Reviews

Airjazz

Biography
Reviews
News
Interviews
Photos
Video
Advice
Sales
Contact

DENVER POST, August 18, 1989

Marc Shulgold

BOULDER - Airjazz is at it again - experimenting, searching, exploring unfamiliar territory. Once a fixture on the Pearl Street Mall, this dancing-juggling trio has been steadily moving away from old-hat, toss-and-catch routines. Trouble is, admitted Kezia Tenenbaum, no one knows where the group - or its performance style - seems headed. Everything we do is always a work-in-progress, she said after a workout the other day at Chautauqua Auditorium, where the group will appear tonight and tomorrow. Dressed in grubby street-people overcoats one moment and gray leotards the next, Tenenbaum and fellow Airjazzers Jon Held and Peter Davison put a new work through its paces - feeling their way, more than rehearsing. We bit off a big hunk on this one, Tenenbaum said of Pole Folks and Rich, an ambitious work included on the Chautauqua agenda. The 20-minute piece jumps from a mesmerizing, often hilarious routine employing a floppy hat and long metal pipes to a semi-theatrical peek into the groveling lifestyle of the homeless. Davison secends Tenenbaum's appraisal of Pole Folks. It's still in the beginning stages, he said after the rehearsal. Usually we just do choreographed juggling. But there are different characters in the same piece and some character interplay - and that's new for us. At one point in the piece, the trio tosses into the air trash bags filled with empty aluminiun cans. The stunt typifies the way Airjazz operates: For three months, the group has been developing Pole Folks, tossing ideas into the air and either catching them or throwing them away.
This painstaking process of trial and error has been the order of creative business for Airjazz since the three members decided to unite their juggling skills seven years ago. It's all collaboration, Davison said, Someone will get an idea, then someone will work off of it, and someone else will go out and find some appropriate music. Sounds like fun. Not always, noted Tenenbaum. You get to watch your idea get transformed until it becomes something the group can stomach, she said with a sour expression. Added Held, That's the worst time for us - the creative period. Everything else we enjoy. Since the company's heralded debut at the Colorado Dance Festival in 1982, Airjazz has expanded its horizons beyond those well-attended gigs on the Boulder mall. Along the way, the members agreed, success has brought its share of headache, I get a little bored on tour, Tenenbaum complained. Davison objected to the structured routine the trio has adopted: We literally have to set aside time to get together and create, Held sarcastically offered a suggestion to his griping comrades, OK, let's go back on the street. No takers. Thanks to its novel blending of comedy and dance with straight-ahead and off-beat juggling, Airjazz has reached a level of national popularity that has eliminated street corners as potential venues. Almost eliminated, Tenenbaum pointed out. We're playing the street in Detroit in September, she reminded her cohorts. Yeah, replied Davison, their annual street festival. The festival people invited us, remember? Now, even a street gig has to be booked.
As with the Flying Karamazov Brothers and other successful refugees from shopping malls, the Airjazzers will probably never shake free from those casual nights spent honing their act and passing the hat. We always try to keep our performance on that intimate level, Tenenbam noted. There are lots of advantages and disadvantages to our approach, but it seems to work for us. It's been working ever since the group's appearances at Marda Kirn's dance festival in 1982. That was one of Marda's first big experiments, Tenenbaum recalled. A lot of people thought, 'Jugglers at a dance festival?' But for us, it was a real door-opener. Held, ever the iconoclast, questioned that, We didn't see it as a door--opener back then, did we? I think it gave us perspective. Davison concurred. It made us see the possibilities of what we were doing. In addition to subsequent return engagements at the Boulder dance festival (Colorado Dance Festival), Airjazz has visited dozens of college campuses across the country and performed in Switzerland, Canada, Chile and Japan, plus the occasional TV appearance. Though the calendar is filled anually for 20 weeks and bookings are arranged a year in advance, no one is ready to settle into the comforts of a stable, long-term career. A breakup is always a possibility, Davison admitted. He paused, flashing a smile at Held and Tenenbaum. That's what keeps us together.

WESTWORD, March 13, 1986

Juliet Whitman

It so happens I had an opportunity to see the juggling group, Airjazz, perform. Airjazz was working for a group of children, so the show was neither lengthy nor as sophisticated as usual, but it reminded me of why I go to the theatre.
For anyone who's missed Airjazz's performances so far (and the group is rapidly rising in prominence, has been on national television, and has also performed in the Colorado Dance Festival and at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts), Jon Held, Kezia Tenenbaum and Peter Davison are extraordinary performers. There's an airy, exhilarating quality to their performing style, and they don't just juggle - they make objects dance. The Airjazz performance took place at one end of a long room filled with children. Costumes were minimal, props traditional: clubs, balls, cigar boxes, two immensely tall unicycles. But it's more fun to watch Jon Held casually handle a club before going on - with that easy, practiced touch master workers bring to their tools - than to watch a dozen actors at the Boulder Dinner Theatre prancing their way through a lavishly produced number.
With Airjazz, all the attention is on the performers and their work. And if the three ham it up for the children, fake terror perched on their unicycles, pull faces, it's done with an affectionate lack of pretension: the hamming is a line of communication between actor and audience, not a layer of affectation imposed between them.
The three Airjazz members are so skilled as jugglers that juggling becomes, in a sense, almost irrelevant. Yes, Peter Davison can juggle an extraordinary number of balls at once, can arc them through the air in a variety of patterns and rhythms. And Kezia Tenenbaum and Jon Held can do such fluid, impossible things with three cigar boxes that your dazed mind somehow assumes the boxes must be velcro'd or stuck together or something. Otherwise, you think the laws of physics would absolutely prohibit what you're seeing.
But the trio's focus is not on their own skill, or on the impossibility of what they do. It's on the process of juggling itself, the juggling phenomenon, as it were. While the children in the room howled with joy at the gags, at the flying objects, the adults laughed at the silent commentary Airjazz's antics provided on the group's own work. In this context it doesn't matter much if someone drops a club; what matters is how elegantly the club can be retrieved, and what a dropped club signifies in a world where gravity is routinely mocked.
Three human beings in a room with no lighting, no sound effects, no elaborate costuming - with nothing to offer but their talent, themselves. Ah, but it tasted suspcicously like real food to me.

The Boulder Juggling Company, August 1981

The following is an article that appeared in a University of Colorado newspaper four months prior to the formation of Airjazz. The four of us had actually been performing as The Boulder Juggling Company at the end of 1981. The Magnificent Material Movers were Peter and Kezia, who had been performing as a duo for the spring and early summer of 1981. The last quote in the article is rather curious, and Peter claims he never said it. We still can't determine what it should have been if it were a typo.

THE CU CAMPUS PRESS, October 22, 1981

Ramsey Flinn
Jugglers go separate ways
They are no longer the Magnificent Material Movers and they are no longer the Boulder Juggling Company. They are now Jon, Barrett, Kezia and Peter. They are jugglers, and Boulder probably won't be seeing them anymore.
Jon Held, 22 and Peter Davino, 20 were in Balch Fieldhouse in the midst of their daily five-hour juggling workout. Barrett Felker was already gone, probably flying over the Caribbean on his way to South America, where he'll be touring as a half-time act with the Harlem Globetrotters. Kezia Tenenbaum was in Washington somewhere, about to begin a job as a juggling instructor.
The four graced the downtown Boulder Mall for nearly two years - mostly during the summer - and always knew they'd eventually be going separate ways.
The jugglers recently staged their last performance as a group at the Estes Park Magic Festival.
"I feel like doing some solo work again after a year of two of team work," said Davino during his workout.
The Boulder Mall has always attracted street performers. Both Held and Davino came here separately forh southern California to work on Boulder's mall.
"Boulder is better than L.A.," said Davino. "The mall is here, and the crowds are more laid back. In L.A. everybody's always too busy going somewhere."
"It's not as smoggy here," added Held.
As the Magificent Material Movers (their former name), these jugglers probably drew the biggest crowds for a single act in the mall's history and did so consistently. Combining comedy with the expertise of their acts, it was often hard to see through the packed gatherings that surrounded them on the mall. And when the money hat was passed around, no one was ever in a hurry to leave.
Their take on a good night?
"That would ruin the mystique," said Davino.
Jugglers are like musicians and other professionals in that they start early. Davino for instance, started at age 12, hit the streets at 16, and went pro at about 18. As a young performer he had been inspired by a vaudevillian act on the streets of Los Angeles.
Held's mentor had been world circus champion Dick Franco, with whom he used to practice in San Diego five years ago.
Following the lead of their former partners, Davino and Held will be leaving Boulder soon; Davino to Chicago for another juggling job and Held to wherever his agent "lines something up."
Asked whether serious juggling required a strict lifestyle, Davino said, "You have to live like a chimp." He smiled and then paused, "Well you have to practice alot."

As it turned out, we went our separate ways for about 1 week. I followed Kezia up to Seattle to teach juggling (yes, with Dave Finnigan and JuggleBug) and Peter arrived in late January for a few weeks of performances. Airjazz was conceived on the drive home, in the White Jammer (a 1965 Volvo station wagon) on either February 17 or 18 depending on who you talk to.