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• Burrowing Into Fine Dining
• Revolutionary Movement
• (L)inked in Controversy
• The Art of Protest
• He's the Band
• The Watchmen of Rogers Park
• When Everybody Isn't Doing It
• Help Wanted
• The Party Starter
• Ball of Fury
• Tossing Off the Old Routine
• Flight Risk
• Surgical Revival
• On the Road with Puppet

Tossing Of the Old Routine

Brian Dailey is part of a new breed of jugglers -- guys who see their work as high art

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It speaks to the relatively small size of the juggling world that Dailey has met and talked with his biggest influence on a number of occasions, even convincing Gilligan to perform at a benefit concert for a studio owned by Dailey's friend. “Brian seems to be able to do his own thing,” writes Gilligan in an e-mail from Finland where he’s currently performing. “I don’t see him having to answer to anyone about his juggling or what he does with it. For me that fits more on the art side, as a performer generally has to answer to an audience more often than not.”
   
Gilligan arguably represents the height of what is possible in artistic juggling. On August 10th, he and two fellow jugglers kicked off a worldwide tour sponsored by Chicago-based T-shirt seller Threadless. The manifesto on the tour's website speaks of establishing “a cohesive and self-sustaining network of venues and areas of public interest that can support up and coming jugglers.” This formal declaration implies that in the future jugglers like Dailey might be the centerpiece of a performance, a development new to a juggling world traditionally treated as the sideshow.

“As an art form, craft, or a sport, whatever, it’s all happening right now,” writes Gilligan. “The history of juggling is being written as we speak and we’re all right in the middle of it.”

Juggling’s earliest known depiction can be found as far back as 1994 B.C. in Egyptian wall paintings. The modern perception of a juggler, that of a clown or entertainer, can be traced to 1768 when Phillip Astley formed the first circus and included jugglers as part of his act. As vaudeville and variety acts gave way to motion pictures and television in the mid-20th-century, jugglers struggled to find work. In responding to this growing threat, jugglers at the time did what many professionals had done before them to preserve their chosen trade: they organized.

In 1947 the International Jugglers Association (IJA) was formed to fill the need for “an organization for jugglers that would provide meetings at regular intervals in an atmosphere of mutual friendship.” Currently, the IJA has 1,800 members, from professionals to beginners, who read Juggle, their quarterly magazine, meet at the IJA’s annual festivals, and compete in IJA-sponsored events.

In 2004, juggling got its second organized body in the creation of the World Juggling Federation (WJF). With prize money, sponsorship opportunities, and tournaments televised on ESPN2, the WJF is attempting to legitimize juggling as a sport and its participants as athletes.
   
In many IJA and WJF competitions, the emphasis is on “flashing” or “qualifying” – keeping the highest number of balls, clubs, or rings in the air for at least one or two rotations. On the last night of the most recent IJA festival in Winston Salem, North Carolina, after all the medals for individual prop, team, and best trick had been handed out, Dailey performed Loving Feeling in an old courthouse in front of a handful of juggling friends. Dailey thought the performance went well but worried his warm reception might have only been because the previous “act” had been so bad: the man was removed from the stage after dropping crumbled potato chips down the back of his pants for 10 minutes.

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Dailey grew up in Glenview with a younger sister. Both were adopted from a private agency in Evanston. His father is the CFO of TrailMobile, Inc, a company that Brian says “sells the boxes that go on the back of trucks.” His mother is a former toy buyer for Marshall Field's, part of the reason that Brian most often describes his childhood as “privileged.” Dailey says both of his parents are supportive of his juggling but admits they’d like him to do something more important with his life, “like be a Senator.”
   
When he was a sophomore at Glenbrook South High School Dailey joined the juggling club and learned to juggle three balls. It took him two weeks of practicing every day. Glenbrook South is known for being academically rigorous: its website boasts that over 75 percent of its teachers hold at least one advanced degree and 95 percent of its graduates go to college.

“I really enjoyed (juggling) because it wasn’t going to help me get a job or improve my grades or be something that any of my teachers or parents wanted me to do,” says Dailey. “That was important because I felt a lot of academic and social pressure in those days. It just has to do with myself, my personality. (Juggling) was just kind of punk rock.”