Modern Club Passing

A printable PDF of the first chapters is available at ckaestne.github.io/modernpassing/book.pdf

With this short book (and corresponding website), my goal is to provide an opinionated introduction to the fascinating world of modern club passing. Like many areas of juggling, club passing has its own community that continuously pushes the field and invents and shares new patterns and new styles of passing. I have learned many things from this community and tremendously enjoy patterns that go beyond traditional 6-club four-count (“every others”), 7-club two-count, and two-count/four-count feeds. In passing corners at juggling festivals and at festivals dedicated to passing, it is now common to find ambidextrous 4-handed siteswaps with zaps and triple selfs, and Roundabout-style manipulator patterns of various difficulty with 3 to 5 people.

Getting into modern club passing can be intimidating and overwhelming. There are so many patterns, notations, and video collections that it can be difficult to know where to start, where to go next, and how to even figure out what’s going on. I try to provide a clear guide, laying out possible paths to learn patterns and skills that incrementally build on each other and increase in difficulty. Along the way, I’ll briefly introduce the necessary notation and concepts, which allows sharing and explaining individual patterns more compactly.

I try to curate and guide in a short book, rather than create a comprehensive repository. With this book, you will learn the essentials that are broadly known in the passing community – at any level, you will likely find people to pass interesting and challenging patterns with. You will find plenty of patterns beyond the basics to push yourself, and also gain the skill to find, read, and create other patterns.

What is modern club passing? Modern club passing is ambidextrous. Modern club passing combines passes at different heights (zaps, singles, doubles) with zips, flips, heffs, and triple selfs. Modern club passing is about slowing down and controlling the pattern. Modern club passing embraces manipulator and walking patterns with 3 or more people. Modern club passing is for the passer and not for an audience. Modern club passing constantly pushes the boundaries and tries more challenging patterns, even when they all look the same from the outside. Modern club passing is not a fixed concept but a term I embrace for the kind of passing that I and many others in the community enjoy.

– Christian Kästner

Table of Contents