History - Baoding Balls & Tai Chi

YouTube link
Ah ha. I’ve been after a web video of this for years.
Multiball Contact - Baoding Ball style.
The First clips shows a traditional technique for holding and rotating multi-layer stacks of balls in one hand, by using plates to hold the tower together, I’ve heard reports that stacks of over 50 balls have been palmspun using these plates.
In the clip, the bottom balls look like 65mm balls, large compared to the Baoding balls for sale in Europe.
The 2nd half of the clip looks like a combination of Tai Chi and Baoding Balls - woo ha.
The origins of Ball Contact are not in the 1980’s with Micheal Moschen (his fantastic routine “Light” was a milestone), Contact has several roots, most of them go back thousands of years in China, this Clip shows one of them, still alive in its home country. Multiball Contact has it’s origins in Baoding balls. It’s history baby!
The only place I had footage demonstrating these 2 before was on Greg Irwins hand health Chinese therapy balls DVD. Which, I’ll review…one day.
China - There’s 1 billion of them and they got skills.

Posted by Drew on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 12:26 pm under Contact Juggling, Media & Gear to Buy, Online Videos. RSS 2.0 feed of comments for this post. Trackback.