Excerpts from Juggler.com/video review. By Eric Bagai
© Eric Bagai, used with permission.
From JUGGLE magazine, 2004
This is a great compilation video, despite the weird title and nondescript packaging. Here you'll find Dan Holzman, Frank Olivier, Bill Berry, Rich Ross, Sean McKinney, Chad Taylor, and Dave Capurro, as well as Bob Mendelsohn and Tim Kelly. You'll also find Kimo the cat, Woogie (a space dog), another dog (probably terrestrial), a few odd cartoon characters, a passing skunk, and Bob the Jockey.
Chad Taylor, better known as Mad Chad, is definitely a warning to us all that juggling two flaming tennis halls and a chainsaw while riding a motorized skateboard at 18 mph may be hazardous to your health. Still, it took him only two tries to nail the stunt, six weeks apart, so the enormous burn blisters on his hand could heal. (You get to see the healing process in all its gory glory.)
That leaves us with Berry, Olivier, McKinney, Holzman, and Kelly. Now here is some fine juggling that makes the video worth seeing again and again. I've long wanted to get Holzman's cane work on video here it is. And he and Kelly go through enough variations with three-tennis-balls-and-a-can to keep the rest of us busy for a year or two. Kelly gives a brief but thorough demonstration of club flourishes and their application while juggling, something I haven't seen done as well since Chris Baer amazed everyone at the first Portland Juggling Festival.
Berry, McKinney, Holzman, Olivier, and Kelly each do their three-ball work-outs for us, showing a variety of styles. Frank Olivier favors the funny stuff that plays off his charm. Bill Berry combines tricks based on pendulum movements to which his body type lends itself. Sean McKinney projects an introspective grace and aloneness. Tim Kelly produces an amazing variety of tricks with seamless transitions, and Dan Holzman does as many tricks or more with three balls, but at least twice as fast. And because this is a DVD, there is a bonus track! The first two parts show more three-ball work by Kelly, but the third part is worth the price of the DVD all by itself. Alexander Kiss does remarkable work with head balances of clubs and swords, and head bounces of balls and clubs(!). All the more remarkable because he does up to seven rings or five clubs at the same time, and occasionally uses a rola bola simultaneously. These clips are taken from shows in 1955 and 1970. In the midst of these and other splendors, Kiss does continuous fiveclub backcrosses that are as solid as a rock.
A few juggling one-offs intersperse these brilliant exhibitions: Kelly's box tricks, Bob Mendelsohn's ring, ball, and club tricks. Mark Nizer's 2,000-foot drop. And throughout the video, knitting it all together, the editing and musical synchronization is quite remarkable.
I'd recommend this DVD to all jugglers. The DVD format makes it easy to avoid the stuff you don't like and to see some of the best juggling anywhere, over and over again.