Interview with Martin Frost

You might not know Martin Frost, but if you've been reading this column (aka the Kaskade Passing Workshop) in the past issues, you've certainly encontered more than a few patterns devised by Martin. Although he is an amazing club passer, Martin is not a professional juggler, he is a Unix systems manager at Stanford University. Martin has probably done more for club passing in the last 25 or 30 years than anybody will ever do. His input to the juggling community can not be praised high enough - even though he is a very modest person and would never asked to be praised. He is doing it for the fun of juggling and fun of sharing the fun. I found out about Martin three years ago on the Internet and discovered that he is considered a passing mega-guru. That's why I came to ask him for advice now and then when writing some pages for my passing website. I still have to meet him in the real life. The Internet has also made possible this interview by a Frenchman in Sydney, Australia of an American juggler in California for a magazine to be published in Germany and distributed mainly all over Europe. Thanks to Wolfgang Westerboer for his help with a few questions.

When did you start juggling? Has passing always been the focus of your juggling?

I taught myself to juggle about 1974, after having been exposed to various juggling teams at a Renaissance Faire where I was performing as a folkdancer.

Passing quickly became a passion because one of my housemates was another beginning juggler and we discovered that we could share the challenge, the fun and the laughter. We did a lot of ball passing initially but soon made some clubs from empty bleach bottles and began passing them as well.

After we had mastered passing six balls, we had no idea what pattern to use for seven, so we made up a pattern, namely the now-classic 7-object 1-count (a figure eight, with one person crossing). A bit later we figured out we could pass seven right handed out of phase, in what is now called a 2-count.

Even with clubs, we did a lot of passing with both hands, including a counting pattern where we alternated between a right-handed 2-count and a left-handed 2-count, doing each side for a different number of passes. Another of our inventions back then is what I now call All-Collisions 2-Count, where we're both doing a 2-count and both crossing, one right-handed and one left-handed.

That experience passing with both hands was great to have had early on. Thank goodness we weren't exposed at that time to other passers, most of whom were probably doing very little besides a 4-count with tricks and an occasional right-handed feed. As a result of that isolation, my first 3-ball pattern was the reverse cascade and my first 4-ball pattern was a forward-back "fountain" (throwing back toward myself on both sides).

What has your involvement been with the juggling community?

I started the Stanford University juggling group in 1980 and have been keeping it going ever since. I've been teaching workshops at juggling festivals since the 1984 EJC in Frankfurt (where my partner Bente and I won the 3-legged club juggling race). I've been to about 12 conventions in Europe and 80 in North America, including four that I organized at Stanford in the early 1990's. My Juggler's Workshop column appeared in Juggler's World for ten years, explaining lots of passing patterns as well as other forms of juggling. For several years now I've been working, though not with a lot of success, to get IJA management to once again be responsive to the membership. And I've subscribed to Kaskade since it was first published and have contributed a couple of pieces.

Do you perform?

I've performed off and on at local events over the years, whenever I've had available passing partners. (Unfortunately the Stanford students I've trained to become great passers always end up graduating. ;-) I've competed twice in the IJA Teams (1986 and 1991). And for the last year and a half, I've been performing at juggling festivals with NeilFred Picciotto and Rick Rubenstein as the Stanford Juggling Research Institute.

In your opinion, what have been some of the important factors you've observed in the development of modern juggling?

The creation and eventual proliferation of juggling festivals and the existence of juggling magazines have contributed heavily to the spread of juggling ideas and thus have encouraged further development, while actually creating the juggling community itself.

In the area of props, I think an important event was the introduction by Brian Dube of affordable (and widely available) excellent clubs. Prior to that, most hobbyists and many pros had to make their own clubs.

Another significant event was the development of siteswap theory, which made it easier to think about variations in patterns.

So what is the importance of theory, causal diagrams and siteswaps in the creation process? Was Martin's Madness created with causal diagrams?

Martin's Madness was created while I was actually trying to feed two people each of whom was doing Jim's 3-Count. I had no idea how the feed was going to turn out and was in fact quite surprised. At first I didn't even realize it had a handacross in it, because I was doing the handacross automatically.

A lot of patterns are created because someone says let's do such-and-such. Often the pattern can simply be worked out in your head and then tried. If something doesn't work, you figure out why and try to fix it. If the timing or sequence of throws is particularly complex, then it can be worked out on paper, using either siteswaps (typically for a solo pattern) or a causal diagram (for passing).

Years ago I had an idea of how to do a 7-club PPS pattern, but it didn't work and had a strange rhythm when we tried it. So I wrote down the causal diagram and realized that it was actually an 8-club PPS. So then I used causal diagrams to work out a number of possible 7-club PPS patterns. Those patterns are all "irregular" in that they involve different heights for different passes from one of the jugglers. That's a case where causal diagrams were really needed and quickly solved the problem.

So causal diagrams are good for working out the details of a pattern, especially if you can't just go do it. They're also very good for recording patterns and for conveying them to others because causal diagrams are very easy to read (and to draw).

You invented causal diagrams. How did the idea come to you?

I was trying to work out a 3-count with 7 clubs. Having a scientific background, I wrote down possible throwing moments for each juggler on a chart with time flowing from left to right. I kept each juggler on a different row so I could easily read a juggler's sequence of throws. Initially, each throwing moment contained a P or S (for pass or self) plus a number that denoted the spins. I knew that the number of spins generally determined the time in the air and that the spacing also implied the time, so I replaced the spin number with an arrow and causal diagrams were born. Since the arrows show which throws are passes, I replaced the P's and S's with R's and L's to show the hands involved.

How many patterns do you think you have invented and name a few? Which are the most well known today?

Maybe a couple hundred real patterns. Or more depending on how you count them. One day I worked out 56 different 1-count feeds, half of which we did at one juggling meeting. Although I wrote down the causal diagrams for those 56 particular patterns, there have been many other times when I've forgotten patterns I've come up with, having been too busy having fun to write them down.

Anyway, some well known patterns of mine are:
- 3-Count Feed (which I popularized in the early 1980's)
- Typewriter Feed (a 1-count feeding three 3-count feedees)
- Complete Feed (everyone feeds everyone in the other row)
- 7-Club 3-Count
- Random 13-Club Feed (feeder passes at random to the feedees)
- Bruno's Nightmare (yes, I turned Bruno's original 31-pass real nightmare into a clean 30-pass cycle, and probably no one has ever done the original again)
- Martin's Madness, Mob Psychosis, etc.

Some lesser known patterns of mine include:
- 7-Club PPS
- 8-Club PPS
- T-Shirt Pattern (an 11-club feed with triple selves)
- 11-Club and 15-Club Feeds based on the 7-Club 3-Count
- Feeding Frenzy (a difficult 10-club feed that is perhaps the most aptly-named pattern I know of)
- Happenstance Juggle (one juggler standing behind another with each juggling 3-clubs in the front)
- and Compressed Mesopotamia.

You have called the 7-club 3-count "the pattern of the 90's". Do you see a particular direction for juggling for the new century?

One thing that's happening is the breaking of rules in order to allow new patterns to emerge that weren't conceivable before. Jim Brennan broke a rule to create Jim's 3-Count, and that opened the door for Martin's Madness and a bunch of related feeds. The Stanford Juggling Research Institute (SJRI) broke another rule with the invention of the simul (a type of hurry that involves periodically passing from both hands simultaneously). Generally the patterns that result from newly broken rules are more difficult, because most of the easy stuff has already been discovered. So the new stuff challenges jugglers to keep up. And indeed many of the new patterns we come up with at Stanford are quite difficult.

Fortunately jugglers have always wanted more difficult things to learn, at least up to some point. We always teach our Stanford patterns in workshops at festivals but many of the patterns are just too hard. So we teach some patterns to get people moving in the new directions, and we demonstrate the harder stuff in hopes that people will be inspired to work up to those patterns.

What is the latest pattern you created? Can you give the basic idea of it in one sentence?

In the Random 5-Club 1-Count, you each pass either one or two clubs whenever and wherever you want (just be careful).

What's your biggest passing achievement so far? What's your next goal?

I suppose my proudest achievement is passing 10 clubs, which I've repeatedly qualified with a few different partners. That's big for me because it has been done without a lot of available practice time with any given partner (unlike some teams that are together regularly).

Qualifying the 9-club 1-count was also very rewarding, again done without much practice time. And great joy came from successfully demonstrating (in a festival workshop in St. Louis in 1991) an 18-club box -- two pairs passing 9-club triples at right angles to each other through the middle. My next goal is to publish my passing book.

Can you give a short comment on that eagerly awaited passing book then? What, when?

My book, tentatively titled Passing Madness, has close to 500 club passing patterns. Although it's mostly written, I have a bunch of editing still to do, a lot of diagrams to create, and the layout to do. I'm guessing it will be out in 2004. But then I've been saying "next year" for a while now. I really wanted it to come out this year.

Any interesting juggling related story you want to share with the readers of Kaskade?

In 1989 I was teaching a passing workshop in Baltimore and explaining the 7-club 1-count on a little stage. So naturally someone asked if I knew an 8-club 1-count. I said that I had worked one out with all crossing doubles but had never tried it. They wanted to see it of course, so I explained the pattern to the audience and to my partner at the same time. I knew we wouldn't be able to do it, but we tried it just to demonstrate what it might look like and how hard it would be, especially to avoid collisions in the middle. We started it and.... huh? We kept going! We did it amazingly well on our first try, somewhere close to qualifying it (8 catches per hand). Probably it went well because we didn't have pride or high expectations riding on that first try. Well, maybe I did a good job of telling my partner (and myself) how to avoid collisions. But with all eight clubs going through the middle, it's a startling pattern (and still difficult), and I'm sure we were more surprised than the audience was that it worked.

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