Idea List

     Last year for my March post, I made a list of ideas for our Fourth of July showdown. We haven’t been asked to do that show again this year, but hopefully we will get to do something like that this year.  The three rounds of the competition are a different solo skill, a shared solo skill and a new act. I already told Darren that I wanted to do 5 ball juggling as our shared skill. I haven’t put much thought into what my new act could be, so I decided to once again come up with a bunch of ideas for new acts this March. I have been jotting down ideas for the last week, but I lost my little piece of paper. Here are the ideas that I remember.

1. Robot Juggling Routine – Darren and I recently performed at a talent night. We had a juggling relay. If I won, Darren agreed to do the Midas Touch routine. This is a routine that I am excited about, but Darren did not feel it was ready for an audience. If Darren had won I would have had to do a robot dance for the audience. I don’t really know how to do that, and I only put in a very minimal amount of practice the day of the show. Fortunately I won and didn’t have to do that, but I was surprised how non-awful my robot was during practice (at least I don’t think it was awful). If I could do a juggling robot routine I think that could be cool.  The closest thing I have seen to this is Olivia Porter routine.

2. Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger – First there was a video of the “finger dance” for this song. Then there was a two person dance version. Now, I would like to do a two person juggling version of this. If I was doing this for the Fourth of July Showdown, Darren wouldn’t be involved, but I could just figure out my part and have someone else just do the dancing part to cover the other half of the words.  

3. Speed Art – I always like seeing this type of act. Last year on America’s Got Talent, two of the top acts were this type of act. One used paint. The other used sand. I can think of three ways to do a juggling act like this.

                a. The first would be the paint approach, I could use sponge balls and paint, but that would be super messy and expensive.  Instead I would use a Buddha board and use water in the sponge balls, swiping the board as I juggled.  

                b. The second way would be similar to the sand approach. Moving sand to create a picture is basically drawing by erasing. I would do this by having a bunch of little white boards filled with marker, and erasing bits of them as I juggled probably with balls wrapped in socks to erase. In the end all the white boards would come together to make a picture.

                c. The final way to do this would be to use pixels to create the picture. I would do this by creating some kind of giant grid that I could throw juggling balls into. I would need to use a lot of different colored juggling balls to make a picture. It would kind of be like a giant Lite-Brite. This would probably take two people, and might end up being more of just a really weird way to make a picture rather than juggling.  

4. Memorizing – It is possible to memorize a deck of cards in a minute. This sound weird, but I think it is really cool. Here is an article that explains it all.

5. Hoodie Act – Darren got a juggling ball stuck in his hood during our last practice. Maybe this could be done on purpose to form the basis of a routine. It would be kind of like when you see people put a basketball into their shirt and hit it out. 

6. Balloons – I could juggle helium balloons by the strings/ribbons. Instead of throwing balls up, I would have to pull strings down.  This would probably be too slow, but I keep coming back to this idea.

7. Fitted Baseball Cap – Right now, Darren and I do hat tricks with derbies, but it could be interesting to try and relearn all those tricks with fitted baseball caps. Breakdancers frequently use this type of hat for tricks.

8. Music – I have always wanted to make music by juggling.  Last year I tried the boomwhackers, they are kind of quiet and would probably require two or three jugglers to play an interesting song.  I saw a video of Michael Karas juggling and hitting bells, this is a cool approach to this.


There were a couple of others, but hopefully I didn't forget anything too good. If you particularly like any of these ideas or have any additional ideas for me to add to the list, let me know in the comment section.