Up In the Air

Sunday, Jul. 16, 2006 By LEV GROSSMAN / AGOURA HILLS
The entertainers call Garfield a dictator who's crushing juggling's creativity. He calls them hippies and hacks
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In 2003, Garfield, 31, a world-class juggler himself, founded a rival organization called the World Juggling Federation (WJF), dedicated to promoting juggling as a sport, not a sideshow. There are no clowns in the WJF. In WJF events, contestants are judged on the difficulty of their routines and the technical skill with which they execute them, and nothing else. The object is not to entertain but to win. "I wanted to see people competing like athletes," Garfield says. "Kind of like an X Games for juggling."

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Feelings between the two camps, the entertainers and the sport jugglers, can run a little high. ("They all get really crazy about it," says Olga, rolling her eyes. "It's insane.") The entertainers call Garfield a dictator who's crushing the creativity out of juggling. He calls them hippies and hacks. "Both can coexist, I think, very easily," says Kim Laird, an IJA board member. "The WJF right now is the new kid on the block, and some people feel their territory's being invaded." Garfield too is a little befuddled by the ire, though he doesn't seem to mind the attention. "It's just juggling. It's surprising to me that people get so mad about it."

His dream is for juggling to become a big-time professional sport, like ice skating--or at least a lucrative fad, like poker. And he has made a start: ESPN and ESPN2 broadcast the first two WJF championships in 2004 and '05, a first for competitive juggling. The next event is in August. The IJA holds its own festival--the '06 festival is this week in Portland, Ore.--but so far it remains a relatively low-profile affair.

Garfield met the Galchenkos shortly after they arrived in the U.S. and immediately offered to coach them pro bono. They're the perfect poster siblings for the WJF: peerless, purely technical jugglers with little interest in show biz or comedy patter. Moreover, stage juggling is about making tricks look difficult, and the Galchenkos' natural gracefulness makes everything look easy. "We're probably the top team in the world, ever, technically, as far as juggling goes," Vova says and adds ruefully: "But we're probably the bottom team when it comes to presenting it."

The Galchenkos may well be the future of juggling, but right now they have a lot more than clubs to juggle. They have little money. They haven't seen their parents in three years. They have legal troubles too. Olga has successfully filed an Extraordinary Ability petition that will allow her to stay in the country for now, but Vova's hasn't been approved yet. He'll have to go back to Russia in October, at least temporarily.

In the meantime, he sometimes gets his host to drive him out to Venice Beach, where if you're lucky you can see one of the greatest technical jugglers in history performing on a street corner. "It's kind of an entry-level juggling job, I guess," he says. He's even working up a little patter to go with his act. "I mean, I don't make up a story," says Vova. "Most people who perform, they usually make up stories." Then again, most people don't have a story like the Galchenkos.