An Exchange of Rings
In the late 1980s, Carter Brown developed an idea to combine laser lights with juggling, creating a new form of vaudeville entertainment. Meanwhile, choreographer Cindy Marvell became the first woman ever to win the International Jugglers' Association's Championship. In 1994, Brown and Marvell crossed paths, and ever since, they have been juggling their way from country to country, touring in Brown's colorful juggling spectacle, Lazer Vaudeville. The show is currently playing off-Broadway at the John Houseman Theatre for a limited engagement. Brown, who directs and performs in the magical vaudeville act, has been in TV's Nashville Now, had a two-year stint with the Ringling Brothers' Circus and was featured with Marvell in the PBS Specials, Juggling Work and Family with Hedrick Smith and Center Stage. Marvell has been seen on the New York stage in Bouncing Back and Lady Fingers and is featured in DVDs A Juggling Journey: Cindy Marvell in Performance and Trailblazers: Women Who Juggle. Along with their passion for juggling and performing, the two share a passion for each other. They exchanged wedding vows in 2000, with a festive juggling themed wedding of course! and founded the Boulder Circus Center in Colorado. For Brown and Marvell, performing Lazer Vaudevillein New York is like being at home. Both have childhood memories of living in New York. Here, they share their intimate thoughts on being onstage together and traveling across the world, juggling everything from their props to their every day lives on the road.
When we started conversations with Eric Krebs of the John Houseman Theatre nearly four years ago, we had no idea we would be the last show to play this wonderful space on "Theatre Row." Talk about bringing down the house!
It all began when we discovered, to our chronically immature surprise and delight, that Carter's juggling hoops fit inside Cindy's flying drums. What better way to pack a touring show? Since joining forces in 1994, our relationship, which culminated in a juggling wedding in the course of a run in Santa Fe, has survived the loopy thrills and spills of an annual nine-month touring season. Note: that is the only nine-month venture we have undertaken. The creative side of Lazer Vaudeville for us involves the idea that juggling can be an art form and not just a bunch of pie-throwing slapstick. Just as Isadora Duncan took dance into a new realm, we like to think of taking juggling in a different direction.
Our varied outlooks have made communicative exchanges as essential as juggling exchanges, leading us into ways of figuring out what to do when we both know we are right, but we are worlds apart.
Carter: I have a taste for clown gags after having been with Ringling Bros. as a clown for two years, whereas Cindy has a gift of gracefulness, which is far beyond my movement capabilities.
Cindy: When it comes to directions on tour, I generally defer to Carter, or to the guy at the truck stop, or to any five year old I meet. The thing about directions is that when you're touring, they become useless the next day, and are thus hard to remember. My former high school juggling partner gave me a Street Finder. For some reason, I still get laughs from tollbooth clerks when I pull up in a tour bus towing a truck. They still don't expect a woman to be driving. When I worked in Japan, female bus drivers were really common, but it's still rare to see one in New York. As a female juggler, though, I'm a novelty everywhere. Once I fractured an elbow in a unicycle accident during a gig in Japan. "This wouldn't have happened if you had stayed home," said the doctor in Nagasaki. Women still number one in 10 to their male counterparts in the field.
Fortunately for our lives as jugglers, we are both right-handed. This comes into play when we pass clubs. To keep in synch, jugglers traditionally count right-hand throws and pass from the right hand. More modern systems require passing in tempo from both hands, at times simultaneously. For the most part, we leave these variations to younger jugglers, pursuing the more traditional patterns. Except, of course, in "Drumble," a Lazer Vaudeville piece, which involves tossing drums and balls back and forth in a system Cindy describes as a cross between tennis and Taiko drumming.
Juggling requires a delicate mix of pattern and rhythm. At the end of each show, 26 road cases get packed into the truck. We jugglers climb over the boxes to get to our own box, with mattress. What happens next is anyone's guess. Some states are better than others: Alabama is notoriously bumpy, Colorado has more curves more than a Pilates class, and as for New York--we won't go there. Of course, we did, but that was later. For years, walking into a truck stop while on tour with Lazer Vaudeville and putting a hand in one's pocket yielded a pair of underwear from the previous night's changeover.
This went on for years before we got married in the year 2000. Since most of the guests were jugglers, we saved a lot on entertainment. After the ceremony, which included an exchange of rings juggling hoops, that is and the distribution of ceremonial beanbags, the guests each took the stage with their particular specialty. From a juggling chef who balanced eggs and climbed on volunteers to the unicyclist who narrowly avoided the buffet table, the show rivaled any we had performed on the road. A cousin performed a modern dance piece, a sister belly danced that's another story--Sharita, from Portland, and parents reunited for a Gilbert & Sullivan duet from Iolanthe.
Performing in Manhattan represents a homecoming of sorts.
Cindy: I grew up on 112th Street. My father is a physicist at Columbia University who used to juggle three balls and three children in his spare time. My mother, a music journalist, used to do stand-up comedy shows in clubs and on TV. My first performance as a juggler was in the eighth grade talent show at Bank Street School for Children. Later, I performed a show called "Up in the Air" in the same auditorium. One of the highlights of Lazer Vaudeville's run at the Houseman has been seeing Bank Street teachers and former classmates attend the show.
Carter: I spent two years on West End Ave. while my father worked as a stage manager and photographer in the city. My mother worked as an actress and dancer. That's how I learned to wire exit lights--it was trial and error. I came up with the idea to combine lasers with juggling and new vaudeville in 1987, the same year Cirque du Soleil started. Some of the founders were in my class at the Dell'Arte School for Physical Theater in Blue Lake, California. I wanted to bring modern technology into the genre of new vaudeville, which tended to be anti-tech at the time because it was all about performers doing their thing with physical skills.
Cindy: There probably aren't too many people who juggle 100-year-old bicycle hoops and then take a soldering iron to a laser computer.
Carter: There probably aren't too many English majors who drive a bus around the country and then juggle everything in it. We probably are unique.
When we walk onstage together in Lazer Vaudeville, we can tell what the other person is thinking just by looking into his or her eyes. When we are juggling together very often we are both "ON" and there is no place in the world like it. There are other times one of us is off, and that puts the pressure on the other to be more than perfect. There is a third cast member in Lazer Vaudeville, Nicholas Flair, one of a long string of collaborators who are not married to us. But when a group has experienced so much--typhoons in Taiwan, supervision in Saudi Arabia, ovations in Osaka, "till death or vaudeville do us part" is more than a bumper sticker on a truck parked outside an opera house.