the Way of the Showman 85 - Erik Åberg - Expanding Our Artistic Practice - part 2 of 2
This is the second part of my conversation with juggle, inventor and thinker Erik Åberg. We talk about a whole range of interesting topics and I marvel at the depth of thought Erik shares with me.
we talk about:
Archiving as artistic practice.
Paul Cinquevalli.
Juggling history is the past, juggling today can be observed, the possible future explored by Erik is his kinetic sculptures.
How to ask existential questions through juggling.
Why should juggling exist?
Erik sketches out two possible answers based on his 20.000 archval clippings about Paul Cinquevalli. Following the descriptions by critics and reviewers Erik finds two main lines of answers
1 - Paul Cinquevalli is the greatest juggler in the world and is comparable to Shakespeare and Ninjinski.
2 - He is a manifest example of wasting ones life away on purposeless activities.
In this way Erik demonstrates the interlinking and usefullness of the archival part of his practice. As a show only exist as experience the reviews and quotes become like fossilized represantations of the experience of the shows. The fact that Cinquevalli was so famous that it generated 1000's of quotes gives us a pretty strong representation of what these Show experiences were like.
Why is skill so captivating to us humans?
Michael Moschen's idea of the kill. How our paleolithic ancestors deeply valued the kill with a spear or sling of an animal.
Ivar Hacksher - life is difficult an endless dynamically unstable situation and when we successfully surf through it we get a deep sense of completion.
Creating a microscoping focus of Attention. The performer focuses the Attention of the many, creating a collective experience.
Enriching the Audience.
Current evidence points to early juggling as being only cascade patterns and not sequences of tricks.
Eriks wonderful theory of Transportational Activities.
Links:
Erik Åberg's Ghost Cubes
Erik and Jay Gilligan's juggling show Bevis
Erik and Jay's juggling show Blick
A more biographical interview with Erik for those who want to get to know him a little more.
A short podcast about Paul Cinquevalli from Smithsonian Magazine
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