Stewart Sinclair: Moving Objects, Moving People
Photograph courtesy of Stewart Lawrence Sinclair I happened upon Stewart Sinclair’s work by chance. Seeing a crowd gather in front of KGB Bar, a dive and performance space in New York’s East Village, I decided to follow it up a set of stairs. At the very top, I found myself at a book release reminiscent of a street show. Sinclair opened the event, reciting poetry while juggling swords over the prone body of a volunteer from the crowd.
The awe and wonder in the faces of the audience that evening expressed what the semipro juggler and author would describe to me in conversation — and in his book Juggling — as a through line of global history. Juggling, taught and performed by a large swath of people across the world — connecting Tongan women in Polynesia to Russian circus performers to Southern Californians like Sinclair himself — almost universally inspires joy, priming audiences for new experiences.
The use of juggling to arrest and influence spectators stretches back further than two millennia, and jugglers have adapted many forms of object manipulation, such as throwing swords or contact juggling (where objects appear to float and slide across the body), to gain audiences as court jesters, Soviet propagandists, and, in the extreme case of ancient Chinese juggler Yiliao of Shinan, military battleground victors. In this way, the practice mirrors art and literature in its ability to package meaning through various devices and modes of presentation, albeit with significantly lower stakes these days.
Juggling once depended on
