Atlanta Juggling Festival

The Atlanta juggling association has a yearly juggling competition every year over groundhog's day weekend. They had competition things happening all day and then a show in the evening. Since I can't actually do any tricks, I went to the show and not the competition part. While we were waiting for the show people stood out in the courtyard and juggled glowing things. The two best were a set of strobe light balls that were slightly out of sync so when they were sitting still they looked white but when they were moving they flashed all different colors, it made it look like the guy was juggling about 4x the balls he actually was; and someone brought a sphero that they drove around, they would change the color so it matched the balls being juggled and confuse the jugglers. 

So where was this event? Why in a Shriner's temple of course. You may recall that the cool theater in Atlanta, the Fox, was once a Shriner's temple too. Who are the Shriners? Well I don't really know, I think it is kind of like the Masons but more fun. So, this is the inside of the hall, it looks pretty cool. 

The show itself was excellent. Everyone did a fantastic job, they were real performers so they  had stage craft and everything. The MC was a professional clown and was actually really funny. The performers all adapted their shows to the audience. This meant instead of juggling like they would for and audience of people who can't juggle, where the worst thing would be to drop something, they juggled for an entire room full of jugglers, where it is ok to drop things as long as you are doing something cool and recover well. This meant that they tried tricks that normally I wouldn't get to see. Most of the performers dropped something in their act but all had cool ways of getting back on track from having someone throw the club to them and just adding it back in, to doing backbends to pick up the lost ball, to catching a wayward diablo using the string like a bull whip. One of my favorites was the kid who juggled 9 boxes. I had never seen box juggling before but it is really cool. It looked kind of like this but with more boxes. I also really liked someone who had 3 diablos that they juggled on the string. All in all it was a pretty fun evening and practically like going to the circus.