FEBRUARY 9, 1996

OBIE MAKES IT IN THE WORLD OF JUGGLING

Up in the air: Cindy Marvell with her traveling juggling troupe, Lazer Vaudeville (photo courtesy of Cindy Marvell)

By Catherine Tarpley

Although her Oberlin classmates said she could never do it, Cindy Marvell, OC ‘88 is making a living out of juggling. She has been traveling and performing for eight years, and for the past few years has been a member of Lazer Vaudeville, a Florida-based company that is reviving vaudeville.

With only three performers in the company, the members handle the technical aspects of their performances. It takes them six hours to set up their equipment. They run their own sound and do their own lifting, jobs people have told Marvell that they couldn‘t do themselves. Most of the company‘s time together is spent on the road, not on the stage. Last year the group traveled 30,000 miles in a nine-month period, each of them taking turns to drive their truck.

Despite the stress and physical demands such a lifestyle imposes, Marvell doesn‘t mind: juggling has been her passion since the age of 12. Marvell started juggling in high school, but her enrollment at Oberlin only marked the beginning of a more intense juggling schedule than the one she had maintained during high school. She began practicing her juggling at least two hours everyday.

Oberlin provided Marvell with public forums for displaying her talent. She performed at Mayfair and juggled to spoken poetry for one of her Winter Term projects. Juggling to poetry inspired Marvell to want to write her own poetry to juggle to, so she did.

Though some might think that graduating requires abandoning true passion and finding a job with some stability, Marvell has proven that wrong. She has never held a job that wasn‘t juggling based.

But, said Marvell, persistence is required if one wants to find juggling work in the postgraduate world. To get jobs, Marvell said that jugglers must be willing to promote themselves avidly.

Marvell has always enjoyed traveling, and juggling is taking her everywhere. She had three different jobs in San Fransisco, including one at an amusement park. Also, Lazer Vaudeville travels all over the U.S. and Canada. This summer they will tour parts of Asia.

Marvell particularly enjoys street performance because, she said, it increases her spontaneity and helps her deal with difficult life situations when they arise.

Another aspect of juggling that Marvell finds attractive is that it allows her to be creative. Though “Juggling is a physical talent,” through performance Marvell has found an outlet for her creativity. Such a talent, Marvell said, must never be wasted.

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 1996

LAZER VAUDEVILLE ZAPS MUSIC HALL BACK TO ITS ROOTS

By Mark Dagostino

This is Lazer Vaudeville, where the physical skill, comedy and magic of an old-time roadshow combine with the speed, light and color of a video game.

A monster, a dragon, a wizard and three humans make up this touring troupe, which rolls into the Music Hall in Portsmouth next Sunday for a fantastical family show.

“The Music Hall was built to be a live entertainment/vaudeville house – and we‘re bringing that history back in a whole new way,” said Cindy Marvell, one of the humans in the troupe, on the phone from the Midwest.

Old-fashioned skills from juggling to rope twirling play out under blacklights, lasers and special effects yielding such visual delights as a 7-foot tall emcee named Alfonso the Dragon, a glow-in–the-dark cowboy and a saw-the-monster- in-half trick performed with a laser beam instead of a saw.

Darn, Good & Funny has earned several prestigious awards together and apart. In 1989, Marvell was named national individual juggling champion.

In 1990, Darn, Good & Funny won the team division. To stay in top form, they rehearse daily, sometimes together, sometimes separately. Currently they rehearse about 3 hours a day in a meeting room in the Moore Public Library.

Darn, Good & Funny has a busy schedule for the summer of 1994. In addition to their library appearances at Cheyenne, Clinton, Thomas and Weatherford, they will be performing at the World Trade Center in New York, at the International Jugglers’ Association Convention in Burlington, VT in August; and will then be traveling to Amsterdam, Holland to perform at the Oranjeboom Festival in Rotterdam.

No admission will be charged to attend these public performances and all ages will enjoy this family entertainment. These performances are made possible with the assistance of the Arts Council of Oklahoma.

“We give lessons,” Phariss said. “Come by.”

Note: Paul Phariss, Kevin Holman and Cindy Marvell won a Silver Medal in the team competition at the International Juggling Convention in Burlington, VT, in 1994.

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MARCH 31, 1996

JUGGLING MAGIC AND HISTORY

LAZER VAUDEVILLE GIVES AN OLD FORM A NEW LOOK

By Kevin Farley

SPOTLIGHT CORRESPONDENT

If you were one of the hundreds of people turned away from Lazer Vaudeville‘s shows at The Music Hall during First Night Portsmouth 1996, your chance for redemption has come. The group is bringing its stunning combination of high- tech laser magic, and the traditional vaudeville arts of juggling, acrobatics, zany comedy and audience participation back to The Music Hall for one show at 3 p.m. on Sunday, March 31.

Carter Brown, the group‘s founder, is excited about bringing an expanded version of the New Year‘s show back to Portsmouth. “Portsmouth is our kind of town,” he said in a recent interview, “an active downtown with a restored vaudeville house. And the audiences on New Year‘s Eve were absolutely fantastic.” The Music Hall itself is also an attraction to Brown and his cast mates: “Vaudeville comes back to the vaudeville house. There‘s a certain magic knowing the old vaudevillians performed there; I can almost feel their ghosts

The show fulfills Brown‘s dream of “diving into history to pull an art form out of the grave.” His background includes stints with the Ringling Brothers and Carden International Circuses and the Monte Carlo Festival du Cirque, as well as solo tours of South America, Canada and Japan. He brings a strong sense of history to his work, tracking down old films of his heroes and speaking with reverence of his encounters with such juggling legends as Kit Summers and Homer Stack.

Since forming Lazer Vaudeville in 1987, Brown has been committed to energizing his art with new technologies and original methods of presentation. “When I started the show, I was fed up with the lack of creativity in circus acts and vaudeville in general,” he says. “I really wanted to see it combined with the lighting effects and technology of the 90‘s.”

The result is a show which encompasses everything from traditional juggling with such diverse objects as plungers, machetes and running chainsaws, to a masterful demonstration of the lost art of hoop rolling. The troupe creates pinwheel illusions and percussive sounds with South American bolas, bounces balls off airborne drums in a mesmerizing ensemble piece, kicks up a luminescent rope-spinning display, and uses flying black light sticks in a piece called “Geospheres.”

These death-defying feats are mingled with such silliness as a chef named Julia Childish teaching plate spinning to a young audience member, and various tricks involving more conventional fixtures like straitjackets, pie tossing, acrobatics and slapstick. They are all performed with a decidedly surreal bent, and presided over by the master of ceremonies-a seven-foot tall, fluorescent, fire-breathing dragon named Alfonzo. “Kids are used to video and film, so they really respond to this,” Brown says. “Part of our mission is to introduce young audiences to the art of live performance.”

“Portsmouth is our kind of town – an active downtown with a restored vaudeville house. And the audiences on New Year’s Eve were absolutely fantastic.” – Carter Brown

The Centerfold of the Weekend Section

Brown comes from a theatrical family. Raised in New York City by his set- designer father and actress/dancer mother, he began performing at the age of eight. During a stint as director of the University of Vermont‘s mime troupe, The Silent Company, he picked up the basics of juggling and moved on to Ringling‘s Clown College.

It was during his road days with the circus that he found his niche as the premier revivalist of hoop juggling, a dying art which features the rolling and manipulation of antique bicycle rims. “The rims are hard to find these days,” Brown says, “and this act is rarely performed because of the space it requires.

During his time with Carden International Circus, Brown became interested in the use of technology to enhance the presentation of his art. He eventually developed innovations in sound and lighting, which were successful enough to encourage him to pursue the vision behind Lazer Vaudeville.

In addition to the mainstream juggling tradition, Brown‘s influences include “movement art” innovators, ranging from Mummenschanz and the Famous People Players, to recent MacArthur “genius grant” winner Michael Moschen and The Flying Karamazov Brothers. “We‘re taking it a step further into the realm of high-tech,” he says, “pulling a lot of elements in.” Brown‘s partners in his endeavor bring the same rich diversity of skills and background to the group.

Cindy Marvell, also a native New Yorker, is the first woman to win the International Juggling Association‘s Championship. At age 15, she became the youngest student ever admitted to SUNY Purchase‘s Antic Arts Academy, and moved on to San Francisco‘s Pickle Family Circus, and eventually worked solo in the Far East. She brings her background in dance to the mix, adding elements of modern choreography to the group‘s routines. “The technical level we perform at is very high,” she says, “but we try to explore the frontiers of the art in a way that still appeals to kids and enthralls adults.”

Jeff Taub, an acrobat and comedian, is also a graduate of Ringling Clown College. The Louisiana native studied theatre from a young age and, after his stint on the road with the circus, pursued his interest in theatrical design at the Dell‘Arte School of Physical Theatre in Blue Lake, California. His background in mask making and design brings an additional dimension to Lazer Vaudeville, and he works constantly to develop innovations in props and costumes for the show.

Besides presenting over 150 theatre shows a year, Lazer Vaudeville offers an Arts-in-Education Outreach program designed to bring live performances to schools. “We teach kids about the history of vaudeville in America,” Taub says. “Most of them can‘t imagine life before TV or movies, when vaudeville was the staple of popular entertainment.”

TUESDAY, JANUARY 4, 2000

Juggling: a Career

Tossing Clubs and Carving a Niche in a Male Bastion

By KATHERINE E. FINKELSTEIN

At first glance, Natalia Sarygina doesn’t look like much of a glass-ceiling smasher. She wears a sequined minidress to work, is pleased with her $25,000-a- year salary and has a conventional take on gender roles, in Russian-laced English.

”I think man is a man, he’s more strong,” she says. ”A woman? It’s a woman,” she shrugs, applying thick makeup in her stamp-size trailer in Manhattan.

Five-foot-four and 110 pounds, Ms. Sarygina appears to have more grace than intensity. But at 28, she is among a handful of women worldwide at the top of her profession: juggling. It is a field in which men outnumber women 9 to 1, according to the International Jugglers’ Association, and in which the three other partners in her troupe are men.

Even rarer, she juggles clubs, which are heftier than the batons, rings or soft balls that other female jugglers favor. At her alma mater, Moscow‘s State Circus and Variety College, most women content themselves with hula-hoops.

By numbers alone then, Ms. Sarygina — currently performing with the Big

Apple Circus and living in its trailer encampment behind Lincoln Center at

62nd Street between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues — has accomplished something on a par with the C.E.O. of Hewlett Packard and the secretary of the Air Force, both women.

Her act is almost too fast to track, her concentration muscular. The clubs slam into her hands and fly off, touch down in her partners’ hands and fly off again. The performers circle, climb onto pedestals, traverse a distance of 12 yards, all while passing and plucking clubs, spinning in a blur.

”The circus lights are blinding and the dust can get in your eyes,‘‘ she says.

”You finish a performance and you can‘t feel your hands. You can train and train, but if you miss one thing,‘‘ juggling becomes an ungrateful profession. The roles of most other women beneath the big top are defined by gender.

Women gravitate toward elephant riding, the trapeze and balance acts known as equilibristics, which demand grace and speed. Clowning, with its bruising pratfalls and adolescent goofing, draws more men, as do acts requiring strength, like the four-high acrobatic teams in which one huge member of the troupe stands beneath the others.

But none have remained a male bastion as much as juggling, with its long-term dangers of vision problems and hand numbness, technical demands and grueling practice schedule. ”Traditionally, boys have been more comfortable playing games that involve throwing and catching,‘‘ said Cindy Marvell, who in 1989 was the first woman to win a gold medal at the International Jugglers’ Association competition. Since then, only one other woman has succeeded her. Even the jugglers’ association itself, formed in 1947, evolved from the International Brotherhood of Magicians.

Juggling holds little glamour and sex appeal, Ms. Sarygina explains. ”When little girls start to do something, she doesn‘t want to be a juggle,‘‘ she said, dropping the r in her sketchy English. ”She wants to be a little queen.‘‘

When it comes to hurling bowling pins through the air, however, Ms. Sarygina is king.

Beneath her liquid eyeliner and leopard-print undergarments, her determination is steely, her thin arms like ropes, the result of the 20-pound barbells she curls every day. The troupe‘s practice schedule — four hours a day, one hour nonstop— leaves her with calluses and disappointingly short fingernails.

Her feminism is ”maybe just in some things,‘‘ she concludes: ”For each woman to earn by herself, to work by herself, to exist by herself.‘‘ She has been juggling for only four years.

Mostly, the female phenoms of the juggling world learned the art from their fathers. Katya Ignatov, for example, was trained by her famous father, Sergei. And Dorothy Finnigan, 15 — the next generation‘s talent, Ms. Marvell said — learned on tour with her juggling father, who goes by the stage name of Professor Confidence.

By contrast, Ms. Sarygina knew nothing of the circus, growing up an only child in Moscow with her fighter-pilot father, and her mother, an assistant television producer. She trained at the Moscow Institute of Sports as a rhythmic gymnast and became a two-time European aerobics champion, in 1990 and ‘91. On she went to model Puma sportswear and contemplate a career in journalism. Then one day in 1995, three male jugglers invited her to toss around some clubs.

”It turned out it worked for me,‘‘ she recalls.

She makes no claim to be the world‘s greatest juggler. That honorific may belong to Sergei Ignatov, the first person to juggle 13 rings. He is known for saying that juggling lies in the soul, not the wrist. Others argue for Michael Moschen, who received a MacArthur Foundation genius grant in 1991 for his manipulation of crystal spheres.

Francoise Rochais grabbed the gold from the International Jugglers’ Association in 1995 by tossing seven clubs simultaneously — slim homemade ones, albeit, with little flower decorations at the ends.

Though Ms. Sarygina prefers three clubs, there is little doubt that her strength, dexterity, and flawless grasp of whizzing objects put her near the top of the tent. Her male partners, somewhat miffed to be passing clubs in her shadow, concede that of 3,000 Russian circus artists — 48 reputable juggling troupes among them — only one or two ”girls‘‘ juggle at her level.

Backstage in the sawdust, the ringmaster‘s stunt double, Dinny McGuire, said that in twenty years of circus experience, he has never seen a woman as good as she is in an act ”like this.‘‘

Bello Nock, the star clown, with vertical orange hair and a baggy tuxedo, said that Ms. Sarygina had mastered upper-body isolation, mixing strength and force with elegance. ”It‘s hard to look as graceful as she does,‘‘ he said, watching her troupe, The Original Jugglers, warm up.

The subject quickly turned to her striking looks, akin to those of one of James Bond‘s girlfriends. ”I don‘t think she has to juggle,‘‘ Mr. Nock reflected. ”She could just drop them and pick them up.‘‘

”During this act, she’s about all you see,” Mr. McGuire chimed in.

But ask Ms. Sarygina whether it’s hard to be young and single in a man’s world, with smitten audience members sometimes offering dinner or drinks. Her sole complaint is a practical one. ”If a woman is single, it’s a little bit hard, driving,” she says, explaining that she must drive her own trailer, hours on end, to circus gigs across the country.