Distillations

Overview

Distillations takes the audience on a multimedia and multidimensional journey through the anatomy of a moment, investigating causality, and emerging into the ground state of the juggling universe. By highlighting segments within the juggling process that are often only a means to an end – the suspense of a peaked throw, an object at rest, a dropped object, and the moving human body above, below, and through it all, we are invited to explore the realms between inner and outer, and wonder at the transformations inherent there.

Alongside the juggling performance, Distillations features projected video that is intertwined and parallel to the live performance, providing an extra perspective and tactility to the juggling and movement, and allowing for further questioning and understanding of the presentation. With a mixture of vivid and surreal imagery, the video puts a lens onto the performance itself and investigates it from both the macrocosm and microcosm, taking the audience into the infinitude of the juggling process. In each new place it is performed, Distillations creates a new relationship in how it interacts with and activates the environment, through the projection of the video onto the space, and the projection of the throws around it.

NOTE: the 9/13 performance of this show has been canceled.

About the Artist

Luther Bangert was born and raised in the farmlands of the USA in a small town near the banks of the Mississippi river. Always taken with the unusual and enchanted, he developed a fascination with juggling at the age of 19. It ran deep, carrying him into the rich world of circus. Years of personal practice and development later, performing and traveling have led him to find other juggling, circus and movement communities around the world.

To Luther, juggling is both dance and martial art, a wondrous means of transferring spirit and sense to objects while exploring relationships with them both physically and philosophically. He performs both technically and fantastically, drawing on his movement experience, fusing the patterns of juggling with the organic movement of the body to flesh out fresh expression and depth.

Luther has performed with the Great Bombay Circus in India, has a degree in philosophy, holds a Guinness World Record for “Most Things Juggled Whilst Sword Swallowing”, and has performed in twenty countries across four continents in the last nine years. Most recently he has premiered his contemporary show ‘Distillations’ and is based in Philadelphia and the East Coast, performing and teaching juggling at the Circadium School of Contemporary Circus.

Credits