After having mastered several tricks, you may want to showcase you skills. Here is my process for creating a diabolo routine.
1. Before Choosing The Tricks
Get a notebook
From your first idea to the final routine, things will change A LOT! So get a notebook or at least a big piece of paper to take some notes.
Choose a character
You don’t have to write a whole play, but having an idea of what type of persona you want to have on stage will help you choose your music, your costume, how to handle drops… Do you want to be serious, goofy, shy or something else? Do you want to tell a story?
Choose your music
The 2 criterias your music track(s) must absolutely meet are:
- the length you want: sometimes you will have to fit your routine in a certain amount of time and sometimes you’re free to choose. Find music that lasts the duration you want for your routine.
- something you can listen to on repeat without going crazy. To get your routine solid you will have to practice it a lot with your music, so choose wisely!
Choose your costume
Your clothing matters! It should be comfortable and not hinder your juggling. For example avoid loose long-sleeved shirts as your sticks might get caught in the sleeves, buttons can catch the string… You also want the color of your costume to contrast with your props: so dark colors if your sticks and diabolos are white, yellow or any light color and light color clothes if your props are dark.
Plan for drops
When you drop during your routine or tangle the string, and you will, you need to know what to do. The audience will see it and if you’re just running after your diabolo or trying desperately to untie the string, you will feel crappy and the audience will feel sorry for you which is not what they came for.
Ask yourself “what would my character do in this situation?” and plan ways of dealing with drops. When you drop or tangle the string, pause, look at the audience, acknowledge the drop (you can make a joke out of it or sell that the trick is hard, it doesn’t matter what you do, just stay in character) and continue your routine.
2. Tricks
Make a big list of tricks that are visually pleasing and that you like. What would be interesting to show on stage? Try to mix the types of tricks you’ll be performing: stick releases, body moves, throws, knots, suns. Then put tricks together in combinations.
If your audience is mainly composed of non-jugglers, here is a list of 20 easy tricks that you might want to include in your routine.
The structure of a diabolo act is pretty straightforward:
- Cool start
- Acceleration: this one should be quick.
- Combination 1: easy and flashy, that doesn’t require a lot of spin or include tricks that give spin to the diabolo.
- Pause + eye contact with the audience: that 2s pause when you make eye contact is when you’re telling your audience to clap. If you don’t have that pause, they will applaude at the first natural stop which is usually a drop.
- Acceleration: start giving spin when they start clapping.
- Combination 2
- Pause + eye contact with the audience
- Acceleration
- … repeat the sequence combo/pause/spin until
- Final combo
- Impressive finish
- Bow
You want your start and first combo to be impressive AND easy. You don’t want to drop in the first 30 seconds of your routine because it sets the expectation of the audience. The first combination should be flashy and almost undropable. You want to grab the audience’s attention but you also want to NOT DROP. People are much more entertained by flawless juggling than by very difficult tricks attempted weakly. Just because a trick is hard, doesn’t mean that audience knows that.
Having an easy start of routine also serves as a warm up to get used to the stage, the lights, …
You also want your final tricks to look impressive, they don’t have to be as solid as the rest of your routine, because even if you drop on the last bit, you can retry after the music has stopped and get an even bigger applause than if you landed it on your first try.
For the middle of the performance, the only thing you need to worry about is having fun. If you don’t enjoy it, no one else will.
3. Choreography
Here, I’m not talking about dancing, but about something much easier. Although if you can integrate dance moves, definitely do it! What you want to achieve is having your diabolo moves, your music and your character to look good together.
The tricks are only a small part of your routine and synchronizing your moves with the music will come fairly quickly when you practice.
The things that really add depth to your performance is your character and the interactions with the audience. It can be as simple as doing a trick without looking at your diabolo and making eye contact with the audience instead, the way you walk around the stage, your facial expressions or the small movements you do while doing a trick.
For example pushing my glasses up my nose when doing an infinite suicide is a small movement that has a big effect.
4. Practicing And Refining Your Routine
When you’re done with the first three steps, the grind begins! Now you can work on making your routine solid.
Practice your routine with the music and the costume over and over again.
Film yourself, watch the practice session and take notes on when you drop, what looks good and what could be better.
Keep track of drops and ditch the combinations you struggle with. Replace them with an easier version or a different combo. Unless they are all jugglers, your audience will not know if a trick is difficult or not. As long as it looks good and you don’t drop too much, you will get the applause.
When rewatching your sessions, you will be able to spot where you can make adjustments, like if you’re standing in the same place for too long or if you’re focusing only on your tricks and forget the audience.
Then practice again with the changes and repeat this process of practicing and refining until you get your routine almost 100% of the time. On stage things tend to go worse than in practice, assume your worst practice session will be your average performance.
Get Inspired
Here are some examples of diabolo routines that I like, there are plenty more examples on YouTube.
Have fun creating your routine and good luck on stage!
