In an effort to not forget a few of the good things about Bungay this year...
I bizarrely had a 100% success rate at croquet this year. I won two games (& was leading a third which was paused for dinner then abandoned due to rain). The first game I played well & just seemed to hit every shot I made. I finished by making 3 postings before hitting the final post. The second game I played badly, but so did everyone else, I managed to capitalise on my ability to be able to go through any hoop backwards. I'd tap the ball gently sending it flying past the hoop I was aiming for, knock the ball back through the hoop, then tap it back through the correct way.
Amy's flapjacks were very nommy.
Monte's pet trebuchet this year stood a magnificent 9 metres tall & during the day was sending projectiles past the croquet pitch. One night we all gathered to witness the launch of a flaming projectile in the dark. Anticipation was high while the flames were allowed to build before releasing the trigger. The pin was pulled, the counterweight fell & the arm rose. But the projectile didn't! Unfortunately the flames had burnt through the rope.
The Fight Night Tournament was a fun addition to the Bungay line up. Instead of the usual round robin qualification we had a series of melee (which was as close as we could get to mellow) rounds to choose 8 people to go through to the knockout stages. We had a confined playing area so the rounds were rough & chaotic. Richard was disqualified from one round for throwing a club at my head (successfully). As expected the top players Luke & Brook made it through pretty early on. According to the fight night rankings the next best player should've been me, but I only just scraped through by winning the 8th round. During the knockout phase I won a close match against Void, had a typical 5-0 defeat against Brook, but won the third place play off against Rob with a pretty convincing last strike. Luke & Brook made it to the final to play for the coveted banoffee pie. It was a close, well fought battle but Luke just pipped it 5-4.
While playing Kubb in the early evening we were fooled by Void's questionable ornithology skills as he excitedly drew everyone's attention to the 'barn owl' that turned out to be a black bird.
There were many candidates for game of the festival this year. Spyfall, was very popular. It is a silly roleplaying game where you have to determine who is the spy by asking your fellow players questions without giving away your location. Thinking of questions that were simultaneously vague enough to avoid giving anything away & meaningful enough to avoid suspicion was extremely difficult. Notable rounds for me included Richard's failed espionage attempt that lasted a spectacular 3 questions & Rob's successful mission on the pirate ship because no one else but me thought that biscuits vs biscuit was important.
I enjoyed 3 different games of Above & below with various people. It's a resource/people management game with a side order of roll your own adventure story. I think Andy was by far the best story teller of the festival. In the end I picked up a copy of Splendor, which is a deck building game that is very simple to play but saw a lot of very competitive games being played over the course of the festival.
Luke's flawless 3 ball rap in the Saturday night show was fantastic. It is just such a well put together routine. Do I remember a, "world's slowest pirouette" from a previous performance or am I getting that confused with another routine? I was sat at the side of the stage so didn't get the full benefit of Rob's iso-hoop routine, however it was a nice new perspective, usually I focus on the hoops themselves to judge how well the performer is maintaining the isolation but the different view allowed me to see the finger work required to create the illusion which is not something I've been able to appreciate before.
It was a lovely week of good company. Thank you to everyone who I spent time with & to main organiser Ron especially.
#BBU2016
Well done for posting your review Orin.
I was thinking about getting the ball rolling myself as I thought people might feel weird about doing it.
Right up to Sunday night it was another great Bungay.
For the first time ever I didn't actually do any juggling at all. I wanted to before hand and was looking forward to having a play but I never seemed to have the time once everybody arrived. Oh well maybe next year.
The main reason for not having enough time was "Trebuchet Guevara" which was by far the greatest siege weapon we have built yet.Funny to think how we started about 5 years ago with our first one made with drinking straws. Standing over 30' tall with a max ballast of around 200kg it was a fearful thing. We eventually threw a 2kg projectile over 90m and had it all set up to throw a flaming missile as a finale to the show. I'm pretty sure "flaming trebuchet of death" would have been the first act of it's kind to appear at a juggling convention anywhere in the world. However in an ever increasing search for power I reloaded the ballast with all but one small weight and when it was cocked it creaked worse than my knees on a cold morning. When fired the throwing arm broke due to the extra torque and threw the projectile high into the air backwards. Some of the cafe crew watching worried for the safety of their vans leading the Italian guy to turn to Maria the French girl, shrug his shoulders and say "fuckin English" LOL
If anyone puts any Treb' pics or vids online please share the links with me as the analysis is really useful and they are fun to watch.
Other than treb' news, Void finally won the poker. About time really but you had to feel for poor Andy who has been 2nd three times now. I managed to get to third which covered my cash game loses leading up to the tourny.
My new lorry had it's first convention and the extra size made it a great card room for the week.
Ewan and Becky set off on their cycle trip round Europe on Wednesday and failed at the first hurdle. The Felixstowe to Harwich ferry was not running because of the high winds so they ended up going on a hundred mile train journey instead of the 5 minute trip across the estuary.
Finally I'd like to say thanks to everyone for the support they gave to each other. It is a real privilege to be a part of the juggling family on occasions such as last Sunday.
See you all next May.
Tandemeers update: they're in my living room here in Utrecht waiting to be fed and apparently working out boring details like what's they might actually be going.
In case the non-facebookers thought they could escape the lycra: https://scontent-amt2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/t31.0-8/13320773_10154250166568679_4159191953621833111_o.jpg
Aiieee! I prefer https://www.instagram.com/p/BGTp8zJuBsI/
With the distance they're doing, I don't think he'll be that fat bloke when they get back!
Poland seems the firmest part of the plan, with some other stuff too before the EJC. No idea on numbers!
Richard Loxley - - Parent #
Richard was disqualified from one round for throwing a club at my head (successfully).
Well I was actually aiming for your pattern, so I think the throw should be recorded as unsuccessful!
Sorry (again).
Please don't worry about it! Of all the bumps I've had playing gladiators that was pretty minor!
That bird was DEFINITELY white. Until the point where its relative angle to the sun showed it to unquestionably black. In hindsight, the complete silence (confusion) that reigned up to the 5th or 6th time I'd said "Barn Owl!" should probably have been a clue.
I think I may have "made up for" this incident by finding the lost farm wildlife diary on the Monday evening. ...In plain sight on the kitchen counter. ....After Ron had climbed back into the storage shed of inaccessability to search for it. My timing, like a beakless barn owl, is impeccable.
My pics are at https://tlmb.net/galleries/BBU17
lukeburrage - - Parent #
My 3 ball routine has changed a lot since the I first performed it. You are remembering a version I last performed in 2003!
Version 1: a longer, slightly slower routine choreographed to Fat Boy Slim's "You're Not From Brighton". In this one I didn't speak, and the words of the video appeared on a TV screen beside me. I performed it only 6 times, first at the a Birmingham convention (I think the uni one), then the BJC 2003 in Brighton, a few other places, then finally at the Crawley convention in 2003.
As it was just the first in a planned 6 routines I wanted to make in 2003 (one every two months), the plan was to only perform them until I got each one dropless, and then retire it. And at Crawley I got it dropless, so retired it.
This is the version that had "world's slowest pirouette" in it.
Version 1.5: I made a video of me doing the juggling, then made a series of flash cards that I revealed in turn in person. I performed this later in the same Renegade show in Brighton.
Version 2.0: I liked the choreography, but wanted a shorter routine. I wrote all new music to fit the juggling better, cut out most of the repeated sections, made tricks that were once right and left handed just be on one side for brevity, cut the slow ending, and instead of me falling onto the floor at the end, just drop the balls. The music is, to this day, just called "3 ball remix".
I didn't plan on speaking during this routine, and performed it without any video or speaking (just to the music) at the Convention Ieper in Belgium in early 2004. It got a good reaction, but it was a step backwards.
Version 2.1: During the spring I started talking along with the juggling. I hadn't wanted to do this at first, because I wanted a bit of distance between this act and another piece which was a strong influence on it, that being the Gandini's "3 3 441" routine. I'd shared version 1 with Sean at a workshop, but without the music or video, I'd spoken along. He commented that it seemed quite familiar somehow.
I performed in Berlin at the Scheinbar, and my CD broke, so I had no music. I just did the routine with no soundtrack except speaking, and it became a totally different act. I could do some tricks for longer, and if I dropped I could pause and say other things in to the beat.
The version with just the music and the talking, but no video, is what I put in my club/ball act that I performed in the summer of 2004 at conventions like the IJA and EJC. Due to not always having a microphone, and performing in large venues, I made a version of the soundtrack with my words already recorded.
Version 3: For the Nott a Juggling Convention in 2005, I was asked to do something special to close the show. An idea I'd had since the start of the act is to have the words on a screen behind me, not just on a TV beside me. As video projectors became more available, and because I'd made a video screen for another act, I spent a few days making a this kind of video. That's this version:
https://youtu.be/6eWn0dRHwIQ
In the same week before that convention, I also made the Luke vs Luke combat video routine and performed that for the first time: https://youtu.be/rbtUaYHlJiQ
Version 3.1.1 became the version I was most pleased with, as it distilled down all the ideas into one routine. Video surrounding me, talking, tight juggling, only 2 minutes long.
Version 3.1.2: In case I wanted to perform the routine without a big screen behind me, I made a separate video with just the words.
Version 3.2.1: In 2013, when tracking drops in my show, I noticed the one trick I dropped most was the "Back Back Forward Forward Forward Back Cross" in the middle of the three ball routine. It's a hard trick, but also as I do it three times, there seemed to be three chances to drop it, not just one.
I decided to rechoreograph that small section of the show. It became the "body juggling" bit. The first conception of the original routine was that it would all be building blocks of juggling, base patterns and tricks with just the hands, but that was 10 years previously, so who cares? So I swapped in "Right Elbow Arm Left Elbow Arm", then "Right Leg Left Leg Right Leg Foot" and then "Head Catch Swap Point Swap".
I also reanimated the video from scratch, as I couldn't get the old file to open in Final Cut Pro.
The result? Way fewer drops in the routine! It went to usually not dropping to almost never dropping. Which is handy for a professional juggler!
Weirdly, and I'm not sure why, people laugh at the head catch bit. But they do laugh, so I guess I'm happy. I performed this version of the routine for jugglers for the first time only this year, at the Open Stage in the Living Room and at Brianza convention. Wes Peden was the only person to comment on the changed choreography from the previous version.
Version 3.2.2: Even though I made version 3.2.1 in 2013, every time I had to perform it without the central video projection, I would either do it without a video at all (like in Hungary in 2015) or use the video to Version 3.1.2, which didn't have the new body juggling sequence. This was fine, as I performed it this was so rarely.
But at Bungay I was talked into doing the routine, and I decided to do it with the 2013 choreography, not the 2004 choreography. So I spent 30 minutes editing the old separate video in Final Cut Pro. I didn't get the old file to work, I just imported the old video, blocked out the relevant three bits, tried to match up the font and put in the new words. Then I performed in the show, as you saw.
Little Paul - - Parent #
Thanks for that, it's not often we get to see such a detailed write up of the evolution of a piece
Rose-tinted specs on...
I also had a 100% record at croquet at BBU this year... until I played my third game. Should have stopped early, as I ended up 2/5. Did pretty well all round in games though: 2/3 in my yearly games of chess; qualified for Fight Night, and got a couple of points against a more experienced player; couple of Scrabble wins, but losses too. Gutted at missing playing a single extra 'a' which would have scored me an extra 34 points, and won the game which I lost against Robin; Won Mastermind, just! Yosser Hughes! Might well have been a different story if Gary had been around midweek. (Cheers Monte for running it - although the format lasted too long, maybe we should switch back to 15To1 next year (or Eggheads?) - I'll run it next year, as you've done the last 2.); Won the poker tourney! Woo, 'bout time. Felt good. Also, somehow I got involved in the grudge match game, and came away with it. More through Monte & Ewano playing like the megafish they are, than skill. You can throw it away if you like, lads, but I won't make it easy for you to get it back. :-P; Caught 3/6 in arrow-catching (Nice shooting, Mikey!); Learned Guillotine (lost, after foolishly picking on Ash); Won a game or two of Backgammon; Played no Cribbage (Maybe we should resurrect the Cribbage & Backgammon tourneys too); Thought I was doing okay in River Dragons, then lost.; I was trounced by Lynne in a couple of really fun games of table tennis. Monte beat me too. Again, I enjoy my yearly games. Feel like I've forgotten some too....
Bit of a hectic BBU this year: We had 4 workshops & 4 official events too. Cripes!
Juggling: Despite bringing a good bit of kit, I didn't do a lot this year. A nice Volleyclub workshop/session, a quick run of backcrosses in the buttercups, fight night, flipped a few fake candles in LP's plumber's candelabra (got 2 quite a few times, in various combis of cup positions). Inspired by Hairy trying a quick 7b qualify, I had a blast too, first aiming for a clean flash - got there in the end - before going for "a flash and a half". That ended up being exactly spot on, as I got 10 catches and a fumble. I'll take that, given it's over 12 years since I was trying 7 balls. Shot a kendama video.
Trebuchet was fun to watch/play along with. I've got a bunch of clips that I'll compile at some point.
I had one go at stacking the mini-cups. 1m19 seemed pretty good to me, given that I didn't know what the sequence was, and had to be told it as I was going along. Donald gave them to me as a present at BJC, and though I haven't used them again yet, I'm glad I took them along, as they gave a lot of fun to quite a few people.
I enjoyed this year's Southwold excursion. Ice-cream, pier, silly arcade, beach, stone skimming, group photo - all check!
Lots of fun, silly fireside chats. I particularly enjoyed the sessions of #ChangeALetterRuinAFilm and #ScaleBackABook. Luke called us outside one night to see an ISS pass - it was the brightest one I've ever seen, and we all waved at Tim Peake.
Didn't get to play Kubb this year, but did have a great morning's sitting at the top end of the field with the chilling gang, talking rubbish and laughing a lot.
Hilarious "posing with banoffee" session with Andy, as Lynne mysteriously played the technophobe, assisted/heckled by Sandra: Press the button, no not that one, the one on the screen, the white one, press it! Ended up with 11 shots of us in varying degrees of crackup.
Back to poker, and the Saturday night game with Hairy, Monte & Gary will linger long in the memory. Can't remember if anyone actually rivered Gary that night, but it seems likely. Calling M & H on the river with Jack high may seem like a questionable play, but it was that kind of silly game.
Lots of good memories, and fun friends.
That'll do for now...
"Still waiting on video", whinged someone on a history forum.
https://vimeo.com/169732138
No worries, mate. How's my Mike-trolling this year?
And was that you or me saying "more weight!"? I can't tell or remember.
We also had a lovely time; trips to Aldeburgh to eat smoked mackerel from the fishermen's sheds, the usual charity shop pilgrimage to Bungay and a fantastic walk around Minsmere with Kate & Mark & Tessa & Ash, seeing all kinds of rare birds and butterflies. On site, Ben was most impressed by the trebuchet (he's doing a Castles project at school soon so he'll have some great videos to show the class) although he's probably also learnt that wherever Men build Machines there will be Swearing. Looping Louie was also a great hit with the children. I got to play some croquet although it's been many years since I first brought it (sadly everyone else has learnt to play it now, there goes my strategy for being the best at something :) and came a close second to Void in Mastermind - damn you, Yosser Hughes and General Gordon! Of course, when I mentioned this to Farmer Paul he told us that the actor Bernard Hill lived nearby and had often been to events at the farm. Other highlights were tasting sessions with my nettle beer and cider (only some liked the former, most liked the latter) and chatting to Paul's neighbour Will Abbot about homebrewing, also visiting his parents' wood pellet stove; having to walk away from Change a Letter Ruin a Film because I was laughing so much I felt ill and enjoying the fact that our kids are now old enough to amuse themselves and as a result we can do pretty much what we like - back to the old days of Bungay.
Juggling wise, I had a brief pass with Phil the compere and taught him some lefty-righty stuff; failed at Combat-actually-it's-solo-Gladiators, partially because I was unsettled by being awarded a point due to some kind of infraction of the rules by Luke and mainly because he's just too bloody good; solo Bungay Tricked in the show (oh and it was a most excellent show as well, one of the best recently) without the usual team of Void and Monte who hadn't been asked (oops) and had lots of fun with my Dapostars which sadly don't seem very popular with anyone else.
And then of course Sunday. More has been said about this elsewhere, but I am both terribly sad at the loss of our friend and for his family and proud of how we came together as a group to do what we could for him, calmly and supportively. I am privileged to be part of this juggling tribe.
lukeburrage - - Parent #
A bit late, but here are my stats:
My 2nd Bungay. My first was in 2002 when I just came down for the last weekend.
Passport application: win.
Volleyclub: 9 wins, 0 losses.
Croquet: 1 win, 0 losses. This was my first ever game of croquet, and I didn't realize how brutal it was. It looks so civilized, but it is 99% about fucking over your opponents. Thanks to Sean coming in late, I went from distant second place to in the lead, then I was caught up by two other players, and then a late surge to a very close win. I never got round to playing a second game.
Splendor: 2nd place, 2nd place, 2nd place, 4th place, win. I wondered if my original strategy would ever win, or always come in second. In game four I tried something new, and came last, but I learned something from it that let me win the last game quite handily.
Combat: for some reason, two banoffee pies. I ate too much of both.
Park Run: about 29 minutes.
Mini-cup stacking: Andy got ahead of me, and then I got ahead of him with 22:59. On the Sunday, shortly before he had to leave, he shared his new time. I thought I'd give it another few goes to beat it. I somehow improved his time by about half second on my very first attempt: 19:88 (I only know my times as I took screenshots of my stopwatch result.) Andy didn't have time to try to beat it.
Visited: Southwold, Bungay, Peterborough (for new passport).
Spotted: some owls.
Hot water bottles: 2.
Drops in the show: Brook's fault.