How Karamazovs Make a Juggling Act Fly

For those who have witnessed their act--at the old Renaissance Pleasure Faire, for instance, or the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival--The Flying Karamazov Brothers are to juggling what Ty Cobb was to baseball or Orson Welles was to movie making: Performers who turn craft into artistry, and then push that art quantum leaps.

After seeing the frenetic Flying K’s--who only “fly” in airplanes, whose actual last names are not Karamazov, and who aren’t really brothers--it’s easy to grasp a remark that member Paul Magid (“Dmitri”) is fond of making:

“Juggling is a metaphor for the universe.”

Magid and Howard Jay Patterson (“Ivan”), the group’s co-founders, were in town recently to check on the status of two upcoming movie projects: “The World of Mirth” for producer Ben Myron, and “The Flying Karamazov Brothers’ Wild Bison Fun Hour and Power Trout Parade” for Disney. But foremost on their minds was the opening today of their new show, “Club,” at the Henry Fonda Theatre. According to both, it stretched their minds and bodies to the limits.

“It felt at times during rehearsals and rewrites for ‘Club,’ ” said Patterson, “that to pull off our experiments, we had to develop additional brain hemispheres.”

Again, for those who have witnessed the quartet (no longer a quintet since the departure of Randy Nelson, but still including Sam Williams as “Smerdyakov” and Timothy Furst as “Fyodor”), it’s difficult to picture how much further they can stretch beyond what they’ve already done.

On one level, there’s the array of objects they toss: pins, balls, clubs, knives, pizza pans, Champagne bottles and (during the routine in all their shows called “The Gamble,” Patterson’s specialty) anything the audience gives them--as long as it’s less than 10 pounds, more than an ounce, and smaller than a bread box. Jell-O. Shoulder pads. Fish heads. If Patterson drops them before the count of 10, his punishment is a pie in the face.

Then there’s the blending of juggling and music. This, revealed Patterson and Magid, is the opening for basic juggling routines to pass into a wild, and highly technical, kind of performance art.

Like pop musicians junking out on the latest toys to send their electronic instruments further out on the sonic plain, the Karamazovs have amassed a battalion of horns, percussion and electronic devices to create unheard-of sound and music affects. Patterson: “We couldn’t have done ‘Club’ two years ago. The technology wasn’t here yet.”

For all the high-tech gear, one of the key origins of these illegitimate sons of Dostoevsky was an anthill in the front yard of Patterson’s North Hollywood boyhood home .

“I was a zoologist from birth, I think. I’d be flat on my stomach, observing this city of ants for hours on end. Suddenly, some kid would come along, step on the anthill, breaking my trance, and I’d run after him. It’s the only time I ever beat anybody up.”

Scientifically observing and loving nature, both agreed, is, in their words, “a locus of our work.”

“The continual tension in our performances,” Patterson said, “has been our desires to just do a show and to deliver a message.”

The message in “Club,” showcased in a rock ‘n’ roll finale that’s being premiered for Los Angeles and titled “The Whole World Has Got to Juggle,” is about the global need for ecological restoration. Or, if you will, juggling the human desire to consume with the larger need to sustain the planet.

“It’s lighthearted, but explicitly political,” Magid said. “Which is our two sides. We attend an annual traveling festival called a Chautauqua, based on the old festivals of the same name. We trade not only juggling secrets with others, but also information on organic farming and ecological living.”

Patterson chimed in: “About 50 of us come together and roam the Pacific Northwest like a tribe. No. We are a tribe. And the rest of the year, (the Brothers) are one of the tribe’s hunting parties, searching and foraging.”

They try to live out some of their ecological ideals on the farm they own in Port Townsend, Wash., which includes a bed-and-breakfast where Magid and Furst live, and a large barn where the Brothers convene for 8- to 10-hour rehearsals. Williams lives in nearby Seattle, and Patterson shares a Port Townsend Victorian with his wife, Seiza, and their two children.

Patterson met Magid at UC Santa Cruz, where they were across-the-hall dorm neighbors in 1972. (At their 1976 graduation, they were co-valedictorians.) Magid: “We’d never juggled until Howard came to me with this crazy idea.”

Patterson recalled that he was hit with a case of mononucleosis “and I had nothing to do but read and fiddle around. The fiddling became juggling. I got hooked, then I got Paul hooked.”

Neither knew any jugglers, and Magid had the potentially prohibitive handicap of being partially dyslexic (“Binary thinking--stop and go directions, yes/no, left/right--have always confused me”). Within weeks of their discovery of juggling, the college drama department asked them to put on a Renaissance-style juggling act before a play Magid acted in.

“We’re bright,” Magid said frankly, “and we cram very well.”

“That’s how we do our shows,” said Patterson, “just like we used to take tests.”

Getting over Magid’s problem with binary consciousness proved another key to how the Karamazovs have broken through barriers.

“The way I could be aware of the balls as they were aloft,” Magid explained, “wasn’t by looking at them as higher or lower, but by color: yellow, blue, red.”

“I didn’t know that,” Patterson jumped in, amazed that he was learning something new in their nearly 20-year friendship (the Brothers have been a group for 15 years). “For me, I can’t tell the balls by sight. I do it by rhythm.”

Say again?

“You know, like this”--and then Patterson began miming the juggling action, counting out beats as his arms went up and down. “Boom, boom, boom, like a piston.”

This rhythmic pulse is then employed for percussive effect in the show: As juggled clubs or pins land in a hand, they’re quickly pounded on a drum or other percussion, then flipped back in the air.

“If you want to know the trade secrets,” Patterson said in a mock-sly tone, “we don’t really flip the objects. There’s the snap, where you employ almost all wrist and no arm for a fast spin, or the float, where you use less wrist for a slower spin.” The speed of the spins is based on the time signature of the music used in a piece.

Patterson: “Past pieces have been in 5/4 or 7/8. In ‘Club,’ though, we have pieces in wild times, like 11/8. The beat is as important to the juggling as the wrist, and you just keep in mind that a single spin of a pin is 1/8, while a double spin is 2/8. Sort of like a flying metronome.”

“When Howard says, ‘keep in mind,’ ” Magid said, “he doesn’t mean that literally.”

“We have to empty our minds,” added Patterson, “and not think about it. After being a biology major, and deep into musical theory for years, it’s nice to learn that in juggling, as in life, too much thinking can get you into trouble.”

When he thinks about the airborne glob of Jell-O for too long, it means a sure flub and pie in Patterson’s face. And they both insisted that in a regular routine called “jazz juggling” (free-form tossing and passing at speeds past the human eye’s ability to track), time actually slows down for them. “I don’t want to sound mystical,” said Magid, “but we go into another world. It’s no longer normal time.”

“Whatever works, we’ll do,” Magid said. It’s their motto.

When they begin work on a new show, all four write “anywhere, anytime, in any position,” according to Patterson. Sounds great on paper. Then starts the hard work of testing, rejecting and enhancing the pieces in their rehearsal barn/studio (“our juggling lab,” as Magid and Patterson dub it). For “Club,” the process, plus tryout tours, has consumed 13 months.

There’s the bit where the Brothers bang clubs against hockey helmets (with built-in electronic sensors) for a distinctly jarring variation on a Beethoven symphony.

Another one had Williams hitting a set of bottles with a screwdriver in 11/8 time, with Patterson playing the melody on trombone (his favorite in the dazzling range of reedless horns he’s mastered), and Furst and Magid drumming with juggled clubs--all while playing street characters.

“There were those Karamazovs,” Patterson recounted, without naming names, “who didn’t think the (maneuvers) would work.”

They did, finally, and they’re in “Club,” but Magid added that there many other skits that were junked, or blended better into one overall skit than small separate ones (“Our rehearsal videotapes are soooo embarrassing!”).

The added high-tech elements, however, are what make “Club” an unmatched challenge.

As to how the Brothers can be “a hunting party” and fill their lives with radio transmitters, wireless instruments and computers, Patterson’s answer is cryptic yet somehow definitive: “You just have to keep juggling.”