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The New York Times
June 1, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

AS SEEN ON YOUTUBE (AND PRETTY MUCH ONLY ON YOUTUBE)
BYLINE: By JASON FAGONE.

Jason Fagone is the author of ''Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Fat American Dream.''

SECTION: Section M2; Column 0; Play Magazine; Pg. 62
LENGTH: 4096 words
When Vova Galchenko juggles, he often dresses in a red tank top and black track pants -- no clown suit, no mime makeup, nothing that comes off as circusy, French or 'gay,' as he puts it.

Galchenko is built like a gymnast and approaches juggling like an athlete. Ten minutes into his daily three-hour practice, a little vertical bar of sweat appears between his pecs. At 25 minutes, the bar sprouts two bunny ears, and a stripe down his back turns dark maroon. Galchenko keeps juggling until his whole shirt is sweat-soaked and his arms are tired. This is usually when he starts getting angry at himself and whipping his clubs at the walls.

Such was the case last year, when I watched Galchenko try to land a really hard trick in the 12,000-square-foot mansion where he lives in Agoura Hills, Calif., near Malibu. The house is owned by the Bakalors, an American family of Internet entrepreneurs and juggling enthusiasts. Galchenko practices in the living room, designed specifically for juggling. It has 30-foot-high ceilings, a wall of convex glass facing the Santa Monica Mountains and a smooth stone floor that's kept clear so that Galchenko can wander around and work on tricks. The trick he was attempting was called a ''seven-club, five-up 360,'' and it required Galchenko to juggle seven clubs, throw five of the clubs very high and pirouette underneath them. He then had to exchange the two remaining clubs in his hands for two of the plummeting clubs and resume juggling all seven as if it were no big deal.

The thing that's so hard about this trick is that it combines two tricks that are hard to execute separately -- keeping seven clubs aloft in a pattern known as a cascade and doing a pirouette under five. As far as Galchenko knows, only one other person in the world can pull it off: Anthony Gatto of Cirque du Soleil, an American widely considered to be the world's greatest juggler. Only 20 years old, Galchenko is 15 years younger than Gatto, and may supplant him before long. Galchenko's ''just one of the best that ever lived,'' says Penn Jillette, the vocal half of the magician duo Penn & Teller, who began his showbiz career as a juggler. ''It couldn't be simpler. He can throw more things in the air and catch them in order.'' In juggling, difficulty increases exponentially as you add objects. Three is cake. Five is tricky. Seven approaches physical impossibility. Every throw has to be perfect, describing a precise arc (a gentle, high parabola) with precise spin (each club flipping exactly three times). If one club deviates even slightly, the pattern collapses, and the juggler had better duck unless he wants to get brained.

For 50 minutes straight, Galchenko tried to bang out the nearly impossible trick. He began each attempt with a seven-club cascade. If the pattern was a good one, tight and stable, five of the clubs would suddenly spurt to the rafters in order to give him room -- and time -- to pull the 360. (This is what Galchenko says he likes about juggling, the ''aesthetic feeling'' of a good pattern: ''It looks nice. And it looks like you could keep going forever. Which, of course, is a false impression.'') But every time he tried to collect the clubs after pirouetting, they were just beyond the reach of his hands. They'd bonk off the floor, skittering in all directions, and Galchenko would scowl and trudge after them and send all seven skyward again, biting his lip, jerking his neck every so often to shake his shaggy mop of brown hair out of his eyes. He never looked down at his hands. The clubs made hollow popping sounds as they slapped against the callused pads on his palms. A half-hour into this, Galchenko finally nailed his first 360 and wrangled the wayward clubs back into a clean cascade, only to drop one. He opened his right hand and said, into his palm, ''Catch,'' like a mother disciplining her kid. ''I cannot juggle anymore,'' he said. He kept at it for 20 minutes longer until, finally, he landed the trick cleanly. Then he landed it again -- then a third time, then a fourth, then a fifth. ''Thank you, Jesus,'' he said.

Galchenko -- his full name is Vladimir Vasilievich Galchenko, but he's known simply as Vova -- is not a laid-back person, but he is a pretty happy one. ''My life is lovely, for the most part,'' he says. He just finished his freshman year at California State University, Northridge, taking classes in calculus, computer programming and political science. In his free time, he reads about atheism; his blog is probably the only one where you can get both chatty shop talk (''Went through my ball routine with only two drops, which was nice'') and skeptical arguments about religion (''Pascal's Wager has very many flaws. I will go into a couple of them''). Galchenko doesn't drink and generally finds the social rituals of American teenagers screamingly funny, but he's not a loner. He has a girlfriend, a student at Monmouth University in New Jersey who wrote to him after she saw his juggling videos on YouTube. It's only when Galchenko juggles that the sociable side of his persona fades away, replaced by what Mark Bakalor, Galchenko's de facto manager, calls ''the Russian Robot.''

The Russian Robot never smiles and never bows. He merely executes the hardest moves in the juggling canon -- and some new ones of his own creation -- flawlessly. His only concern is the raw trick itself, stripped of glitz and flourish. ''Artistic expression through juggling . . . I think is [expletive],'' Galchenko says. ''There's nothing you can express through juggling. It's just throwing and catching [expletive].'' The severity and eye-popping virtuosity of this philosophy translate well to YouTube, where the Russian Robot is a quasi-viral phenomenon. His most popular video is a montage of tricks set to music by Fatboy Slim: Galchenko, his hair flopping with the beat, juggles seven balls on the Bakalors' roof, five clubs in the bathroom, seven clubs in the living room, five clubs behind his back, three clubs between his legs (a trick he calls Crotch Madness) and five balls while casually ascending a spiral staircase. The Fatboy Slim video has received more than 650,000 hits; representative viewer comments include ''sick vid,'' ''omg man that waz sweet'' and ''god like!!!''

Videos of Galchenko passing clubs back and forth with his younger sister, Olga, a champion juggler in her own right, have gotten the siblings on the ''Today'' show, ''The Ellen DeGeneres Show'' and ''The Oprah Winfrey Show'' (clubs whizzed by on either side of Oprah as she stood there with one eye closed). But to a certain kind of hard-core juggler, Galchenko's videos are much more than a daytime diversion. They're akin to holy texts. There are young people all around the world who are learning to juggle not in the old way, by honing their craft in live performances, but by clicking through Galchenko's tricks frame by frame, then filming their own versions of the tricks and uploading the proof to YouTube. These kids are changing the face of juggling, evolving a culture whose values -- speed, numbers, athleticism, technique -- are distinct from the traditional juggling values of balance, expression and showmanship. And that's Galchenko's problem. In the real world, juggling is still largely a showbiz skill, and a marginalized one at that; the vast majority of professional jugglers make their living on cruise ships, juggling machetes and torches for the melanoma set. Galchenko isn't well suited to this world. It's a poorly kept secret that he suffers from crippling stage fright. His hands start to shake before a show. ''Put Vova in Cirque [du Soleil], and he'd die,'' says Jay Gilligan, an accomplished circus performer from Ohio. Galchenko describes it this way: ''Everything seems slow-motion, kind of. Everything feels weird. I don't like that feeling inside of me -- being in front of people, being nervous.''

It hasn't always been like this for Galchenko. As a kid in Penza, Russia, a medium-size industrial town southeast of Moscow, he didn't have stage fright. His father, Vasili, a math professor, sent him to circus school when he was 4, followed by Olga. The Galchenkos learned to tumble and do handsprings and ride unicycles. ''I was really driven by competition,'' Vova says. ''I wanted to be one of the top kids.'' As the economic situation in Russia deteriorated, Vasili seems to have put his hopes in his son and daughter. He had them do extra juggling at home. He couldn't find proper clubs in Penza, so he had a friend carve a set from blocks of wood. When the kids were 14 and 11, Vasili bought a camcorder, filmed a few videos of Vova and Olga passing clubs back and forth and uploaded them to a primitive Web site.

Jugglers from America and Europe soon discovered the videos and flooded Vasili with e-mailed praise. Vova and Olga were ''beautiful,'' ''awesome,'' ''inhuman,'' ''silky.'' It was the first time the kids realized they were anything special. ''That's actually really motivating,'' Vova says. They kept posting new videos and eventually began to get invitations to perform abroad. In 2003, they came to America with their mother, Tanya, making their United States debut at that year's International Juggling Association convention in Reno, Nev. That's where Jillette and another juggler, his buddy Owen Morse, first came across the kids, dressed like ''refugees,'' casually passing huge numbers of clubs in a makeshift gym (Jillette remembers 12 clubs, Morse remembers 11). Morse and his partner, Jon Wee, once set a world record for passing 11 clubs with 68 catches. Before Morse's eyes, the Galchenkos were juggling 11 clubs with seemingly hundreds of catches. Morse turned to Jillette and said, ''I've never felt older in my life.''

After almost a year, Tanya went back to Russia, leaving Vova and Olga to live with a series of jugglers -- first, a middle-aged man in Vermont who performed as Spunky the Clown, then a suburban mom in Boulder, Colo. Eventually, they landed with the Bakalors: Barry; his wife, Sue; and their 30-year-old son, Mark. The family runs a business called Know-Where Systems that provides online store locators for retail chains and corporations. By that time, Olga was burned out. Vova had been hard on her in practices, sometimes screaming when she dropped a club. (The kids' green-card paperwork had stalled, and Vova was worried that if they stopped juggling, they'd get shipped back; the Bakalors helped them finally get their green cards via the same ''extraordinary ability'' exemption often applied to Olympic athletes.) Olga wanted to focus on school -- run track, study, hang out with her friends. Vova was left to figure out what came next. If he was going to keep juggling, he had to become a solo performer. The Bakalors bought him a P.A. system and wrote him a 20-minute comedy routine for street shows, encouraging him to deliver punch lines in an over-the-top Russian accent. But Galchenko didn't want to tell ''cheesy jokes''; he just wanted to juggle. ''Mark and I were cringing, watching him,'' Barry says. Photographs of Galchenko's early street shows depict him on a lonely patch of boardwalk, beanbags in mid-air, beachgoers passing him by.

Galchenko's act is smoother now, but there are still kinks, as I saw when I tagged along to one of his occasional Sunday afternoon shows at the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. Galchenko wheeled his P.A. system to a cobblestone street lined with a Latino break-dancing crew, a garbage-can drummer and a monkey on a leash. It was warm and slightly windy, and the street was full of couples milling around, many of them pushing baby strollers. Galchenko set up shop and pressed ''play'' on his Discman. A muscular male voice boomed, ''Internationally recognized champion juggler. . . . He holds 12 world juggling championship titles. . . . You can see him on ESPN. . . .'' Then, to the Stones' ''Start Me Up,'' Galchenko launched into his act: five balls (''Uh-oh, watch this,'' he said in loud, unaccented English), then seven balls (''I need you guys to go absolutely wild!''), then a complicated, three-club routine set to ''Back in the U.S.S.R.'' The crowd of about a dozen regarded him with quiet smiles.

As the show went on, Galchenko's tricks got harder and harder, but the crowd only dwindled. Then, with the wind sharpening and the branches of a scraggly tree looming above him, Galchenko juggled seven clubs, clean, on the first try, to polite applause from five or six people who didn't know what they were seeing.

There are two major juggling conventions in America, each one representing opposing camps in juggling's sport-versus-entertainment debate. Galchenko always attends both. The first is known as W.J.F., which stands for World Juggling Federation, the creation of a 33-year-old juggling instructor named Jason Garfield. The quickest way to get a sense of what Garfield and his organization are about is to scan the rule sheet posted at the sign-in table of last year's W.J.F. 4, held in July inside a vast, dark convention hall in Hartford, Conn. The sheet spelled out prohibitions on clothes (no clown costumes), behavior (no ''acting in a manner that could be considered clown type''), even hygiene (''you must be clean and actively using effective deodorant''), and included a 16-point list of contraband items, such as tie-dyed shirts, court-jester hats, ''unicycles of any length,'' rubber chickens and whips.

Garfield has labored mightily to make juggling appealing for television, with mixed results. The 2004 and 2005 W.J.F. competitions aired on ESPN and ESPN2, but the ratings were poor and the network dropped the event. Attendance at W.J.F. 4 was sparse, with fewer than 200 die-hard jugglers -- many of them kids, who dragged their parents here from all corners of the globe. The high point came on Day 3, in the W.J.F.'s annual exhibition, which featured Galchenko and his rivals in the juggling equivalent of a jam session. The only requirement was to amaze. One by one, the jugglers walked into a small arena and pulled their sickest, most original tricks -- and then took requests. It was an ideal showcase for Galchenko. Jugglers in the audience yelled out strings of numbers called ''siteswap patterns,'' and Galchenko decoded the numbers into tricks. Using this geeky language, the audience controlled Galchenko like a marionette:

''Can you do a 7-4-4 with the 4s as flats?'' someone called out.

''Probably,'' Galchenko said. He tried it, but his clubs kissed in midair, one club then nearly bonking a kid. ''Oh, man,'' he joked. ''I hate it when they touch.''

''A five-up, two-stage 720 with singles and doubles?''

''A 9-5-5-5 with the 5s as back-crosses?''

As Galchenko pulled move after move, the kids laughed and shouted, slapped one another's shoulders, made involuntary cooing noises. His enraptured admirers at W.J.F. 4 included Freddy Sheed, 13, from Portsmouth, England -- ''He's got style, he's got tricks, he's technically amazing, he's just so cool'' -- and 13-year-old Jeremy Sacks, from Austin, Tex., who just said, ''Vova's my idol.'' They were in awe of Galchenko's uncommon fluidity and speed. With any given pattern, he can throw in spins (from a 360 to a 1080), or a ''crotch-throw,'' or a ''back-cross,'' or an alternate spin, without needing any time to recover. Galchenko is able to blur the transitions between tricks so completely that it often seems as if he's not doing tricks at all. Instead, he's unspooling a comic monologue about gravity. Athletes often talk of entering a ''zone,'' where they see the action in slow motion. Galchenko can't relate. ''Merely seeing patterns in slow motion won't help, because things don't actually slow down.'' Part of the fun of watching Galchenko is the sense that you're missing things -- the subtle flicks and turns and balance shifts that structure the blur of his clubs. Watch him long enough and your eyes speed up.

Somebody shouted, ''Singles into five-up singles into back-crosses,'' and everybody laughed. This was a fiendish request: three hard tricks in a row, stitched seamlessly into one monster trick. For a second, it looked as if Galchenko was going to nail it -- the clubs twisted into the air, the kids sucked in their breath and his main competitor at W.J.F., a German technical whiz named Thomas Dietz, leaned way back in his chair and shouted, ''Oh, my Gotttttttt'' -- but a club slipped through his hand at the last minute. ''Hard,'' Galchenko said, with dry understatement.

The second juggling convention, the I.J.A., is dominated by the artistes, the performers. Last year's I.J.A., held over the course of a clammy midsummer week in Winston-Salem, N.C., was a crucial one for Galchenko: for the first time ever at this event, he would be competing on his own, without Olga. The I.J.A.'s ''individual championships'' are the closest thing in juggling to an Olympic contest. Like figure skating, the acts are judged on a ratio of technique (60 percent) to creative expression (40 percent). Team Bakalor saw this as Galchenko's chance to prove that he was more than just a robot juggler. In the weeks before the event, they were preoccupied with Galchenko's elaborate I.J.A. routine, which would require him to interact with a pretaped version of himself to be shown on a big screen. Real Vova meets Video Vova.

I found Galchenko preparing in Winston-Salem on the morning of his big performance. He was in the ''gym,'' a long exhibition hall with a hideous orange-and-brown carpet that was full of jugglers, their portable coolers and all their myriad stuff in the air: balls, clubs, rings, hacky sacks, oversize yo-yos, plus enough clown paraphernalia to give Jason Garfield an aneurysm. Galchenko was wearing a T-shirt that said As Seen On YouTube. ''We have prepared nothing,'' he said. Due to logistical delays, the video that was to be the centerpiece of his act had never come together, which meant that Galchenko had all the trappings of a fancy routine -- including what he called ''the gayest costume ever,'' a nautical-looking black shirt with red trim and black sequins -- without any of the fancy content. To make matters worse, the competition looked fierce, with scheduled performances by Dietz and Wes Peden, an 18-year-old from Rochester. Peden is a born-again Christian who says things like ''superfun'' and ''supercool'' and juggles with an infectious glee: the anti-Galchenko. Of all the competitors, he loomed the largest, because of his showbiz X-factor. Still, the Bakalors were confident. Galchenko's planned routine included a long run of seven clubs, as well as several complex tricks with six clubs. As far as they knew, none of these tricks had ever been done before in any competition. Barry believed that if Galchenko ran his routine cleanly, ''Vova wins.''

Galchenko was set to perform last, the capper to the night's festivities. He waited as Dietz ran a difficult, nearly impeccable routine and as Peden gave a stylish yet sloppy performance, heavy on drops. Finally, it was time. Galchenko took the stage. He smiled and waved: ''Hi.'' There was a peal of nervous laughter from the crowd of 1,000, most of them jugglers.

Then he picked up three clubs from his prop stand and started juggling. Two-stage 720: clean. Reverse back-crosses plus crotch throws: drop. The Bakalors, waiting in the wings, began to pace. He briefly juggled six clubs and then lost his nerve, cutting out the six-club tricks altogether. Not a good sign. Five balls: drop. Seven balls: clean. He switched to rings. ''These things,'' he joked. Barry put his hand on his head. ''His shoelaces are untied,'' he said.

Soon Galchenko grabbed two armfuls of clubs and shuffled them between his hands until the balance was right. Everyone knew what was coming. Galchenko sent the seven clubs skyward. There was a gasp -- and five clubs came crashing down. Galchenko shrugged, gathered them and tried again and again without success. Barry frowned. ''He's gonna be pissed about seven clubs,'' he whispered.

Galchenko finished with a long run of five-club back-crosses set to the cannon blasts of the 1812 Overture -- the hardest club trick anyone had pulled all night -- then walked offstage. Mark hugged him. ''Oh, my God,'' Galchenko said. ''I'm so glad it's done.'' Galchenko and the Bakalors suddenly became very businesslike. They packed up Galchenko's prop stand in silence and walked back to the green room. The contestants were called up for the trophy presentation. The M.C. said, ''Third place . . . Vova Galchenko.'' Dietz took first and Peden second.

''Cool,'' Galchenko said, ''I got third.'' He was trying to be gracious, but he was obviously disappointed. He went back to his hotel, flopped onto the bed and said: ''Ahhhhh. I feel free. Free of all this [expletive] now. Ah, dude, I should become something that actually matters.''

Galchenko has been confused when in the past Americans complain about having ''low self-esteem.'' ''Saying your self-esteem is low is trying to trick people into thinking you're actually worth more than you give yourself credit for,'' he wrote on his blog. ''How pathetic is that?'' Maybe it has to do with growing up in Russia, where life is tough; maybe it's an artifact of Vasili's intense parenting. Whatever the case, Galchenko's unsentimental temperament does have an upside: it helps him recover quickly from setbacks, since he's never particularly surprised by failure. Within a few weeks of the I.J.A., Galchenko was pointing me to a new cache of YouTube videos, filmed on a recuperative trip to his hometown of Penza. In one video, Galchenko juggles on top of an old Soviet tank, and in another, he executes a six-ball 360 in a complex ''half-shower'' pattern while standing in front of a giant statue of Lenin. When he finishes the trick, he chucks three of the balls directly at Lenin's head.

In the year since his debacle at I.J.A., Galchenko has focused on his marketability and ways to ''redeem'' himself. Recently, Mark Bakalor booked him in a commercial for the Florida state lottery; he was filmed juggling seven lotto balls and getting showered with a rain of cash. Galchenko is also busy editing his first solo juggling DVD, which he promises will feature newer and harder tricks (including a seven-club, seven-up 360), and even some comedy skits. And, of course, the Bakalors have begun working with him on a new routine for this year's I.J.A. convention, which takes place next month in Lexington, Ky. Mark Bakalor has forbidden Galchenko from telling me anything about it, hoping that the routine will hit the juggling community with the force of a revelation, or at least give Galchenko the bones of an act ''he can start selling.''

But the most unexpected development of Galchenko's spring didn't have anything to do with redemption or commerce. It happened by accident. Early this year, Galchenko realized that he needed a place at Cal State where he could practice his juggling, and the best place was the theater. So Galchenko went to see the head of the department, who put him in touch with a director planning a production of Moliere's comedy ''The Imaginary Invalid.'' He thought Galchenko would be good in it. ''I show up for the audition for the play, all right?'' Galchenko says. ''The director, he says, 'Pretend you're a French lover, and you're in the woods, and you're blind and deaf, and you're trying to find your lover in the woods.' I'm like, 'What the [expletive], what's that?' I guess he liked me.''

The director wrote Galchenko's special abilities into the play, which finished its run in early May. In one scene, Galchenko juggled five bags of money; in another, two mallets and a machete. He also ate apples while juggling. Basically, he did all the stuff the Bakalors could never get him to do -- and he never dropped a thing. Galchenko says he thinks the play itself was ''a lot funnier than I would have thought,'' although it took him a while to get used to hanging out with a bunch of theater majors every day. ''Mostly I just feel really embarrassed for both myself and the people there,'' he says. ''But I think it's getting less with time. . . . You know, they like me, and I like them.''

Galchenko tells this story in his usual self-mortified, isn't-it-hilarious-how-lame-I-am? tone, but there's something else in his voice too: pleasant surprise. ''See, I'm a thespian,'' he says, lingering on the word -- its pompous, vaguely filthy sound. ''I'm a thespian, and I'm very proud of that.''