INDEPENDENTLIFE
SUNDAY THROUGH SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 13-19, 2005 — PAGE 17
David Mercer, a linguistics student at Memorial, has been juggling for seven years.
Paul Daly/The Independent
Dr. Juggle’s club Group meets at MUN to throw things at each other; fire breathing catching on By Jenny Higgins The Independent
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even juggling clubs fly through the air — and they’re all headed towards Aaron McKim. He’s not bothered. McKim catches each club and fires them right back at fellow juggler James Burke. The two stand facing each other, about eight feet apart, while passing the multicoloured clubs back and forth. They’re both part of the St. John’s Juggling Club, whose members meet three times a week at Memorial University in St. John’s. “I moved back home to Newfoundland when I was 14 years old, back in the winter of ’87,” says McKim, who helped found the club 18 years ago. He speaks while juggling with Burke. “I looked … to see if there were any other jugglers in the area. There was one guy, Dwayne Starcher. So we got together
right here in the phys ed building and started juggling. We kept at it for a couple of years and other people got interested and started coming around. The rest is history.” Starcher has since moved to British Columbia, but McKim’s been coming to the club ever since. He says membership is still small, but it’s grown — to about 10 from the original two. “The majority of (members) are university students,” he says. “We’ve got a number of high school students as well that are friends or relatives of already existing members. “Mostly people just wander through and see it or they hear about it through the grapevine and decide to check it out. We don’t do any formal advertising at all.” Club member James Burke, who has spent time juggling in Montreal, says the club’s small membership has its pros and cons — there aren’t as many people to learn from as there are in larger cities, but the
community here is more closely knit. “It’s very open here, and the atmosphere is not competitive, it’s more supportive,” he says. “If you see someone trying to learn something, it’s cool to go over and help. It’s never seen as criticism.” Five people are at today’s meeting, including 15-year-old Jeffrey Smyth. When he first joined the club three years ago, Smyth didn’t know anything about juggling — now he can juggle five balls and three clubs. He also started Sunnyside Circus with his older brother, David. “It got the name because at the end of the show we crack an egg over my brother’s head,” laughs Smyth. “It’s a small circus that so far we’ve done at my mom’s work pretty much. We’ve had about five shows and they’ve all been paying, so that’s good. “Around the beginning, when I first started performing, it was really nerve-wracking, but I’m OK with it now.”
McKim says it’s not unusual for the club’s members to make money juggling — he used to do it himself while going through medical school. But now that he’s a doctor, McKim says things have changed. “I mostly do volunteer shows, like the Newfoundland and Labrador AIDS Committee and Christmas shows for the Janeway — shows like that.” His stage name, fittingly, is Dr. Juggle. Performing — however good for the jugglers — is not always good for the juggling club. “This year we’re going through a bit of a transition,” says McKim. “We had a bunch of people come regularly and they all got good and then they all got hired by Beni Malone (a local performer who owns Wonderbolt Circus) to tour around Newfoundland and Labrador. “Now most of them have moved up to Montreal to try to get into the Ecole See “When I’m juggling,” page 19
LIVYER
‘I learn constantly … and I love it’ Lisa Hurd’s been a fixture on the St. John’s theatre scene for 35 years By Stephanie Porter The Independent
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ithin three weeks of moving to Newfoundland with her husband and four young children, Lisa Hurd had auditioned for, and been cast in, two plays. It was 1968 and the family had come to this province from England for a planned stay of two years — Hurd’s husband, Donald, was on a short-term contract. “Seven years later we decided to buy this house, and we looked at each other and said, ‘I guess we like it here,’” Hurd says, relaxed in her home near the St. John’s airport. Her two cats, Summer and Autumn, nose around the room, purring. “I really wondered whether, coming from London — I loved it there — I
wondered whether I would ever be able to settle in a place with 100,000 people. But I’ve never looked back. The minute we set foot on the soil here, I fell in love with it.” It might have been the welcoming and active theatre scene, the fast friends she made, or something else entirely about the city. But by the late-’70s, Hurd’s parents realized she wasn’t going to return to England — so they moved to St. John’s. Her husband’s mother, too, made the move across the ocean. “We had good friends in London, but it took two hours travel to go see them, so you didn’t see them that often,” Hurd says. “Here you can see your friends almost every day so you can become very close, very quickly.” Hurd was 12 when she caught the acting bug — and ever since then, that
is all she’s wanted to do. She put in six years of teaching in England, but left to enroll in theatre school. She’s been pursuing her passion ever since. Shortly after arriving in Newfoundland, Hurd became a member of the St. John’s Players, an association she would continue for some 25 years. She’s recently gotten involved with the organization again, and codirected Hickory Dickory Dock, which had a recent three-day run at the St. John’s Arts and Culture Centre. “It’s a lot of fun and a wonderful, close-knit group,” says Hurd. “Still, my best friends are those I met when I joined them. It’s a community thing but it’s also a family thing. “Donald, bless his heart, babysat for me while I was rehearsing. We had four See “Going at 150,” page 22
Lisa Hurd
Paul Daly/The Independent