Sunday, Dec. 20, 2020 – Learn to Juggle with Viveca!

As our kinda-quarantine keeps wending on, a weird tediousness threatens to set in. So what better way to entertain and distract us than to learn to juggle! One of my classmates, Viveca Gardiner, volunteered to give us a Zoom class on how to juggle She is a professional in the circus arts, a filmmaker, a producer, a teacher, and an MBA to boot, and she has recently starting delving into art directing Zoom backgrounds. She appeared sporting a very cute shirt, emblazoned with letters in colored circles that were the symbols of NYC subway lines – JGLR. She said it was a bit of a test to see who picked up the joke. Our instructions for the class were to show up with whatever we could manage to juggle. I came with three dryer balls which apparently were the wrong sort of balls as they are “too light,” and indeed, they consequently disappeared under furniture within my first tries, so I personally mostly observed. However, some people showed up in fine form with proper official juggling balls and some experience juggling. People really got into it, it was fun, with live time throwing balls in the air, dropping them, and trying them again, all from our little Zoom boxes. She’s experienced as a teacher so she very clearly and charmingly broke down the juggling basics, with two balls, with three balls, and a fancy two balls in one hand tossed to the other hand trick. It was a great way to break up some of the heaviness we’d all been feeling, and we learned that juggling was even good for us, it helps improve coordination and combats Alzheimer’s. We didn’t even talk about COVID, just juggling, her experience juggling, how she got into juggling, and what her next projects were, which due to COVID shutting circuses, include a somewhat major film project. COVID’s affect on the arts has been devastating, but I’d like to think some of the pivots artists are forced into will lead to some good things that might not otherwise have happened, like her film project, and like a number of us perhaps picking up juggling as a new and healthy hobby.