FirstWorks opens their spring 2010 season with visionary performing artist Michael Moschen. Considered by some to be the greatest juggler of the 20th century, he has made ancient skill into a mesmerizing performance art form that astounds people. Crystal balls, spheres, hoops, rings and other forms defy natural law and float and spin like living things. If you do not believe that can be done, go see Moschen on Saturday, March 13, at the VMA in Providence.

Moschen modestly says he is not the greatest juggler of the last century or this one but he has developed a healthy respect for his own skills and appears to be able to step back from himself and decide there may be something to it.

“I think Frank Brunn was the greatest of the last century, or one of them,” said Moschen. “Bobby May, from Ohio is another. There are people who do different things. I once remarked to Frank Brunn, ‘From now on I’m not going to be influenced by anybody, I’m just going to do what I want,’ and he said, ‘I thought that was what you were doing all along.’ So, we are not always the best judge of who is the greatest. I am willing to say I’m the best at what I do but that doesn’t mean much as far as the rest of them go. If being able to say that people all around the world have been stealing parts of my act, then I can say I am among the best.”

Moschen feels that, if people learned more about juggling, they would be in a better position to judge what is good or not. Juggling, he said, is found in every culture and has been given various values culturally. Here in the United States it is an entertainment. Other cultures take it much more seriously.

“In China, it is taken very seriously,” said Moschen. “There a kid will be given porcelain jars to juggle. If he does it well, that will be all he will juggle for the rest of his life.”

Most jugglers control their props by grabbing them. Moschen has developed the skill of using his open hands, training, as it were, the objects to roll from one hand or plane to another. When he uses crystal balls, the effect is mesmerizing. He makes it appear that the balls are moving of their own volition and he is standing back, watching it happen with as much interest as we are. Not for nothing have Moschen and other people taken to calling it performance art. On stage with the crystals, the balls flow from hand-to-hand, as many as six of them, as Moschen appears to be in a trance. Then one by one, like a parent sending children off into the world, he lets them go and they roll away from him as if they insisted, and as if Moschen is sorry to see them go.

But that’s not always the case, when things leave his hands. Sometimes he screws up and drops something, but he always takes it in stride and, quite frankly, at that point into his act, he has already done so many amazing things, you can’t help but root for him.

“There is risk involved,” Moschen admits, “but that’s what makes it fresh. Every new thing I do is an experiment and things can go wrong, but that is how art is made.”

Some people would think that it was presumptuous and pretentious for Moschen to compare what he does to art, but he is not always the person who thinks this is art.

He was a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, or Genius Grant, as it has been called.

In 1991, Moschen was profiled in an episode of PBS Great Performances series titled In Motion with Michael Moschen. Other film credits include Labyrinth, directed by the late Jim Henson, of Muppets fame, starring David Bowie that was released in 1986. Moschen’s hands doubled for Bowie’s and people are still astonished that David Bowie is a gifted juggler on top of everything else. He was also featured in an A&E special, The Mystery of Genius.

That is a long way from the housing project Moschen lived in for the first 12 years of his life. Moschen always explains that he did not grow up in a ghetto with crime and vermin running amok.

“It was in Greenfield [Mass.], and I was not aware of my family being any different than most people in the town,” he said. “I was actually living out in the country and that was the kind of childhood I had.”

He shared that childhood with an older brother, who was the person who got him into juggling.

“He started it and, naturally I had to do it too, and be better than him,” said Moschen.

What Moschen figured out on his own was that he liked juggling as a form of self-expression and an excellent vehicle for his imagination. He also considered himself lucky to be an elementary school chum of Penn Jillette, of the Penn and Teller magic act, and a next-door neighbor of Jillette’s when his family bought the house next door to Jillette’s.

Long before Tiger Woods, Michael Moschen wanted to be a professional golfer but he went with his gifts and he and Jillette polished their respective arts and performed together before they moved in different directions. Golf faded as a goal as Moschen realized that the physical gifts he had were actually rarer than golf skills, so the world ended up with an exceptional performance artist and not another so-so golf pro.

Like other artists, Moschen anticipates the time when he will not be capable of the rigorous touring and physical stamina and has approached math with his aesthetic feel for shapes and grace. He frequently uses geometric forms in his act and one of his most famous bits is when he bounces balls within a large triangle on stage. Moschen walks past the triangle after casually lobbing a ball inside and is stopped in his tracks as he hears the sound of the ball bouncing inside the triangle. He goes back to the triangle and begins to experiment with throwing and juggling the balls inside the triangle and a geometrical ballet ensues. This is as close as Moschen got to realizing his next ambition, which is to be a math teacher, or at least teach the mathematics of what he does to others.

He has been a keynote speaker at the National Conference of Teachers of Mathematics and for the Association of New York Teachers of Mathematics, and he has lectured on innovation and creativity at Carnegie Mellon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Lincoln Centers education program.

“I have always been good at math,” said Moschen, and there is a lot of math in what I do. I have spent the last couple of years doing a book about math and it has been hard work, but I enjoy it. But I want to show people how to do all sorts of things with math and juggling.”

Moschen has been doing the math at his home in Connecticut, which he shares with his girlfriend and daughter. If he has any advice for her and other young people, it is to go for what you want to do and do it as well as you can.

“What I really love to do is create,” he said, “and what my experience has taught me is that you should never set your sights too low. You may find yourself doing something really cool.”

Tickets range from $18 to $32 and are available through the VMA Arts and Cultural Center box office window: 220 Weybosset Street, by phone: 401-421-ARTS (2787) or online at www.first-works.org.