171 - Rolling Balls And Facing Mortality with Jay Gilligan & Captain Frodo- Malmö Conversations 1 of 4

The brutal part of juggling isn’t the hard trick. It’s the simple demand that never changes: once the object leaves your hand, you either catch it or you don’t. From a snowy, sleety Malmö cabaret week at Victoria Theater, we sit down in a hotel room surrounded by ribbons, feathers, and confetti while Jay Gilligan rolls his legendary Ivar Balls, and we ask the mid-career question that every performer eventually faces: does life actually get easier, or do you just get better at carrying it? 

We get practical about performance pressure, stage presence, and why technical mastery doesn’t erase the feeling of risk. Jay talks about building a professional “floor” where a truly bad show becomes rare, not because you’re perfect, but because you’ve earned tools, timing, and recovery instincts. We also dig into the creative process of making new work, where everything feels equally important at first, then slowly reveals a hierarchy as you perform it again and again. If you self-produce, you’ll recognize the trap: props, music, lighting, marketing, and logistics all scream for attention until the piece finally tells you what it’s really about. 

Then we widen the lens to the touring life and the human cost: being away from family, sitting alone in hotel rooms, aging into different limits, and the pandemic’s wake-up call that “I can always fall back on street shows” might be a comforting story more than a plan. Underneath it all is a bigger question about meaning, identity, and what work gives us besides money, especially when the end starts to feel closer than the beginning. 

If this conversation hits home, subscribe, share it with a friend who makes things for a living, and leave a review with the part that stayed with you.

Transcript

Welcome To Malmö And The Gig

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Greetings, fellow travelers, and welcome to the Way of the Children, where we view the world through the lens of childmanship. I am Captain Frodo, and I will be your host and your guide along the way. And today I am back talking to Jay Gilligan. These are some episodes from a while ago, and in uh a few episodes still ahead, we are going to be meeting Marlon Nilsson, an incredible Swedish magician. We got two episodes with her lined up. And um uh during um a gig that she organizes every year and the end of the year when it was all there was so much snow in Sweden in Malma, uh Jay Gilligan and I were both uh booked by her to uh do this incredibly wonderful little uh variety show in um Victoria Theatern, which is a theater that uh Marlon Nilsen collaborates with a lot. And um we're gonna talk a lot more about her there, but anyway, that afforded Jay Gilligan and I to record some conversations, and there's um I believe there's five and all, and they're gonna come up uh in between here as we as we go move forward. And um the great thing about that was that we've got into this routine because every day Jay had to roll these balls. Uh that is this is the so-called Eva balls that he closed a show with uh for the first time, I think that he closed a show with it anyway in um reflex. But whether he closed the show in another show or not doesn't really matter. But um you have heard about it on the podcast, and now uh these episodes are recorded whilst he is making that juggling prop. And that takes about 20 minutes. But once we started talking, it took about an hour each uh day. So um yeah, that was the opportunity.

How To Support The Podcast

SPEAKER_01 2:04

And while I have you here, uh if you uh would like to support the podcast, then the first and easiest step is just to uh click um and follow the podcast, you know, subscribe to the podcast wherever it is that you download it. But secondly, my uh beautiful wife Miranda Mahalo has um uh created a little bit of an expansion on our uh uh merch. So there are t-shirts that now have the famous uh logo on the front and on the back, it says follow the way. And we also have uh hats that's uh both with the logo and we have it that it says the way of the showman. So um, yeah, click on over there. And if you get a get a hat or a shirt, I'm much, much uh excited. Uh it is much appreciated, and I am much, much excited, as I just said, for you to walk around the world spreading the way of the showman with anyone that sees you, even if it is just subliminally, it would make a great uh great deal of uh difference to me if anyone did that. So anyway, without further ado, we're gonna uh is it adieu, adieu? It I think it actually is without further ado, but I have somehow drifted towards saying adieu. I might stop drifting that way. So let's talk to Jay.

Eva Balls And A Sold-Out Night

SPEAKER_01 3:35

All right, so we have the pleasure of uh being together doing a gig, which is a rare occasion. Yeah, man. But um we are in Malma, Sweden. We're uh invited by the excellent uh Marlon Nilsson to do a sweet cabaret here at the Victoria Theater in Malma. And we opened last night and it was a hands-down success, sold out and great audience and incredible response. So that's good. So, in the wake of all of that, we're sitting here in your hotel room, and you have a pile of ribbons and feathers and confetti and leaves and uh all sorts of stuff, and you are rolling it into your infamous, famous, beautiful, poetic image of you juggling the so-called Eva balls. But let's not get distracted by talking about artistic content of shows and stuff. We talked about this and then we talked about reflex. But now I would like to go a little bit more. It's winter, it's raining, kind of raining, sleeting outside, and it's a time for quiet reflection as to what we do, despite the fact that we're staying together in the same hotel and having all of this. This is a rare occasion for us to sort of work on a gig where it's just really, you know, it's sometimes you're alone and you're working a corporate gig, you're doing stuff that is a bit sort of one person on the road away from your family, but we are um now together, so this is good. But it's the kind of stuff that I think about when you're feeling a little bit down, and I'm going in the journey as an artist.

Does Stage Life Get Easier

SPEAKER_01 5:19

We both have a long career. Does life get easier?

SPEAKER_00 5:26

Well, I have a couple thoughts about that, my friend. Oh, good. So one is on a very kind of mundane practical level. Yeah. And I had this reflection, I don't know, a couple years ago. So I'm 48 years old. I've been juggling for 40 years. And my reflection a couple years ago was on a very I know you're asking existentially this question, but on a practical level, it's all all of the above, yeah. Yeah, but practically juggling never gets easier. That's interesting. And it kind of drives me, it's starting to drive me more crazy. It's trying, it's starting to disturb me more the older I get. So of course with practice we get better. I don't mean that, right? Like on a technical level, we can say that the more experience you have, juggling gets easier. If you've never juggled five balls before, well, if you practice for thousands of hours, then that's easier. But it's something about the performing of juggling doesn't get the pressure of performing juggling never gets easier. I get more experience as I get older. I get I have more tools to navigate the experience of juggling, of performing juggling on stage. But the brutal truth of like you catch it or you don't, is that never gets easier. Like it doesn't, it doesn't, every time I step on, I'm not saying I'm nervous, but every time I step on stage, it's still I'm confronted, and we talked about this last night. I'm confronted with that fundamental building block of like base level. Like you got if you throw the thing, you're gonna catch it. And at the very least, that's a cultural expectation. We can start to find theatrics where we swerve around that, we change the conversation, we redefine success or whatever. But fundamentally, we're the conversation starting with like, oh, it's a juggler. Yeah, he's gonna throw something and catch it. Yeah, and in that equation, you know, the speed of gravity never changes, the human reflexes doesn't change, except that I get older, so they maybe get worse. And also then the complexities of life pile up, so maybe my my time spent training gets reduced, you know, having a family or logistics of doing business. But like it was a reflection a couple years ago where and I'm probably I'm really speaking out of turn here, but from what I understand, like pair to like hand-to-hand acrobatics, don't they get better as they get older? Like their their symbiosis, I think, gets deeper. This is what I've heard that pair acrobats, the longer and longer they work together, like we could say Henrik and Louise, and like this, you you develop that communication between two people that makes the technique easier. I get them completely completely speaking out of turn. Yeah, yeah. We don't do any acrobatics, but there's maybe one example of like the longer I do this discipline, or maybe handstand. I've heard too. I've talked to some people who do hand balancing, and they say, Oh yeah, you know, now I've done it 30 years and now I know it like innately.

SPEAKER_01 8:17

And they're talking about the technique, but I think there is a 10,000 hours principle or whatever, they've been upside down for 10,000 hours and done navigated all the different mistakes and they can fix it through their body or whatever. Or maybe. I mean, we do that with our juggling technique too, but there's something Yeah, but there, but there's still that uh I still feel that there's a difference with the as soon as the ball leaves the hand and it goes up, the parameters and degrees of freedom that the ball has and the different heights, there's so many parameters that makes it um it's travel and it's uh the control stuff. And there's yeah, so there's so but I don't know about that. I don't know about uh mean uh about whether it gets easier for other things or whatever. But uh I mean it's interesting. I'm doing three different acts here in the middle act where I'm doing the sword. I don't get to do that so often. So you do it by sword. Sword swallowing. Sword swallowing, yeah. I swallow a sword, but it's a mainly that that is the last thing that I do, but it is also the thing that takes the shortest in a sense. Everything builds up to it, we don't know what it is. That act, as much as I've already performed it, I don't know, six five, six hundred times or something, because I did it a couple of seasons where I did it a hundred, no, maybe four or five hundred times. All right, something let's not get bugged in the numbers. But um I have done it many times, and it has had major iterations, and I'm feeling like last night, and whatever I'm feeling like maybe it's time for the for the music to change to be more of a talking act again, and to build up this stuff of mystery and stuff that's in it. But anyway, what was I saying with that? Oh, yeah, so I have a different feeling when I go on to do that act than I have when I go on to do the rackets or the cans. Because there I am, they they are so second nature that all I need to focus on is the audience. Standing on one leg, doing all the other things, Olox being on the cans, all this. I can really play with the moment and be present, just present with the audience, which we've talked about two episodes of recently about us stage presence. But so maybe I that's an example from my world that I'm going, those acts they are actually easier. I'm sitting on the cans. There's not, I'm not throwing anything, I'm sitting there, and I can feel it in my bum where it touches the can when I'm putting my legs behind my head, and and it's you know, it's it's pretty much under my control. And those are now easier to do. And I can imagine that I could do versions of pretty much this for a very long time.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

I'm with you. I mean, I mean, obviously, like my act I did last night in the show here with you. Um, I had no trepidation, I had no nervousness, I had no problems, no friction. Uh it was just pure joy, honestly, because I knew how to navigate the performance element of it. And I mean, still fundamentally, I we talked last night. I am confronted. I come out on stage and I go, well, I throw this thing, people want me to catch it. And so that never gets easier. But of course, the performing last night was just a pure joy. Um, it reminds me of something that Jerome Thomas said to me, the French juggler, and we don't need to comment more about him, other than this comment, which was uh that he said to me um he said, I can never do a bad show. And of course, uh well, we're not gonna talk about Jerome, just his arrogance, but because it sounds very arrogant the the comment, but actually that's like one rare moment when there was some truth there, and what he meant was uh I can never do a bad show. He had been performing for 30 years. Of course, he could do a show that was better or worse, but he had some sort of base level established in his life through his experience, yeah, where it's like he now had the tools under his control that it he had a confidence that he could rely upon, that at the very least he wasn't gonna do a bad show, right? Like he he knew enough tricks and tips and he could he could pull up.

SPEAKER_01 12:25

If this fails, if that fails, if this fails, I will do this thing and that will sort of win them back and prove the point or whatever. So me too. It's like we come off after the shows, uh Mad Apple, and go down, how was that? Oh, yeah, it wasn't my favorite. I don't I felt like this. I was a bit in my head. But we are talking, it's like you're delivering uh out of uh eight out of ten, and sometimes it felt like six, but then when you went out afterwards and talked to the audience, which we have to do, then you go, the reactions are indistinguishable from them. So sometimes it's your yourself or whatever. So we're in this thing of going like I have better and worse days, but a lot of that has to do with my attitude and my own experience of the thing. It's not bringing the actual act down to a certain level. So I I can fully appreciate that point.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

It's definitely coming to the it's it's kind of seeing the real point of the performance where as a performer you can get hung up on your ego. No, it's not even ego, but just the insider knowledge or the details of what you're doing.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

That joke sometimes works better. Oh, I fumbled this bit here, so that had this leading to the case.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

I normally do 20 catches when I do 18 because I I thought I was gonna have a collision. Yeah, but at the end of the day, we have a bigger vision of what we're actually trying to accomplish. And it's not about they you you told that joke 2.5 seconds after the fall instead of 2.3 seconds after. Uh the point is that we're having this experience in the moment with the audience. And in that way, I think that's what Jerome meant. Jerome Thomas was like, I can never do a bad show. And I think about that like, and I'm glad to have that. So in that way, um, I can definitely think that the older we get, the easier it does get. Because when I was young, I didn't have that confidence on my backbone to be like, I can never do a bad show, right? Like it was still always gonna there was a negotiation there. I'm not saying it was always on the edge of like falling apart. No, no, but but definitely there was always the option that it could go wrong.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

It was just yeah, that's right. Well, and if nothing else, you you felt it more acutely because you didn't have this thing of going like even when I go off and I felt like that was a hard slog. I go through the motions and I know the beats of the jokes and I know this sort of stuff. I'm not reinventing the wheel, so you know that often when they sit there and they're relatively quiet, there's still a certain level to the performance. So I agree. On that level, your professionalism and your experience improves your situation to make the actual performance of your art easier.

SPEAKER_00 14:51

Right.

Premier Stress And Surviving The First Run

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Um, I always think, I don't know how you feel, if you do a premiere or something of a new show. I always have the same saying I have in my head when I do the premiere of a new show. Many times on a new show, I'm I'm pretty stressed. I don't get nervous. The only time I get nervous is when my parents are watching.

SPEAKER_02 15:09

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:09

There's something very deeply personal about like proving my, you know, whatever choices. Yeah, yeah, you know, validating like I'm a juggler and I didn't grow up to be a doctor or whatever. There's all this like, you know, cultural expectation there that I'm whether they impose it upon me or not, it's the it's the narrative of where I grew up in Ohio. But so I'm not nervous. I'm not talking about being nervous, but I do get stressed. I'm just like, because it is that thing you're in your head, you're like, what comes next? And what what you know? I often play my own music and run my own lights, and I was like, oh yeah, not just juggling, but what am I gonna say next? And what do I have to press next? And what prop do I have to pick up and what do I have to put away? And it's all this uh practical things in my head. So I get very stressed. And I always think this to myself. After I do the premiere, I go, oh yeah, now I know I'm not gonna die. Like, so the second time I do the show, I go, at the very least, we know we're all gonna get through this alive. Yeah, yeah. And there's the like that's the language I use. I'm not gonna die. And then that that's kind of this minimal, minimalist version of like Jong Tima, I can never do a bad show. I'm like, well, at least I'm not gonna fall over dead. Yeah. And then that gets me through the second show, right? With the confidence that I didn't have before. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

Because you've done it as proof of concept that it existed. And yeah, we've talked about that before. Like you go into something and you go, I have no idea what what we're doing here. And then at some point during the process or before you go on, going, hang on, I know how to do shows.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

That's true.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

But that doesn't stop me from also having me before doing new shows and then shows where I'm selling tickets and whatever, and you put in those shows that you organize your own season or whatever, like you did with um um maybe with uh another sunset or something. That's a small sort of thing, and you go like and and I'm putting on something, and then you're selling tickets, and it's not going so well because my skill is absolutely in making shows and selling tickets and all that sort of stuff, and you worry, and then I go, I'm going like, why do I do this to myself? You sort of question it, go, why why am I putting all this stuff together and I work so hard like to do it? And and what is it? There's something inside me that sort of is driving towards that, of course. Uh uh, but whatever. That that's part that has happened several times where while I'm sitting just before you'd made some new work and you're and you're putting yourself out there, like you've just been writing about this when I'm putting out that poem, The Illuminator Showman, and I early on in the show talk and do a basically do a sort of poem. And in the beginning it wasn't as didn't have the funny and moment, didn't have the magic elements that it sort of has now. So it was less than, and I was just like, how is this gonna go?

SPEAKER_00 17:47

Because this is the some of the show is hinging on their reaction to this that they and uh then you sort of go, ah, why don't I just do the jokes and uh stuff and like why am I pushing into these other I mean, related to related to like the practical stuff, you were talking, you you you mentioned briefly now self-producing a show where you're also maybe selling the tickets and doing the administrative work and the production side of things as well as the artistic side. We can relate that back to this idea of like I did the premiere and I and I didn't die. For me, because I was gonna talk about it artistically, but we can expand that to the business side too, where you go, this is a new venture for me. I'm in new territory, and therefore everything is equally important or equally not important. And because if it's equally not important, it's all equally important. So when you're making a new show, you're like, Oh, I'm gonna do this trick, and then I'm gonna say this line, and then I'm gonna put this code on. And but you don't know which of those three things has a hierarchy of impact on the audience. Yeah. And that's when you do the show 200 times and you direct dog audio and you say, Ah, now I know what the show is about. What he means is he's figuring out his hierarchy of importance of moments.

SPEAKER_01 18:55

Some of them in the hierarchy go so low that they actually get weeded out, and some get foregrounded and we change the lighting queue here or whatever to bring that out. Because this is the beautiful part of it to someone you.

SPEAKER_00 19:07

Well, for me, for me, in terms of because I love the way you said the question, like, is the older we get, are these things getting easier or harder? Like, how's this going? For me, I love the I love it when the show starts to reveal itself in the way of like what is important and not, because then you start to learn when you can breathe and when you can hold back so that you can actually heighten those more important moments. It's not it's not about just um identifying the important moments and then like you know um always concentrating on them. What I love is like those important moments are the ones you can almost leave alone, like you know what I mean, in the like in the curation of your progress. And so instead of like it's not like finding the important moments to then punch them up, they're already punched up. What it is is finding the moments that aren't the peak moments so that you yourself know that those are not the peak moments. So don't try to sell the moment at the same level. Exactly. Oh, yeah, yeah, maybe or don't or in selling, and not even about selling, don't you yourself waste extra energy of stress inside of you to fix this moment.

SPEAKER_01 20:11

Because this is a build-up to yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:13

I can give you a little example.

Learning What Matters In A Show

SPEAKER_00 20:14

So I did this new show, Stories About Gravity. We just watched the video together this morning, and when I first started making that show, I had a blank slate. What's the show gonna be? I don't know. I'm making a new show. And this started rather with a practical situation than an artistic idea. I had a I had an invitation to come do a show somewhere. So that's where the process started, and then I said, well, here's an opportunity. I want to fill that opportunity with something. What am I gonna fill it with?

SPEAKER_02 20:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:39

And okay, I knew it was a small venue, very small, like 14 people watching or 20 people or something. So I said, Oh, I should, I should get objects that are very that I couldn't maybe normally use, things that are small and detailed and tiny and to reflect the size of the venue. So I got this old vintage like KGB uh real-to-reel tape recorder, like uh Nagra, real-to-reel tape that the spies used to put in their coats to like record the uh conversations of the enemy or whatever. And I was gonna play the whole soundtrack on this little machine and as a set design and and as a little object of curiosity, and I thought it would be so charming. I would have this old warm analog sound and everything. And I bought the I bought the damn thing. I mean, it's not easy to find, and I can imagine it's not easy to make it work, and I had to get another box from Japan, custom made, to make it even interface with today's electricity and audio signals, and it was like a whole thing. I put a lot of effort and money into this part of my process. And then as I'm doing the show, I start to realize nobody cares about this real to real. This is a distraction. Because a show started to emerge that was other than that road, right? And you saw the video today, yeah. And I played music, I triggered music in the video. You did not care about that because we were I was doing something else, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:58

Yeah, you're you were telling another story. And it's clear that there's a soundtrack and it's one of your things. You're you're pushing your own music, but it was a little keyboard-looking thing, and you would know it's an insignificant kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

You just push it and it's the next one, it's the next one, it's the next one. And so there is a moment. So that's a great example of when I started my process. I thought everything was equally important because I didn't know what was important. And I go, Well, when I play the music, that's gotta be cool. And when I when I turn the light on, that's gotta be cool. And then as I started through the process, I can't.

SPEAKER_01 22:28

It's as you start to focus more on stories and gravity. Right. Or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Like this is the And then I go, playing the music is not the thing I'm doing here. Yeah. And then I can I can dial that back to the point where I cut the that machine from the show.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Take the machine out, and there's no the aesthetic of that's not so important. Most is because you're running out of time and you did have other cool gadgets as well. So that so you're filling the thing of as yet another machine, and it actually makes it harder because the way of the way you work. Yeah, yeah. Uh that I would imagine.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

But we can also take that and we don't have to stick with it on a narcissistic level. We can say, like, yeah, if you're self-producing, then it's like, oh, I gotta des I gotta make the craft graphic design of the ticket that the author tickets that I have to, you know, I gotta make sure my Instagram caption has the right hashtag, like, and which is maybe really important. I don't know. But like what I mean is in that process, it's also flat hierarchy when you start where everything is equally mysterious. But then once you do two or three seasons, like Marlin has done here in her theater, yeah, it's the tenth season, she sells out the show every ticket.

SPEAKER_01 23:33

Yeah, before it starts, I believe. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:35

So she started to learn, I'm sure, over the course of 10 years what is important and where to focus your energy and where not more importantly, where not to focus your energy.

SPEAKER_01 23:43

Which is an interesting uh thing that she actually brought up a little bit because we walk in and there is a picture of the cast uh on the on the thing, but it's the cast from last year and last night. After that show, we took a picture, and I had this sort of deja vu kind of thing, because she even used a confetti cannon to take the picture after the show. I mean, the whole audience was taking a picture of us by that point, but we went off and then we came back on again and took a group photo. And I'm like, ah, this is the poster for next year that we just took. Right. She she has gotten to a point where she's like, she's using a new picture each year, but it is of last year's cast. And I've been going, the show will be a little bit like this, but they come, they trust her as the host and the organizer of the venue and of the show, and they love her for it. And the word has spread to the point that they just go, We we're coming because we trust her and her curation of this thing. It will be amazing. And the picture on the front is in part why you buy it, because you go, That's right, those people, that was so great. We are ordering tickets because you know it sells out. Right. So they book their tickets again and then early, uh, early, early sales.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

So when you when you when you first asked the question now, you said like is Does it get easier? Is our life getting easier?

SPEAKER_01 24:58

And then I think does the artist's life get easier.

SPEAKER_00 25:01

And I just had that little reflection of like, well, juggling it's I don't think juggling is a discipline that ever gets like easier for whatever reason.

SPEAKER_01 25:07

Yeah, yeah. But then I I think another the other avenue to take on the answer is because this is the that we have it's all this is the way of the show man, and show man has two aspects. It's the show aspect, which we've just talked about, the on stage and those kind of things. But then you have the man, the human, the mankind, the human being of it. And there's like uh because there's a lot of things that comes with this that I have a changing relationship over time. It has to do with travel, it has to do with loving people that can't always be with you on the tour, and and about spending time alone, and about the the nature of finishing the show and then going to the airport and then drive and then driving to the other thing and flights being cancelled, and you're needing to make last so that all of that stuff. Uh which does that get easier?

SPEAKER_00 26:05

Well, I have a couple I have a couple of of stories about about that, and then maybe you but they're not so big or deep, and then maybe you have a well, I don't have anything particularly deep, but it's just an ongoing thing in my life where I feel these things. Well, so okay, so a couple of answers.

Midlife Narrowing And Pandemic Reality

SPEAKER_00 26:21

Number one is um like man. I felt I mean this is this goes to Ivar Heckscher, and and he's really into the Rudolf Steiner philosophy, and which I don't understand at all. You you're much more familiar than I am with it. But Ivar has these kind of epochs of life, like when you're 20, this happens, when you're 30, this happens, when you're 40, this happens. And I don't know those details. Like he knows it very well. And um, but it did make me think about that, this kind of almost cyclical nature of our lives, or like these eras or whatever, these rhythms on decades. Yeah, and up until I was 40, I always felt that juggling and performing was a widening of my life. Like I'm opening my hands in a V right now, and it's getting wider and wider because it affords me more and more and more opportunities. Since I turned 40, I really feel it's a narrowing now. Um, and it's almost like, and I'm sure this is this is a whole, I mean, this is a whole this is where what brings this to.

SPEAKER_01 27:24

I'm gone.

SPEAKER_00 27:25

But it's like midlife crisis. I mean, I'm sure we find this this this idea I'm talking about, a narrowing in other so many other areas of life than performing. But um I picked a lane and now that this is the midlife crisis thing. I have picked my lane and now I'm in it, and I feel that more and more the older I get. I had a meme that I sent to Eric Lonjaquel, who I did the alien show with, and the meme said something like, Um, be careful what you choose to learn because that's what that's what you will get good at. And I sent it to him with the word juggling question mark as a little stupid, as memes are these little disposable stupid things right now. But it was really this poignant thing of like, hey Frodo, be careful what you choose to get good at, because that's what you will be good at. And now you can swallow a sword. And and so, and so I find that so on one hand, I find this narrowing, and I have a good example of that narrowing, which is the pandemic was very galvanizing for that kind of epiphany, where uh prior to the financial crash, like in 2008 when all of like the Dubai corporate stuff dried up and all the kind of event work, I was never really a corporate event performer, but of course, my friends really felt that ripple of the global financial crisis. And I must, you know, but anyway, I just mean that like there was the 2008 financial crisis and then there was the pandemic. And in both of those cases, um I kind of always felt uh I don't want to say bulletproof, that's the wrong way. I don't really have that kind of egotistical or arrogance or something, like I'm I'm so bulletproof with my my living situation or my career or something. But like I was always like, hey, you know, at the end of the day, I can go on the street and like I can do street shows. I did that when I was a kid. I did street shows for with Sean McKinney in Boulder, Colorado, and New York, we did some street shows and stuff. I'm like, at the end of the day, I can always go perform birthday parties and street shows. And that is you know, I'm that's not a derogatory statement. No, no. I mean that with the most utmost respect.

SPEAKER_01 29:29

Well, you would put the effort that you put into whatever the you're doing now and put that into making the perfect experience.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

And also because we both we both used to do those things to make a living. You know, so but some people do say, like, uh yeah, I guess I'll go do some birthday parties, as if it's like a step down or something. And I don't mean it as a step down.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

The parties are kid shows in general, and then you have people like Mario who goes, takes it on, and Katie being a part in that too, and going, like, you don't have to impress someone just to do that other thing because you can put your love and your care into doing a family audience, and now he is just slamming it across the world with his show and all that.

SPEAKER_00 30:08

So that's like well, so so then in the financial crisis, um, we saw the reduction in our industry of like corporate gigs. Like I said, I wasn't doing that so much, so I felt a little bit skating above the surface of all that, you know, kind of avoiding all that trouble because I was doing more theatrical things or culture-based things that were not relied on upon that market. But but but the pandemic came, and then all of a sudden it was like Achilles' heel of like audiences can't gather. And then you go, like, oh, wait a second, my genius plan of like uh I'm gonna, I can always go to street shows or birthday parties or whatever. You're like, oh, actually you can't legally do that anymore. Um, and so that made me start to reflect on my on this narrowing of like my my midlife, not a crisis, but you know, my midlife journey of like I felt the opportunities going uh diminishing instead of expanding. And then I said, actually, could I I sat down in the pandemic and I said, could I really make a living street street performing right now? Could I really like theoretically I could, yeah, but could I in practice do it? Could I do I have the physical stamina?

SPEAKER_01 31:18

Get up in the morning, see, okay, can I do it? It's only raining a little bit. It looks like it's not gonna be okay. I'm gonna get on a train, I have my gear, I go out, I do it. Oh that started raining halfway through. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:29

Have you got the stamina and the drive to do that? Yeah, mental and physical fortitude. And I and I and I came to the conclusion that I don't, right? Like interesting. Like I could, I don't think I could make a living street performing anymore. Like I I am, I I'm not saying I'm too good, I'm saying I'm too bad. I just I lost those skills, I lost the ability. I mean, I could do it for a day or two. I mean you could go to a street show right now and it'd be a blast. But to make a living at it, that's a different conversation. And I think part of that too is uh we also, as you get older, you just have higher and higher standards in one way of what the work means to you, which is what you're also going to get into later about this kind of existential like, what are we doing here? Is it are we just making money or what like does it feed us more than food or whatever? But so you know, every show I make, it's kind of like I take it less and less for granted that I made a new show because uh for me that it's just a mount I told you about a recent creation that was like climbing a mountain again, like the highest mountain in the world. And uh, every new show that exists, I take less and less for granted because the process is I don't know if it's harder and harder, but my standards are higher and higher of like what the work needs to be in terms of the level that I what I the experience I want to give the audience and also and where it starts.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

Yeah the starting point as well is when you come to see Captain Frodo, you expect a certain level, and just like yesterday, right? Uh in in in just in that going, I watched this guy we're doing stuff when we when we when I first was a juggler, and that goes, here he is, Jay Gilgate. And then you come on, and that sets a certain expectation. And they go, and when I first heard that we had the possibility of doing this variety, I asked him, but uh that's 10 years ago, and I've asked him every year since then, and this is the first time it's suited with this schedule. Yeah, so then you come on, and I'm like, Oh, I better be good now. Yeah, yeah, you just built it up. So to come on, yeah. And I like when I was doing street shows and I went out onto the street in Copenhagen and did something, I would literally go like, I think I'm gonna try this thing with this prop.

SPEAKER_02 33:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:34

And then you go, ah no, but that was good because I got something out of it, and then you did that, and I did, you know, three shows that day. So then the next day I came back, and by the end of that week, I might have done that 25 times, and that's now developed into something, and nobody really cares. But now I come out and it does have to work at the different level. That's just just just basically corroborating what you just say. But it's right, there's a certain expectation to the kind of gigs that I get. There's oh, I'm gonna do a solo show at this uh culture house and this theater, go in, and then they come in and they expect me to function on many different levels, and they don't know it, but they come in and you need to have be able to do what you say, and and you need to be able to create the uh enthusiasm, you need to be able to control the families and situation and blah blah blah. So there's a lot of expectation to it, and when I'm making a new show or making a new act, I work a lot harder and longer on it. So that bit, I don't know if it gets easier, but maybe it is a little bit like with what you were saying in the very beginning. Juggling doesn't get easier yet when you come out there and you open up and you do the thing, you're jamming with a brand new band to people playing music, and it's cool, but it's like you're you're finding a thing for your act and and you start out and you're juggling just three balls, and you're going, okay, this bit at least is like this is within your comfortability range because you've done that bit so much that it's like that's kind of easier. Yet as the act goes on, you go to the places where it is actually difficult for you as well to some extent. So that point will be continually changing, I think. So that's how it is with me too. It's like when I know that I have the trick and uh story and whatever, then I start to look, well, how does these two things go together? How does this reference itself from this bit? And how how does the whole show get built up? So there's endlessly new things to think about, and in the beginning, you're just blissfully unaware, so you just do it. And um you don't see that, and then I start to find these questions more complicated as I get older or whatever. So I'm more into it. So in that way, it stays stays difficult in the actual creation of stuff because you're you're aware of more levels that it needs to work at. It needs to have some subtext, or it can't just be here's a cool juggling trick, here's another one.

SPEAKER_00 35:52

Right. It's like the less naive you get, the more you get shouldered with different responsibilities then for the work, or like you you're just more aware that that could the work could go in different directions or deeper connections, or maybe you could have more, yeah, I don't know. So that's impact in different ways.

SPEAKER_01 36:08

Yeah, it keeps the creation of the work at this level where you're going like you keep challenging yourself and you keep pushing and you keep expecting more from the piece from the beginning. Whereas maybe it took I had already performed it on stage or on the street like for a year by the time by the time it had this kind of richness, because it was enough for me just to get the laugh with it, and then or whatever. And then now you want more, so you think it's more.

SPEAKER_00 36:34

And did to go back uh my other my other kind of second story about the when you were talking about you know all the practical things of like maybe you're on the road and you're away from your family, like there's all these different aspects to the work.

Autonomy On Tour And Unexpected Loneliness

SPEAKER_00 36:47

I have a little story. So I was in this uh circuit circor show inside out, and it had maybe 20 people on tour. And I really find some sort of rhythm in my life, uh, if if I should generalize, which is hard, right? Like it's yeah, I mean it's it's never really uh gener, you know, you're kind of making it all up in retrospect, but my each project I do is a response to the one I did before, kind of it's always a reaction, and sometimes in the in the in the a reaction in the opposite direction, because you're you know, you're just like I did a show with 20 people on tour, and there's all those aspects of that that are good, but there's also many that like I was frustrated with. Yeah, and so um and so I made a project. I go, I'm gonna do a solo show, and in that show, I'm gonna run the lights myself and do the music myself and do the juggling myself and do the set design myself and do the setup and tear down myself, and I'm gonna be alone. And it wasn't so much a social reaction to the project, more it was more of a logistical being sick of being part of a big machine and not having autonomy and you know, freedom and all those things. I was like, great, I'm gonna, and also there was some sort of idea to the project where if I could control all those things on stage in real time, I could adjust the show in real time to what I was getting back from the audience and kind of tweak the show and make it more necessary for that moment for that for that occasion. So that was like a really hard thing to do, but I did it. I I mean that was a lot that's another whole conversation maybe about that artistic process. But I devised a performance where I controlled all the elements of the stage uh production on in real time from the stage. And then I remember I had my first booking, and this is this is the this is the the punchline of the story. I had the first booking, so I'm like, yep, uh, I can carry the show myself, I can fly, I can get it, I can get into the taxi alone. It's not too much equipment for that. I get to the theater, I have this many hours to set up, I can do that alone, I don't need help. I did the whole show. Oh, the audience was a bit more rowdy, so I turned up the lights brighter and I put faster music and I juggled harder. Yeah, it's all working. Oh, I I packed it all up and I went to the hotel, and I swear to God, I got to the hotel that first night, and I sit alone in the room, and I'm like, oh, now I'm alone. It was only then that the social aspect hit me. Yeah, I was so focused on the reaction reactionary against the the big the big touring show that I wanted to have all this freedom and autonomy creativity creatively and autistic artistically. And then it wasn't until I sat alone that night in the hotel room and I go, Oh, I'm alone. This kind of this is kind of boring. Yeah, oh it's kind of in the town, I don't know. Exactly. Exactly. So it's so that was kind of funny, right?

SPEAKER_01 39:36

Like I But you and me have that capacity to just get deep into uh just in the work and it's that all right. We we shorthand it by Miranda going, oh yeah, so where's uh Jay living? Um I didn't ask him about that. And going, oh yeah, is this family here? Oh, actually, I forgot to ask about that. Because you and me just get straight into this kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 40:02

Um that's true, that is symbolic of like the focus of the work for me, and for you it's it's the ideas and the artistic intent and kind of the logistics and the externalization and maybe the business side and the the more social side, it's not the yeah, then you get there.

SPEAKER_01 40:19

Yeah, then I get there and and this thing of going, I how do you deal with the fact that you then are spending this time alone, which I then do, even when you are with a with a group like I that I have done the majority of my career, I would say, with Saree and whatever, just the fact that I am an early riser or whatever, that means that I have several hours before even my wife or people get up or whatever in this I'd spend and then I have developed things that I do so that I have um secondary things that I do to fill my time. Not just fill my time by watching movies and stuff, because that only fulfills you somewhat or me anyway. And when I need to be fulfilled, I need to be uh doing something. I can't just be uh uh passively receiving something, although I do that all the time when I'm like I'm listening to things and I'm watching things and listening to lectures and uh taking stuff in in so many ways, reading poetry or whatever it is that I'm doing, listening to music, to deliberately get inspired or whatever. But there are times when you just have to do something, and that is, you know, we all procrastinate, or I certainly do, and then they get on the road, and now it's feels even more because now I'm away and I don't have all the family and this this stuff around me that is a place where you can put your love and your energy. So then when you're on the road, I push myself harder to to do it because I know if I get to the end of two days and I've just been binge watching some series or whatever, then I feel much more empty if I then get back home again and haven't actually done anything. But if I go out and I've furthered my writing, which is my go-to thing, developing my ideas and my book projects, never eventuating book projects. Um then that's like that gives me something.

SPEAKER_00 42:18

So I guess that's like where we so in that way do you find that kind of making your life easier? Because you have found ways to navigate that.

SPEAKER_01 42:26

Yeah, certainly certainly it it it does. That that has made it easier, but I've done that also for a long time. So I've I started doing getting serious into writing or whatever when I was in uh like apart from what I've written when I was growing up, which is like juvenalia. And then I had a second phase of juvenilia starting in the mid-90s when I was writing living in Denmark and that where I started writing stories and writing other things, and I did that in between and to deal with the times when I was alone or whatever.

Getting Older Without Getting Closed

SPEAKER_00 43:04

This this this is a totally embarrassing middle-aged uh person question, but like we're both basically the same age, and yeah, and uh I get worried, like uh yeah, I had an offer of a gig the other day, and it was like if I was 18 years old and I wanted to sleep on somebody's literally on their floor and you know take a flight at four in the morning and take five different connections and have a 28-hour travel, this would have been a great gig, you know. And then I go, I can't do it anymore. I don't again, it's like that idea of like, oh, I could always just go to a street show. And you go, actually, I don't have the mental and physical fortitude needed to survive in that context. And I now that gig, I'm just like, I can't, I don't want to sleep on the floor. I could technically sleep on the floor, I'm not above it in terms of like being arrogant. I just can't physically and mentally like deal with it and the and the travel and the 28 hours travel and the And all that stuff. And then I get really stressed out that like I don't want to become there is that maybe I don't know how it is in Norway, but for me growing up in Ohio and America, there's a cultural kind of cliche that old people just shrink into a cocoon and get cranky, right? And they get they get upset about everything. It's that get off my lawn, you know, meme or trope where it's like they're screaming at every new thing. They don't want to have any new sensations and whatever. And then I start to feel like I'm turning into that, where I'm like, oh, if I was 18, I would have taken this gig and it would have been an adventure and I would have learned. And I think back on all those things we we did do when we were young and we learned so much, and it was such a crazy. And now that I say no to stuff like that, and I get really worried, I'm like, oh, am I turning into this? Like it's a real philosophical kind of yeah. I don't know. Do you relate to that or do you do that?

SPEAKER_01 44:52

I do relate to that. But what I also maybe I'm finding fortitude in Eva Hecksha's uh idea of the the changes that come over time. Each decade brings with it certain things. And in the beginning, you go, no, no, no, I'm exploding all that. I'm doing everything all the time, and I'm just like going crazy bananas. Uh like I there's no rules that apply to me. And you go, don't don't tell me how old you are, but let me guess.

SPEAKER_02 45:23

Right.

SPEAKER_01 45:24

Like you're not 59. We know that, and you're not three, and you're not even most likely not 35. Like you are in your late teens, probably in your 20s. This is when you're when this is coming out, cut coming out. And each decade you are learning stuff that everybody to some extent learns. And of course, that these are this is not everyone is not the same, yet we are also very much the same. Biology is gonna be the death of us all. So all of those things will come in. And we're like we're going, oh yeah, midlife crisis, but you can also say I am middle-aged, which is another way of saying I'm halfway to death.

SPEAKER_00 46:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:10

And then I am not existing anymore. And I spent quite a bit of time reading Satra and reading Camus and finding that really interesting and uh thinking, like you do, you know, oh yeah, I got the measure of death now. And then time moves on, and you get a child, and my relation to whether I exist or not changes. Just go, I can't crush this person by leaving them behind how they're gonna be. Like I'm going, I need to be the first to go. I don't want to, and then you have a different different thing comes into my came into my life of like, oh, this is no, that things have changed a bit in how I need to be. But anyway, and then so so your relationship to death, your relationship to what you do with your choose to do with your life and everything, that that changes. So I am aware that there are gigs and things that I am not so interested in doing anymore, like you. There comes opportunities where it goes, oh, I need to get home there and jump in. And I mean, that said, I said yes to leaving America, landing at 9.30 at night, and then driving again the next morning at 9.30 to drive five hours to do a gig.

SPEAKER_00 47:32

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:32

But in the end, that ended up being the the the good thing after much thinking because of the people that I drove to be with and blah, blah, blah. But so I still do some things where where you go, that's that's the old person stuff.

SPEAKER_00 47:46

I literally just did it two weeks ago when I flew from America, drove seven hours and did the premiere of the new show.

SPEAKER_01 47:52

So we've both had that. So as much as we both go, oh, and then this was offered to me, but I was gonna do 28. But then when the situation is right, because there's something in it that is to me, was the people that I worked with that I haven't had the opportunity to work with because I've been so much in Vegas and all that, so I've said no to a bunch of stuff with people that I really like to work with.

SPEAKER_02 48:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:11

And then I just thought it was good. And and then I did this. Right. Got back in the car, drove five hours, was there, worked every day for four days, two of the days for show days, two days for creation days, and uh and then my family came down, then I drove back home again. Okay, that's a good point.

SPEAKER_00 48:28

That makes me feel good. Yeah, we still do it when we're we're still stupid sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 48:32

Yeah, or but you but it's like I don't previously I wouldn't have turned down any of those kind of because you go, Oh, well, this will be fun, and then I'll be just sleep on that person's floor and we drive. Right. So things change, but that doesn't mean that I don't do stuff and that I don't still um Well, you kind of touched on it now for a second.

What Work Gives Beyond Money

SPEAKER_00 48:52

You said I'd love to dive into more of what you think about that, where you said, for example, you said, Well, these people I don't normally get to work with because I've been in Vegas a lot. And then this brings up the topic of like, are we working for money? Are we working for what what else can we work for besides money? Which there obviously is something, but what would that be? And you've been talking about that a little bit with me past couple days, where it's like, what are we doing here? Am I just trying to pay the bills or am I what you yeah, can you elaborate a little bit?

SPEAKER_01 49:22

Well, it's uh what is the are we is there a difference? Because we've gotten far enough in our career that you can actually ask those questions. It's like we both have work that gets a certain kind of booking or whatever, and then I at least end up doing a lot of repetition of the same sort of stuff, and then you find yourself in in a situation where I'm going, okay, I'm doing this stuff, so I'm not getting artistic fulfillment in the creative way out of just doing an act that I've been doing for a long time. I like doing it, and I like to go out there because now I'm really my philosophy surrounding the what it means to be a performer and what it means to be a showman comes from the fact that I have known entities of known acts. This is a thing that exists, and I know the measure of it. It gets easier because I know this is gonna kill sometimes at level eight, sometimes at level ten. Every now and then it comes a level seven, and I'll feel really devastated and need to talk to it with others or whatever. But I have the and I get to do them so I know sometimes I get to, like when in Vegas now, doing 10 shows a week for eight, nine weeks on end, and you really you get to test it out the same thing in the same room, so and the conditions change a little bit and all that, but you you get to know what the actual experience is like, what it actually means to get your because you transcend beyond the skills. I don't need to think about these things, I'm just thinking about the delivery because everything because I know everything with it. So that means that I can go past and I focus on that thing which has become the essence of what I do, the it with the way of the showman is to be there for the audience and facilitate what it is that's that's going on. Like I'm I'm curating the time and attention in the best possible way. I'm not focusing on my skills, I'm just focusing on the presentation and shared experience of this thing too. So that you can do because you have these things that I know really well. But when I do believe myself to be an artist, and by that I mean that I do have a certain drive in me to do new things and to express different things. And we have gotten to the state stage that we're at, and the people who listen to us they know that we all often talk about this of going beyond uh beyond the tricks, yeah. And this stuff that when you're hinting, what I've talked about, like doing long-form work where there are tricks and there are uh uh technique and there are there are magic and there's all the stuff that I put into the show, but the show is about something else. My relation to my father is something that I'm working on again, and uh and other so other topics. So it's about that, it's about family, it's about about life things now that I feel like I finally have, even though I've talked about these things for a long time, you're going, okay, I have perspectives now that actually like this is although I'm telling a story that is about me, the this is more than that. This is I am questioning what these things are, and you make it the example that I will be pulling from is my specific case, but I'm doing it in a general so I'm interested in that. It's like when I'm writing poetry, I think I'm a bad poet. I'm writing usually about something, and I have ideas that I want to express in the poem, and I know from some masterclass stuff that I've watched that, or whatever. It's like it'd be I after a while, it's sort of the poem is the thing in itself, and it's not me trying to say something in the poem so that I can say, Well, what the poem is trying to say is this. Like, and I I'm still at that. I mean, every now and then it comes a little shard of light, and something comes out, and I'm going, Oh, that I didn't see that coming, and now that is that's the idea of the poem. Like, like I and I sat down to write something else, so so you know, you tune into all kinds, but um but um be that as it may, I lost my thread a little bit, but uh because I just got thinking of details about a poem.

SPEAKER_00 53:34

But no, no, no, I was gonna I I was trying to ask, like, what else because I mean the pair like to really say it in a very uh random way. Like what else do you get out of performing than money?

SPEAKER_01 53:47

Yeah. And I think what it does is that I I get something out of understanding myself in the world. Because it because I am a performer. And I am and because one of the things that I thought to ask you, it's like, uh, well, you know, now that we have done this for a long time, can you change track? And and in that point, I kind of go. I've said on the podcast before, I think, in conversation with you, that during the pandemic it became clear for me that I can't pivot to become a teacher. I can't pivot to like in Norway, you have to go to university or school for five years to do it. And I started to look at it and go, even at the most worst of times, I could make that salary with less if I'm happy to do that pay cut or whatever. So there's a so I'm like, I'm a performer, and I will be okay to be a performer, and you look at the salary of one of those, and then the money started going, if if if that is what they care about, then I should I could just do a whole lot less and do more obscure kind of stuff, and you change your life to function on less money or whatever. So now, of course, money comes into it again. Uh, but and of course, that wasn't the bottom line of it, but it's that that idea that I would have to go to for training for five years to be able to teach uh first graders in this stuff where I'm going, I'm pretty sure that with my skills of standing facing the other way, I will be able to communicate these things. But of course, I'm not belittling what the teacher knows how to do or whatever, but I'm kind of going like I am so late in my career and development of one type of expressing myself and understanding myself in the world that it makes such a big leap as to take five years to learn a new whole new occupation. Because teaching is maybe the same, but maybe if I had worked to be an electrician, like would I ever really actually do that? And the answer is now I think absolutely it's becoming no.

SPEAKER_00 55:52

I have a couple of things to say about that.

Changing Paths And The Myth Of The Way

SPEAKER_00 55:54

I mean, one is that so I grew up, no, I've said it five times in this conversation, but grew up in Ohio, and one thing you do there is that you go to high school, you graduate when you're 18, when you're 18, you go straight to college, university, whatever, you do that for four years. So you graduate when you're 22, you get a job, you get married, you buy a house, you have kids. This is this is the life I grew up in. This is the way. This is the way. And so I didn't do that because out of high school I started a uh juggling theater company, whatever you want to call it, juggling company. Up at Celebration Barn, Maine. Uh in Maine, at the Celebration Barn. And so there was a definitely a moment of in the family, like my family, of like stress and struggle that you know, I didn't do that path, right? The the the the way I didn't do the way. And uh one thing that I recognized was that all my friends I went to high school with, they did the way. They did they graduated when they were 22. Um, and a lot of student debt, because in America you got to pay to go to university. I mean, we're talking hundred thousand dollars in debt or more, right? When you're 22 and you got to start your career. And I noticed that pretty much every single person who I was friends with in high school went to college or university for a certain occupation, and they had a degree in that field with student debt, and not a single one of them got a job in that field. Interesting. So then I go, well, this way that we've that I grew up in my era turns out not to be the way. And the other kind of parallel to that is you know, my my parents' generation and a little bit my generation too, there still was that vision of like you get a job when you're 23 and you retire when you're 65, and that's your job. And nowadays, I mean it's like everybody's gonna switch jobs seven times in their working lives or whatever it is, right? Is that the thing? Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, I mean, nobody these days expects to get a job at 23 and keep that job until you're until you're 65, right? And so I think about that where I go, okay, I'm pretty glad I didn't follow the structured system because I would just have been saddled with debt and not in the field of my degree, and I would have been working at a grocery store or something. Nothing wrong with that, but other than I would have spent four years in a school, which I could have skipped. Yeah. And so that's so that's one thing I think where it's like, can we can we change what we're doing? Is it too late to change? And it's like, well, on one hand, no, because uh we're lit, I'm what I'm trying to paint is this picture of like, at least from our generation, I don't know how it was in Norway, but same time. We're the same age, right? So it's like you kind of grew up with this cultural expectation. And I think we have that romantic image of circus arts being rebellious and on the fringe of society already and kind of bucking trends and being transgressive or you know, subversive and all these things. And so in that way you can say, Yeah, like we are we're we're more in control of our destiny, maybe than kind of this uh yeah, this this set path or whatever. But then on the other hand, uh I always had this this this this idea in my life because I was so sick of touring. I mean, for eight years in the 2000s, I didn't have a house, a home. I lived out of a suitcase on the road, contract to contract. And thank goodness I had work, but you know, I just got so sick of it. And I said, okay, one day if I ever have kids, that'll be the day I stopped touring. It would be my excuse to settle down and like maybe get a real job or a different, or I don't know, right? Yeah. And so I have a kid who's 10. And like I have to say, I did the math like 10 years ago, where I was like, oh, if I stop performing, I could go work at Starbucks or I could go be a, you know, work at a cafe, and I did the math, and I'm like, oh my God, it would be better financially for me to sit at my computer from nine to five every day, Monday to Friday for a month, and just email trying to get one gig. And that one gig that I would get for my juggling fee would be equivalent to like my monthly salary working at like a cafe. Right?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:18

So like financially, this is the same thing that I was just saying before, and I don't want to make it about the money, but it's when you when I struggle and I'm afraid uh for not being able to pay the bills and take care of my dependents and all this, yeah. Then that's what I look at where you okay, well, if I go and do this other job and you because there are lots of jobs that makes uh considerably more money than me, but you don't get them uh if you start re- uh educating yourself at 50.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:48

Well, so yeah, that that's one thing, and this yeah, so so then so then they're like to wrap up this, I don't know if it's making any sense, this kind of it's like a trilogy of of of the thought here, but like this idea that we should have gone this certain path and already we're deviating off the path, so we're kind of in control of our own destiny. But now it's like okay, then the second part of the story is like could we not be performers and maybe go integrate into normal society or whatever? I hate saying that, but you know, like a more uh normal job. And then you go, well, financially, that doesn't make a lot of sense. Maybe it makes sense in other ways, like because there would be a rely, like a you wouldn't hustle anymore. You'd you would have your working hours, everything's more clear, reliable paycheck, the uncertainty is gone, all the whatever. So then the third part of the story would be I was thinking about moving to Iceland. Uh my wife and I were maybe going to move to Iceland. And so the thing is in Iceland, they're really and and and by the way, when I say I wanted to move to Iceland, what I mean is I wanted to move to there. I didn't want to live there and then travel to work. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't want it to be my home base for touring. Like if I moved to Iceland, I actually wanted to be in Iceland. That's the whole point of moving to Iceland. So then I go, okay, Iceland doesn't have a performing scene. They don't have a cultural real really like a cultural grant system, at least for circus for what I'm doing. Um so then I did sit down and have a moment and go, where'd you play that game? And you go, we are performers, Frodo, but we also inhabit all these different skills. We code websites, we edit videos, we write uh ad copy, we like all these auxiliary skills around self-producing shows. We know how to organize a rehearsal, we know how to lead, we could be a tour guide. We could you know what I'm saying? So like I sat down and tried to make a list of like these are all the skills I possess. And if I move to Iceland, what job could I, you know, uh then diagram these skills into another job? I didn't find one, but that was a game to play, right? Yeah, yeah. And I I think it for me, I like it. Like I maybe tour guide is like a real uh because it's like a performance, you know, like you're you're you're giving a speech and you're giving people an experience. You're taking them through nature, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:08

Yeah, telling some stories and I use that often in my ex because Miranda does it a little bit, yeah, and I use it as an image of what we do. Take people on a on a on a guided tour through a territory that you have prepared. Just in our territory, we have prepared the the whole of the experience, and what I am going to do is the experience. They interface more with geography and history, perhaps a little bit. There you go.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:37

So I think so.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:38

I think there is that game to play of like, like if you want to change your life and go in a new direction, I think we can also sit down and say, well, as performers, we have lots of different skills that are beyond the literal like being on stage kind of thing. But again, it for me personally, just to kind of wrap that whole up, that whole thing up, it's like, again, I just don't think I have the mental ability. Like, I think I've lost the mental ability. Like, if you put me this sounds like it's not, I'm not trying to be arrogant or saying I'm above it. I'm saying the opposite. Like, if you put me in a cafe, dude, at nine in the morning till five in the afternoon or whatever it is, eight to six, and you want me to do that work, I don't think I could do it. I think I would just not have the mental skills to navigate that rhythm or that I would be exhausted, I'd be physically unable to do it, I'd be mentally like I couldn't cope with it. I wouldn't have to do it.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:29

Yeah, or do you would do actually do a bad job because you can't head around to it or so 100%. We we are shaped by the choices that we've made and uh very specific skills that we have. And yes, they then diagram with all kinds of other things, but then the way that I work with my creative process that then channels into curtain goes up and I have something to present is very different from you putting in the hours every day from five to seven and all that. And I don't know also if I could do so well with with doing that swap. But let's uh let's uh it's gone to the hour, so let's uh let's wrap it up. And I thought as as always, I go, let's just do one hour about this, and we are still on sort of on question one. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:18

So let's um can you can I yeah, you I wanted to wrap this up. Well, I wanted to wrap it up by asking you a question. Like, don't you feel in your career, do you feel that it's getting harder? Like from either side, artistically or business side, is it harder to book shows? Is it harder to do the shows?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:38

No, um no, I think maybe the struggle is kind of similar, but uh on on average, but there are certain aspects of it that are changing in me.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:49

Fair.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:50

And I and you have already touched on some of these things of get it easy or whatever. But I have expectations and I have stuff that I want, and this is what we'll delve into. To next, I think, in what that is that we want to create. But I'm starting to feel feel like it's really time for me to take some new steps. And some of those steps I've started to take, and some of it is just in there in embryo, and some of it is on different levels of but uh and it some of it has to do then with artistic development as opposed to the other stuff. So cool man. Let's uh go into that. But I think Eva Hexha is right, there are strong parallels in what we of the human experience that we go through, and we are now asking the questions that are asked not just by Jay and Frodo, but by people at this end of their career.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:50

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:51

Yeah, this part of their life. Because what we're thinking of here, framed through the lens of showmanship and through the lens of doing shows and creating circus arts for lack of a better uh grouping. Uh people are feeling if you've done your life in plumbing or you're done, like the midlife crisis or whatever, this thing that I have reached a point of my existence where uh where the end is closer than the beginning. So with with that said, let's uh let's make a put a pin in this and no, and one more thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:27

Okay because we you said we're gonna talk about our maybe some more artistic things next. So one last practical question.

Younger Artists And Being Hired For You

SPEAKER_00 1:07:33

Yeah, I'm so curious about this. What you would say. Do you feel the younger generation nipping at your heels? Is there any aspect of that in your life where you're like, man, I'm losing gigs to those kids? I'm just curious.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:47

Like, yeah, I don't know. No, I don't feel it.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:50

And part of the reason also is that some of the gigs and some of the stuff that they are really excited about is not the stuff that I am excited about now. So this is the thing of the artistic change. I don't want to take those gigs, and it's not that my gigs are so cushy by any stretch. I have I go and I work all day and you drive seven hours and you get there, then you have to check out at a hotel because you can't go into the theater five next days. I gotta sit in my car for a few hours in some small town where the only hotel is outs, it's like 35 minutes outside of town. Yeah, this is a roadside hotel. That's the hotel that the theater is using. So, like I'm still doing those kinds of gigs where it's not fancy or whatever. But the butter, yeah, I don't feel like in my I it's also because I have been so long in the industry that when I do get the call here, I'm not they're not after a guy that can do some contortion and then you're on the list.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:49

This is valuable.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:50

They're after you, they're after me.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:51

Yeah, and that's I did you ever consciously curate that in your life? It just happened to be like that. I mean it's a great thing, but you never like 20 years ago said, Oh, I have a long vision here, I better create no no I mean but I mean for me.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:06

I think I have always uh strived, striven towards uh expressing myself and do stuff that I believe in in my acts, and and I think that I have managed to by luck or by design or by a bit of both or by whatever it is to have so much of what I am and my sensibilities in my acts that they are they they have been unique, and and I know to some extent that was there in the beginning, just from the youthful enthusiasm where I kind of have had this naive feeling from the beginning that I had something great to offer, yeah. And now I now get like, but but I didn't have an act yet, yeah. Didn't know you couldn't quite but put me on a stage and I'll be I'll be I'm so there in a moment and making this and I'm gonna show you some stuff. And even though sometimes when I look at what I did, it was half-baked, or even with something when it isn't half-baked, the way that the Happy Sideshow took the Glastonbury Festival in the 2000 seed there with a standing ovation, and we did all this, and that is on video, and we have looked back at it, and it's an embarrassing piece of performance compared to what we grew into. It was so early in our career, but we were at the edge of our ability, and the audience could feel it, and we did these big stunts, and it was like it's like the it it it was epic, even though it did get better and more refined or whatever. Yeah, man. So there's something in there where I'm have had that naive kind of thing that I have something to add to the conversation of life, or I have something to add as a performer, and then now I'm starting to have enough that I can come and deliver that on demand uh uh yesterday at the theater, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:55

Yeah, yeah. I get you. Cool, man.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:57

Well, you be you. See you next time. I'll be I'll be me until I see you next time.

Closing Thoughts On Eva’s Influence

SPEAKER_01 1:11:05

All right, going deep with Jay Gilligan. Yeah, that's right, into the existential questions. And uh at least when you've been in this game for a long time, like the two of us have, these are really natural kind of questions to ask. You know, it comes to a point in your life when you have to ask yourself, is this uh going to be the sum of what I have done and uh what I will have contributed, contributed to the world? So I think interesting. We will um there is uh another bunch of episodes of me and him talking while he is uh rolling his balls, so to speak. Rolling and creating this uh the it's amazing that somebody is so dedicated that he spends all that time rolling that up for these fleeting moments of visual joy that the audience gets as they watch the Eva Balls. And Eva Balls are of course uh a reference to Eva Hecksha. Um I can't remember if we actually talked about that in this episode, but uh but um Eva Hecksha, who uh had was the inspiration by asking probing questions, and some of you might remember Eva from uh there's at least three episodes where Eva is talking. An 80-year-old man with a background in creating schools and an interest in the esoteric um um uh teachings of Rudolf Steiner. So me and him have some interesting conversations about that, and uh I hope uh that uh the fruitfulness of some of those uh things that I explore a little bit in my book, although I don't really talk about Steiner in that book, but um but uh uh some of those ideas that I talk about in The Way of the Showman, a philosophical map of showmanship, which is what the name of the book is, that you have already heard me do a little talk about it. That um some of those ideas in there would be uh the kind of stuff that you arrive at when you um have the angle that uh Eva and I have. And some of those uh thoughts and ideas have rubbed off from uh Ivor and has uh sparked this uh beautiful act where balls uh the the juggling balls are literally coming apart in the air in puffs of leaves and ribbons and confetti and leaves you with that final beautiful moment when Jay is left there with nothing left to juggle, it's just a juggler left, and uh one of the few juggling acts that quite frequently brings the audience to tears. So uh that's um what's going on while we're talking, as you know. So uh that was just a shout out to Eva and the inspiration that he is for all of us. So until next time, take care of yourself and those you love, and I hope to see you along the way.