Circus Skills

I am skilled in, and can teach, from beginner level to advanced, all the following circus skills: -

• Ball juggling; 3-ball, advanced 3-ball, 4 & 5 Ball
• Club juggling, including club passing
• Diabolo, advanced tricks and basic two-diabolo
• Devil stick and double devil stick
• Contact juggling (crystal ball manipulation)
• All spinning skills (poi, staff, meteors)
• Fire arts (fire poi, fire meteors, fire club juggling)
• Unicycling and off-road unicycling

These skills are learnable by anyone- practice, patience and determination are worth far more than any initial innate talent which one may or may not possess.

The only thing that blocks progress in these skills is initial lack of understanding as to how to learn the basics, and lack of self belief.

That's where I come in- I've taught this stuff to hundreds of people, I know how to present it in an understandable way, I know the blocks and how to overcome them.

It's the nature of these skills that mastery requires a lot of time; no-one is going to go from complete beginner to five ball master in a one-day workshop! But they will get a excellent grounding in the basics, an opportunity to try a wide variety of skills and, perhaps most important, they will, to some extent, learn how to learn; and emerge at the end of the workshop being able to do something that they couldn't do before it.

Benefits of circus skills

There is far more to circus skills than performing- learning them improves co-ordination, confidence and provides a gentle physical workout. They can be worked on in isolation, yet are an excellent way of meeting people and socialising. Perhaps most important is that they are a lot of fun and, for adults, provide the sense of play that is often lost as we grow up.

The circus skills 'scene'

Currently in the UK there are 15-20 juggling conventions throughout the year at various locations (London, Sheffield, Bradford, York, Nottingham etc). For a small fee (£5 to £10) participants get a day of juggling/poi/circus skills, meet others of all skill levels and get to see a show at the end.

There you will see the wide range of circus skills practitioners- some pushing themselves to the limits of what they can do by working on juggling large numbers (7 balls, 9 balls etc) of objects, others focusing on mastering flow and beautiful patterns with 3 balls, diabolo, poi etc.

Some are there mainly to socialise and have fun, getting together with others and practicing club passing patterns. Also there are professional performers working on their acts- they may well appear in the final show.