Juggling Art

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In the Pre-Qin period the juggling plays were only limited to juggling balls andjumping swords and the varieties were quite limited. By the Qin and Han dynasties the acrobatic show of whirling the dishes entered the list and was greatly developed in the Three Kingdoms Period, Two Jins and the South and the North dynasties. Up to the Sui and Tang dynasties the juggling art took more colorful forms: besides the traditional shows of juggling balls and jumping swords, there were such performances as pitching the swords, gyrating and carrying bowls atop one’s head as wel1. These shows featured such acts as casting, gyrating, juggling, carrying on top of head, pitching and so on.

The Pictures of Xin Xi Gu Yue contains a picture featuring a performer juggling the jade ware. The picture is unique in that the acrobat barefooted plants one foot on the ground, kicks up the other foot, stretches out his hands above which there are three short and pointed articles leaping upward. Above the performer’s upturnedface there are another four similar articles. Such a performance is quite different from juggling balls. Another picture displays the combination of rope-walking and juggling balls. To be specific, two female acrobats are juggling the balls while walking on the rope. And in that period new progress was made in jumping swords.A picture of jumping swords in the Pictures of Xin Xi Gu Yue depicts an elderly with a long beard juggling seven cutlasses. Such a scene indicates the great progress made in the art of jumping swords in the Tang Dynasty.

At the same time the gyrating acrobatics also achieved great progress in that a lot more varieties were developed such as swinging the silk meteorite, the fire meteorite, the water meteorite and so on. One mural at Dunhuang vividly depicts a child whirling a dish:a child arches his belly backward and the second child stand on one foot on the first child’s belly whirling a dish with the other foot and both hands. It is not so hard to whirl the dish by hand, but it is far from easy to do so by foot and the difficulty is more than doubled to do so while standing on a single foot.