Originally trained as an engineer, Light in Winter 2010 performer Greg Kennedy has always been fascinated with geometry and physics. He quickly made a name for himself in the juggling community not only by his mastery of traditional juggling technique, but also for creating entirely new forms of manipulation. Since then, Greg has performed on five different continents and most of the world’s seas. In fact, Greg will be joining Cirque du Soleil as a featured act in 2010 touring production. Recently, Light in Winter caught up with Kennedy for a short interview about how his love for juggling became intertwined with his experience as an engineer, how his performances are created, and what he hopes his audiences will take home.
LIW: In addition to juggling work, you have a background in Engineering. Which interest came first to you? Can you describe the events that took place to get you where you are in your work now?
GK: When I was a little kid, I was the sort of kid that took the stereo apart. Never quite figured out exactly how to get it back together. And that was the interest that I had since I was a little kid. Mechanics and engineering, that line of thought. A little bit later as a kid I learned to juggle, just for fun, for entertaining. I never really thought it was going to be a career. I never even considered that. It was just a hobby. Then, probably about five or six years after that I decided to do something a bit more useful, so I went and got a degree in engineering.
I loved engineering school, and actually loved my first year in the engineering business. The second year in the engineering business was pretty similar to the first year in the engineering business, and I got a little bored. I was doing a little juggling on the side, just for some fun, and I started using the engineering principles I learned in school and began applying them towards my juggling. In the process I just started creating more and more forms of interesting juggling. My first piece that got really well known, a piece where I roll balls inside a large plexi-glass bowl, called “Hemisphere”, I’ll be doing that for the Light in Winter show, it kind of came together as routine. I competed at the 1996 International Juggling Championships with it, and I took the gold medal. About seven months after that I decided to take a short leave of absence from my engineering job…that was February 1997. Now its 2009, so it turned out to be a little bit long for a leave of absence than I first expected.
LIW: What is the greatest challenge that you see in your work?
GK: For me, the challenge is to continue building the work, because it’s really sometimes very easy to just be on tour, doing the shows, getting everything polished and go. Whereas, the time I really value is the time back in the studio creating new pieces and new work. At any one time, I’ve probably got about three or four pieces in development at certain stages. Some of it really close to hitting the stage, and some of it in very raw form that may not even get to performance. So, that’s the challenge for me. Just creating the new work.
LIW: What are some of the ideas that you hope to bring to fruition in the future?
GK: One of the new pieces I’m working on is a horizontal tube, and it has rubber balls rolling around. I have an earlier piece that I do on a circular track, but this puts a lateral movement to it. One of the interesting things is if you stand at one end of the tube, which is about six feet high and ten feet long, and when you throw the ball down the tube, you would expect it to come shooting out the other end. But, because of the physics and the friction, and the ball wanting to remain rolling in a straight line, it will actually reverse itself and come right back to me. So, I’ve been playing with this for a little while, and I think in another couple of years I’ll have something newer than that.
LIW: I noticed that you posted video online of a few juggling ideas that did not work as well as you had hoped, so you abandoned them (see Quadralith on YouTube). Do you see any similarities or differences between that trial and error approach to creating performances, and the approach to creating structures in Engineering?
GK: Well, let me just say that for every extra piece that I put together and figure out how to juggle in, and the three or four minutes of choreography that ends up onstage, there are three or four pieces gathering dust in my basement right now. For me, my failures are very concrete, because I have to build them, and I see them. I store them. It’s fun to look back on them. I never really get upset about that. I always feel it’s part of the learning process. And while, even though it may not make it to something that comes out to the public, the learning process, the things I’ve learned while exploring that piece, usually transfer onto a future idea. There are certain pieces – I have certain sculptures that look beautiful when they do two things, but that’s absolutely all they do. Nothing more. And you explore it a bit, but you end up saying, “Well, that’s it.” It’s fine, because I use the ideas from those sculptures on the next project. I enjoy the process, anyway, because for me, that’s kind of my play time.
LIW: What would you say is the most important thing you have learned in doing your work?
GK: I do a lot of younger, family shows. A lot of kids come and see my show, and one of the interesting things I learned is that when I was a kid I was definitely picked out as this brilliant mathematical, scientific, logical mind, and they put me right on that path, and between the teachers and the parents, I forgot that there’s this whole creative side. It’s not really taught in that curriculum, and there is this whole creative side that a lot of people think “Oh, creative is very right-brained.” That it only has to do with creative writing and painting stuff. But my feeling is that your mechanic that works on your car, he’s got to make creative decisions all the time. He can follow the manual to do an oil change, but when he shears off a bolt, and he’s looking at it, and he’s saying “You know, that’s gotta come out”, he has to figure that out. He’s got to come up with creative solutions. So, I feel there’s a whole side of creativity that works in the left brain side. Both sides of your brain work together. You look at different artists, like Leonardo da Vinci, he had a very good equal mix of left-right brain creativity, and I think that was something I didn’t learn until later in life. I was on this set curriculum, and I went forward, and I did my engineering degree, and I worked in engineering, but I had all this stuff in the back of my head that I wanted to do. I find out now that not only is it something that I do that rewards me, I’ve made a career out of it. So, for the young people out there, anything that they love that they want to do, they should stick with it, because eventually, if you work had enough you can become one of the best in the world at it. And once you get that good, somebody will pay you to do it, you know. And it’s something fun.
LIW: What do you hope audiences take away from your performances?
GK: When audiences come out to see my show, it’s fun for me to show them something they’ve never seen before. I always open my show with a little bit of traditional juggling, starting with balls, props and rings, because it gives them a context of what they’re seeing. It shows them my background, what I went through. From there it breaks into more modern sections of the show where they see that I’ve played with that and I’ve deconstructed the juggling from, you know, juggling is simply serious exchanges, and the means is I throw what I catch. Then they see that I’ve broken it down, and changed the throw and the catch and put little tricks on it. I broke the rules a little bit. So instead of the throw and a catch, there might be a ball rolling on the floor, or it will bounce off an angled shape, or there will be a stick falling to the floor, but before it gets to the floor I grab it, and then throw that back up again. That’s part of the creative process I go through, and I hope they get to see a bit of that process.
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Innovative Juggler Greg Kennedy will be performing in the events “Spherus” at Ithaca’s State Theatre on Friday January 22nd, and “The Kinetics of Juggling” on Saturday January 23rd, at Cornell University’s Statler Auditorium. Don’t miss these amazing experiences! Get tickets here!
Posted by Max Evjen, Marketing and Public Relations Consultant for the Light in Winter Festival.
