Hartford Courant A Conversation With Michael Moschen By RINKER BUCK Anyone who thinks successful artists lead charmed, leisurely lives ought to be sentenced to spend a day with Michael Moschen. The man who has been called "the juggler of the century" and "the world's greatest performance artist" rkSes every morning at 6, then limbers up over a cup of coffee in the studio-barn of his fashionably ramshackle compound in Cornwall. The next three hours are devoted to painstaking rehearsal of a new piece; this summer, Moschen is developing a complicated act involving the manipulation of cylinders fashioned from outdoor plumbing pipe. By 9 am, he is at work at his desk, handling the myriad details of shipping props and booking road crews for a solo act that travels, in any single month, halfway around the world and back. 'Tm toast," Mochen says, "If I dare answer my calls before 2 O'clock." After that, he breaks at 3:30 p.m. for yard work or doing the laundry. Over dinner, Moschen allows himself a single glass of wine. Then, at the ragged edge of fatigue-- "I do my best work under the stimulus of exhaustion" Mochen walks back across to his barn for a grueling 7:30 to 11 pm rehearsal of his regular act. Seventeen-hour days like this, plus a truly superhuman obsession with detail, have placed Moschen. 44, in the top rank of the world's performance artists. Moschen's two-hour show involves as many as 27 separate manipulations of juggling balls, spheres, flaming pros and hoops. In his most famous, trademark piece, Moschen bounces five balls inside an immense wooden triangle. His act incorporates the physics of illusion, mime, ballet, classic juggling and an architectural sense of prop-building and space, elements so diverse that the critics run out of words. The uniqueness of Moschen's work won him a MacArthur "genius'' grant in 1990, and his electric, universal appeal regularly sells out ~eaters from Taiwan to Milan. Moschen's virtuosity will be on display this week when he opens a five-day run at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Mass., Wednesday. A deal is in the works to bring his performances into Connecticut schools, and, along with Robin Williams and Rosie O' Donnell, Moschen will headline the annual fund-raiser at Paul Newman's Hole in the Wall camp in Ashford in September. Moschen grew up in a housing project in the industrial town of Greenfield, Mass. His father, Angelo Moschen, worked days as a factory machinist and evenings and weekends as a stonemason, and it was his early experiences visiting the local pool halls and playing weekend golf with his father that formed Moschen's fascination with balls. After finishing high school, Moschen hitchhiked around America and Europe for several years, working as a carpenter and potter before taking up juggling full time. His first act was a duo with his boyhood neighbor from Greenfield, Penn Jillette (now of the famous Penn & Teller performance team), perfected on the streets of New York and at the Great Adventure Amusement Park in New Jersey. In the late 1970s, after branching off on his own, Moschen's unprecedented juggling feats, combined with elements of music and dance, made him a cynosure of the "performance movement" that changed the face of art in New York. Over the past two years, Moschen has continued to thrive, even as the circumstances of his life have turned painful. His father, to whom Moschen was devoted, died in 1997 from Parkinson's disease. Moschen's mother, Mary, has Alzheimer's disease and no longer recognizes her son. Last fall, Moschen's 12-year marriage to Danielle Mailer broke up. Moschen has spent the last eight months burying himself in new work, confronting the truth that his obsessive rehearsal regime and travel schedule contributed to the marital split. Typically, he's incapable of separating his private drama from his work. "Personal problems don't have to interrupt your growth as a performer," he says. They can make you better. I reach the stage now with more emotional intensity, more to overcome. It's an edge that the audience feels without knowing why." On a recent Friday afternoon, Moschen sat on the porch of his Cornwall house and talked about how he develops new pieces, his love of golf and the death of his father: Preserving The Unknown Every piece I've ever created seemed impossible when I first started out, and that's what I look for now. This is not the pursuit of the gratuitously unique. What achievement in art and life is all about is preserving the unknown for as long as possible. It's the uncertainty that creates great work. Uncertainty forces me to get out of the way, to get my body out of the way and just let what's possible, what the piece is really saying to me, to emerge. Uncertainty also taxes my skill base, my physicality, so that I've really developed new skills, explored all the possibilities, by the time the piece is mature. My hardest invention was the triangle piece. It took me four years. That piece got started because I was researching the history of juggling and learned that no one had ever bounced balls inside a shape. That just fascinated me because it was a complete reversal of the geometry of juggling. The idea of moving shapes inside a confined space seemed more like pool, or the relationship of ball bearings. It had to be done, because it would teach me something important about the nature of my craft, what I was really doing while throwing balls in the air. Now I would confine them. And so I just said to myself, 'Well here you go again, crazy Michael, you have to do it.' I started out studying, exploring wedges and the pyramids of ancient Egypt -- all the different ramps and wedges they needed to get those stones way up there. It drove my wife crazy. 'Michael, what are you doing in the library all the time? Nobody juggles in a library.' Then a sculptor friend of mine made me some wedges of different sizes, and I started playing around with them, doing video and photo studies, juggling them around all the time. The Breakthrough The big breakthrough came when I happened to lean all the wedges together, take a hot glue gun, and fabricate up a triangle. I had a little ball like the one kids use for playing jacks, and I started bouncing it around inside. I heard this rattle of the ball in there, and then I just knew, and I was scared. The triangle had me, owned me, and I knew I wasn't going to give up, and it would be hell figuring it out. So I built a lot of small triangles and just tested them out, then slightly bigger ones, until finally I was working with the biggest sheet of plywood I could get, 10 feet. I constructed this immense black triangle, and I started throwing balls around inside. It was a great and difficult time in my life. I began to learn all sorts of things about the behavior of balls inside a confined space. For example, speed was very important, and I had to throw the balls with a lot of spin, English, because thrown at the right angle, the balls would travel depth-wise and come off the walls of the triangle in a transverse way that allowed me to catch and pass them on. But it was awful. It took me four months of non-stop practice just to throw more than one ball inside the triangle. Sleeping With a Triangle I felt so strongly that I belonged in that triangle that I started sleeping in it. You can imagine what this did for my home life. But I just slept in the triangle every night for a while. I had to believe that there was a union between me and the triangle and that, no matter what happened, I was comfortable inside it. It was unbearable, sleeping in a plywood triangle, but it led to breakthroughs. In the middle of the night, I would wake up because the plywood dug into my shoulders, and then I would start tossing balls around while I was still lying down and it just taught me so many things about the characteristics of this new environment I had created. But here's the great thing about it. I've been performing with the triangle now for almost 10 years, all over the world, and the uncertainty is still there. It's an incredibly fast act. The balls are just flying at 50 miles an hour or more. But if you did some stop-action video on me, you see that all kinds of mistakes still happen, that it's not as balletic as it looks. Balls come flying off the wall and get stuck between my fingers. Balls come toward my ead. It's a challenge every time, no a stage routine and I'm always trying new angles and speeds. The uncertainty is still there. The triangle that I was afraid of, the triangle that I slept in, taught me to live with uncertainty. Never try to conquer uncertainty. Embrace it. Golf Golf has a very special place in my heart because I started Golfing when I was 4 years old. My Dad was an avid Golfer, and so was my brother. It was not only the physicality but the primary human understanding of the sport cuts theough all different levels of human experience and reveals who people really are. It's a ridiculous pastime because you have this tiny little ball, and a club with which to hit it with, and people ask at first, "How difficult could this be?" When they are out there and humbled by the experience - it's a lesson in mainting your level of uncertainity, as I put it, for as long as you can. The other thing I like about Golf is that people learn they can't run away from themselves. There are a lot of liars in this world, a lot of cheaters. It's hilarious to watch them - fusging their handicap, kicking their ball out of the rough. But at the end of the day, they know they've done this; they've faced themselves. They've tried to hide who they really are but Golf has shown them who they really are. His Father's Death I think I was very fortunate because, from the earliest age, the things that I was interested in, my father could give me. I think my most seminal experience was when I was 4, and my father took me to this smoky local bar where the champion pool player, Willie Mosconi, was shooting that day. This wasn't a place you would take a kid and expect him to enjoy himself. But I loved it. My father could see that I understood the game intuitively, and he decided to encourage that. So we did everything together. He bought me my first five-iron when I was 4. I was always the kid in the faro-fly who wanted to go with him when he laid stone. 'Michael, here' he would say. 'Let me show you how to move that stone. Here's how to ease it into the wall so it sits true.' I don't think he knew what he was raising. He didn't think, hell, my boy's going to be the next Joe DiMaggio. It was just, my son's got great physicality, lots of interest, and I have these wonderful manly arms that run machines and lay stone, and I'll show that to Michael; that will be my gift to him. Later, he would come to my place and see all the props lying around, and he came to my shows. "God, Michael, how can you live like this? No paycheck. Where did this talent come from?" One time, I just looked him in the eye and said, 'From you, Dad. My talent came from you. And he knew it, and it was our love, what existed between us. He had given me my physicality, these great throwing arms. Then, six or seven years ago, his Parkinson's got rea1, bad. It was awful -- I was either off performing somewhere or rehearsing. But I always broke off from my schedule and drove up over the mountains to see Dad. Toward the end, he couldn't do anything except wink at me, to acknowledge my presence. I didn't understand at first what was happening, but then it finally dawned on me. I would give him back the gift he had given me, my arms. He could only wink at me now. I could only wrap him in my arms. So that's what I did. I just decided that I would hold him until the end in arms he had trained, the arms that he had given me. I was showing him how much I loved him for that gift and that I would be fine, just fine without him. Dad, you can die now. Here are my arms to help you do that. And that is how he died. In my arms. People say that sons feel liberated by their father's death - they are finally their own people. Well, it may be true. But what I felt after my father died was that I could finally go a little easier on myself. I could accept my success. There wasn't so much to prove now. My father was dying, and I knew to give him back the gift of arms and, well, what is there to prove after that? I had already put in the best performance of my life.