As Seen on Youtube (And Pretty Much Only on Youtube) - Nytimes.Com
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As Seen on YouTube (and Pretty Much Only on YouTube) - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/sports/playmagazine/601juggler.ht... June 1, 2008 As Seen on YouTube (and Pretty Much Only on YouTube) By JASON FAGONE When Vova Galchenko juggles, he often dresses in a red tank top and black track pants — no clown suit, no mime makeup, nothing that comes off as circusy, French or ‘gay,’ as he puts it. Galchenko is built like a gymnast and approaches juggling like an athlete. Ten minutes into his daily three-hour practice, a little vertical bar of sweat appears between his pecs. At 25 minutes, the bar sprouts two bunny ears, and a stripe down his back turns dark maroon. Galchenko keeps juggling until his whole shirt is sweat-soaked and his arms are tired. This is usually when he starts getting angry at himself and whipping his clubs at the walls. Such was the case last year, when I watched Galchenko try to land a really hard trick in the 12,000-square-foot mansion where he lives in Agoura Hills, Calif., near Malibu. The house is owned by the Bakalors, an American family of Internet entrepreneurs and juggling enthusiasts. Galchenko practices in the living room, designed specifically for juggling. It has 30-foot-high ceilings, a wall of convex glass facing the Santa Monica Mountains and a smooth stone floor that’s kept clear so that Galchenko can wander around and work on tricks. The trick he was attempting was called a “seven-club, five-up 360,” and it required Galchenko to juggle seven clubs, throw five of the clubs very high and pirouette underneath them. He then had to exchange the two remaining clubs in his hands for two of the plummeting clubs and resume juggling all seven as if it were no big deal. The thing that’s so hard about this trick is that it combines two tricks that are hard to execute separately — keeping seven clubs aloft in a pattern known as a cascade and doing a pirouette under five. As far as Galchenko knows, only one other person in the world can pull it off: Anthony Gatto of Cirque du Soleil, an American widely considered to be the world’s greatest juggler. Only 20 years old, Galchenko is 15 years younger than Gatto, and may supplant him before long. Galchenko’s “just one of the best that ever lived,” says Penn Jillette, the vocal half of the magician duo Penn & Teller, who began his showbiz career as a juggler. “It couldn’t be simpler. He can throw more things in the air and catch them in order.” In juggling, difficulty increases exponentially as you add objects. Three is cake. Five is tricky. Seven approaches physical impossibility. Every throw has to be perfect, describing a precise arc (a gentle, high parabola) with precise spin (each club flipping exactly three times). If one club deviates even slightly, the pattern collapses, and the juggler had better duck unless he wants to get brained. For 50 minutes straight, Galchenko tried to bang out the nearly impossible trick. He began each attempt with a seven-club cascade. If the pattern was a good one, tight and stable, five of the clubs would suddenly spurt to the rafters in order to give him room — and time — to pull the 360. (This is what Galchenko says he likes about juggling, the “aesthetic feeling” of a good pattern: “It looks nice. And it looks like you could keep going forever. Which, of course, is a false impression.”) But every time he tried to collect the clubs after 1 of 7 6/2/2008 9:16 AM As Seen on YouTube (and Pretty Much Only on YouTube) - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/sports/playmagazine/601juggler.ht... pirouetting, they were just beyond the reach of his hands. They’d bonk off the floor, skittering in all directions, and Galchenko would scowl and trudge after them and send all seven skyward again, biting his lip, jerking his neck every so often to shake his shaggy mop of brown hair out of his eyes. He never looked down at his hands. The clubs made hollow popping sounds as they slapped against the callused pads on his palms. A half-hour into this, Galchenko finally nailed his first 360 and wrangled the wayward clubs back into a clean cascade, only to drop one. He opened his right hand and said, into his palm, “Catch,” like a mother disciplining her kid. “I cannot juggle anymore,” he said. He kept at it for 20 minutes longer until, finally, he landed the trick cleanly. Then he landed it again — then a third time, then a fourth, then a fifth. “Thank you, Jesus,” he said. Galchenko — his full name is Vladimir Vasilievich Galchenko, but he’s known simply as Vova — is not a laid-back person, but he is a pretty happy one. “My life is lovely, for the most part,” he says. He just finished his freshman year at California State University, Northridge, taking classes in calculus, computer programming and political science. In his free time, he reads about atheism; his blog is probably the only one where you can get both chatty shop talk (“Went through my ball routine with only two drops, which was nice”) and skeptical arguments about religion (“Pascal’s Wager has very many flaws. I will go into a couple of them”). Galchenko doesn’t drink and generally finds the social rituals of American teenagers screamingly funny, but he’s not a loner. He has a girlfriend, a student at Monmouth University in New Jersey who wrote to him after she saw his juggling videos on YouTube. It’s only when Galchenko juggles that the sociable side of his persona fades away, replaced by what Mark Bakalor, Galchenko’s de facto manager, calls “the Russian Robot.” The Russian Robot never smiles and never bows. He merely executes the hardest moves in the juggling canon — and some new ones of his own creation — flawlessly. His only concern is the raw trick itself, stripped of glitz and flourish. “Artistic expression through juggling . I think is [expletive],” Galchenko says. “There’s nothing you can express through juggling. It’s just throwing and catching [expletive].” The severity and eye-popping virtuosity of this philosophy translate well to YouTube, where the Russian Robot is a quasi-viral phenomenon. His most popular video is a montage of tricks set to music by Fatboy Slim: Galchenko, his hair flopping with the beat, juggles seven balls on the Bakalors’ roof, five clubs in the bathroom, seven clubs in the living room, five clubs behind his back, three clubs between his legs (a trick he calls Crotch Madness) and five balls while casually ascending a spiral staircase. The Fatboy Slim video has received more than 650,000 hits; representative viewer comments include “sick vid,” “omg man that waz sweet” and “god like!!!” Videos of Galchenko passing clubs back and forth with his younger sister, Olga, a champion juggler in her own right, have gotten the siblings on the “Today” show, “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show” (clubs whizzed by on either side of Oprah as she stood there with one eye closed). But to a certain kind of hard-core juggler, Galchenko’s videos are much more than a daytime diversion. They’re akin to holy texts. There are young people all around the world who are learning to juggle not in the old way, by honing their craft in live performances, but by clicking through Galchenko’s tricks frame by frame, then filming their own versions of the tricks and uploading the proof to YouTube. These kids are changing the face of juggling, evolving a culture whose values — speed, numbers, athleticism, technique — are distinct from the traditional juggling values of balance, expression and showmanship. And that’s Galchenko’s problem. In the real world, juggling is still largely a showbiz skill, and a marginalized one at that; the vast 2 of 7 6/2/2008 9:16 AM As Seen on YouTube (and Pretty Much Only on YouTube) - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/sports/playmagazine/601juggler.ht... majority of professional jugglers make their living on cruise ships, juggling machetes and torches for the melanoma set. Galchenko isn’t well suited to this world. It’s a poorly kept secret that he suffers from crippling stage fright. His hands start to shake before a show. “Put Vova in Cirque [du Soleil], and he’d die,” says Jay Gilligan, an accomplished circus performer from Ohio. Galchenko describes it this way: “Everything seems slow-motion, kind of. Everything feels weird. I don’t like that feeling inside of me — being in front of people, being nervous.” It hasn’t always been like this for Galchenko. As a kid in Penza, Russia, a medium-size industrial town southeast of Moscow, he didn’t have stage fright. His father, Vasili, a math professor, sent him to circus school when he was 4, followed by Olga. The Galchenkos learned to tumble and do handsprings and ride unicycles. “I was really driven by competition,” Vova says. “I wanted to be one of the top kids.” As the economic situation in Russia deteriorated, Vasili seems to have put his hopes in his son and daughter. He had them do extra juggling at home. He couldn’t find proper clubs in Penza, so he had a friend carve a set from blocks of wood. When the kids were 14 and 11, Vasili bought a camcorder, filmed a few videos of Vova and Olga passing clubs back and forth and uploaded them to a primitive Web site.