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Leeds!
I had a lovely time at Leeds. Coffee, doughnuts, friends, juggling (I still can, just about).
Highlights were new and incipient infants; the acro act being very lucky that they asked me to start their music before they appeared, because I was possibly too busy admiring their costuming to have correctly handled a sound cue; Mark's compering and pineapple professionalism; Jon Peat's excellent first go of stage management; and Tiff, whose act was entirely mind boggling, and who is one of the few people on the planet who could even come close to living up to his own high standards. Finally of course, Alice's breakfast.
Low: No Lorri :-(
Thankyou to everyone who came to Leeds. Special thanks to Ron,Lazy Juggler who donated a BJC pass as raffle prize( we set a record for tickets sold) and Butterfingers for trading and donating prizes as well.
We have more people this year than previously so, sorry we ran out of doughnuts.
Thanks to Jon for the show, Jenni for passes and flyers, Alastair ,Tim and Rebecca for running everything and tidying up.
Highs , number of tickets sold, the show(Tiff especially) and having good friends to stay over who did not complain about the lack of pillows or incessant coughing!
Hoping to do it next year ,same time, if the school will have us.
Alice
The Leeds Juggling Convention 2015 Review
Last Saturday was the Leeds Juggling Convention 2015 (UK) held once again in St Marys School, Menston.
First of all, thank you everyone who came to the convention this year! We had bumper numbers and will need to make more passes next year and order even more doughnuts!
Highlights
Having a house full of family and friends who made the whole weekend excellent fun.
I had a really nice custard doughnut, obviously fresh baked that morning. I did do the thing where you check the dates on the packets to see which to open first, then I realised that there wouldn’t be any left anyway!
Ross did a great job organising our workshop timetable and it was nice to see so many varied and good quality workshops. Some took place a little early in the day for most people, we will perhaps look at this for next year.
Enjoyed a lovely fish and chips sit down meal with Jenni and Mark at midday.
Got back in time to run my wrist traps workshop with clubs. I pretty much made the workshop up as I went along (and I think it showed a bit) but I did expose a good number of people to various wrist traps and other miscellanious club tricks. I was pleased when we got onto some of the more interesting variations that a number of people saw what we were doing and came to join the workshop. Overall I think it went down quite well, the problem is that it takes a fair bit of practice to make those sort of tricks look smooth so there were no immediate rewards for the workshop goers but I hope I got some people excited about the possibilities.
I bought a nice selection of games from Lazy Juggler.
The Show! All of the acts were excellent and Mark did a wonderful job holding the whole thing together. (We will forget the small mishap I had with the lighting desk!)
Emily touched upon the subject of some costuming during the show. I missed most of the act in question as I was holding my head in my hands…
Congratulations to Dan Wood for winning the first ever Leeds Juggling Convention Combat Tournament.
My Heroes of the day
Alastair - Directed all of us in the building of the stage, was an excellent games master, did a fine job of getting the raffle done as quickly as possible, helped all the acts by being stage hand and packed everything up at the end of the day.
Emily - So easy to work with and a nice calming influence during the whole show.
Jenni - Supporting me and being my little gofer when setting up the show. All the hours she spent designing and making the passes as well as setting up Mark with his own quote!
Mark - Great company for the entire weekend as well as some excellent compering and a magic performance to boot. We also had a late night magic performance that night and we are still eating up all the Oranges and Melons!
Lows (or things to improve)
Arriving later than planned, turns out Menston is further round the ring road than I thought it was. I did want to help set up everything but Alice and Alastair had everything sorted by the time I arrived.
I’d like to make a bigger fuss about the workshops next year. Perhaps printed timetables of the day would help highlight the workshops which are on offer and also highlight when the show starts.
It would be good if we could find some more toilets somewhere near the show hall that we could make available during the interval as there was a bit of a queue.
I had an absolutely fantastic time at Leeds Juggling Convention this year!
I have always enjoyed LJC as an attendee but this was my first year as part of the organising team.
It was a delight and a pleasure, I hope to be involved again next year and I really look forward to seeing you all there!
Cheers, Jon
#conventionreview
This read like a good (and more interesting than most) reflective log that those of us who have been through any form of teacher training (primary, secondary or tertiary) will be familiar with.
Perhaps this is something to be encouraged for convention organisers. I may need to route out some of my old ones to figure out a good structure. ... something like a records section.
I must get to Leeds juggling convention some year: I only need a compatible teaching timetable to make it feasible.
^ This with knobs on. Goes hand in hand with the recent discussion about articles for the IJA ezine. More personal experiences please!
Regarding workshop timetables Jon, I've put some work into a timetable system on the Edge (go to an event for which you a member of High Command the click create new timetable), I think it should make handling timetables easier & provides a number of formats to play with but I've not had anyone do anything other than play with it yet. I don't know if that is because it is too hard to use or that it doesn't do the job it needs to do. Here's a mock up showing what you can do, & there's lots of discussion about timetables that might be useful too.
Leeds was good as always but at the end of a 60 hour week with a 4-5 hour commute I was perhaps too fatigued to make the best of it. Most of the usual suspects were there and it was wonderful to see them again as well as a few from further afield. The attendance was higher than usual, but there was still plenty of space we just ran out of free doughnuts earlier.
I misremembered a conversation with Alice about bringing extra spare mugs, but thank you to Alan for bringing them.
There were plenty of workshops but they needed to be better highlighted, there was a whiteboard beyond the boardgames area with the timetable, but I didn't find this till the afternoon. With all the distractions at a juggling convention it is nice to have announcements for workshops as it is easy to lose to lose track of time. Luckily we noticed when we were about to start passing a lot of people facing Jon trying wrist-traps and realised his workshop was on (I had seen on the facebook event he was giving a workshop and had been looking forward to it) and it was a really enjoyable workshop.
The show was good, Tiff's act was amazing, the venue penalises you for accepting a lift to the pub before the show from a driver who goes in the wrong direction - by giving you a seat near the back with limited view of anything below the performer waist. So any rola-bola'ing, etc., might as well be mimed. Jon's trick with the stage lights was very entertaining.
The maze through the school to get to the sports hall was well signed except for the one junction where there was a 50% chance of going the wrong way and I accepted those odds and took it.
Much to Alastair's disbelief I won a raffle prize; with nothing I wanted to win available, I picked up something to give to the local juggling club, but managed to sell it before I left the show venue to someone who wanted a hoop more than me.
The toilets are a bit dire at the school, but I suppose it is oop north so we should be grateful they are indoors.
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