Mess though. Going to have to work to rectify that!
Juggling is such an underrated activity. Not only is it rhymthmical which, like walking, is quite soothing for the body, but it also promotes cross-hemisphere communication in the brain.
Our hands get a lot of neural real-estate (see grotesque homunculi) so, unlike walking, activities targeting their communication have significant potential for shaping neural patterns.
Apparently Einstein had an above-normal number of connections in the corpus callosum. I reckon he was an ambitious juggler.
I picked up juggling after doing a management training class that included a one hour lesson with a professional juggler. I had never tried before then and couldn't quite make it work within that one hour group lesson. But they gave us a set of balls to take home and over a weekend I got the juggling to click.
For me the trick was to stop thinking about it and to just let go. Our built-in parabolic trajectory prediction is magical, just need to throw the balls consistently enough for that prediction to become automatic.
I just fuck around with three balls and it is mostly to help me keep sanity if I am working somewhere with shit CI that takes forever. I was aware that there was a proper pedagogy and nomenclature, but never bothered to learn it. Really surprised to see my "repertoire" is all of the Level 2 and some Level 3 listed on this site.
> For me the trick was to stop thinking about it and to just let go.
Indeed. From "Juggling for the Complete Klutz" by Cassidy and Rimbeaux:
> Step 1: The Drop
> Throw all three bags into the air and, making no effort to catch any of them, let them all hit the ground. This is an example of The Drop. I do it all the time and so will you, but it'sgood to familiarize yourself with the moves early on.
> Practice the drop until the novelty wears off.
Learning to juggle is really about learning to fail, repeatedly and publicly, and still have a smile on your face.
The advanced version: it's not necessary to let them hit the ground. Stand over a bed or couch, so to pick them up, at least you only have to bend down to waist level.
My favorite version: juggle while standing in a swimming pool! Use an object that floats, like wiffle balls, and a missed catch just stays there floating right in front of you.
> The advanced version: it's not necessary to let them hit the ground. Stand over a bed or couch, so to pick them up, at least you only have to bend down to waist level.
lol, this is exactly what I did when I started because of the annoyance of bending down. Then I incorporated it into a fitness goal and did proper squats to pick them up. Now, I mostly will just pause and reset if I have a weird catch to avoid the next throw that would end up on the floor.
> My favorite version: juggle while standing in a swimming pool! Use an object that floats, like wiffle balls, and a missed catch just stays there floating right in front of you.
This is a great idea. Next time I go swimming I'll have to bring some balls that float.
This reminds me of one of the more memorable pieces I've read over the last decade or so, an article in the now-defunct Grantland blog about Anthony Gatto [0]. Worth a read even if you aren't into juggling at all.
That was a walk down memory lane, thanks. A lot of names and places I'd thought I'd forgotten. In my teen years, what Gatto had been up to was a frequent point of conversation with a few of my friends.
I'd never compare myself with Gatto, we were in different leagues altogether, he was big time, I toured one year. The hard work that went into it, and the return on that time, makes a normal job look pretty great. Mad respect to the people that keep it up.
There's a community of jugglers who pass clubs who now document their new patterns with videos (and notation) at https://passing.zone/ rather than making animations.
For another "library" of sorts, here's a rather random assortment of (mostly) juggling related documents:
https://jugglingedge.com/pdf/
The really fun thing is to realize that juggling is a meta-hobby. I started out with juggling balls, a short time on rings, spent a long time on clubs, and now spend my time trying to apply some of that to juggling hoops. Plus there's kendama, yo-yo, diablo, poi, and contact juggling, all of which are also available for juggling (I've never seen someone juggle yo-yos, but kendama, diablo, and poi, it's all attested).
As someone who has always picked up and put down hobbies, juggling has stuck with me because it's easy for me to just shift slightly and now have a very different experience even though it's all "just juggling".
My history was teaching myself 3-ball cascade, reverse cascade and then figuring I was 'done' with juggling. When I went to teach my kids in, in an attempt to get them to understand "improvement by inches", I discovered that youtube now has slow-motion breakdowns of every trick you might ever want to do. I picked it back up more than 5 years ago now and still go to regular local meetups. (sadly, my kids didn't ever really get into it)
When I was a teenager (17) all my friends in my class they could juggle three balls and I was a little jealous I wanted to be able to do like them. I remember buying three juggling balls and during recess I would train , sometime I would even skip class to train ! It took me about three weeks to be able to juggle with 3 balls! I am left handed so maybe it has something to do with that.
The animation on this site are great but they could be better if the balls were numbered (1,2,4)
Mill's Mess. Once you've mastered this, you've mastered 3 balls!
https://libraryofjuggling.com/Tricks/3balltricks/MillsMess.h...
This 5 ball multiplex is a fun one to learn - look like you are juggling 5 balls but you are only really juggling 3.
https://libraryofjuggling.com/Tricks/5balltricks/FiveBallSpl...
Here is my favourite 4 ball pattern
https://libraryofjuggling.com/Tricks/4balltricks/552.html
Though the difficulty rating is surely wrong - this is one of the tricks you learn on the way to juggling 5 balls and by the time you've got to 552 you are almost there.
I used to practice this pattern obsessively - the 3 different heights of throws are hard to get right but when you do the pattern clicks in and it feels great!
https://libraryofjuggling.com/Tricks/4balltricks/534.html