Juggling duo take their fun seriously

You blink, you miss it. That’s the underlying challenge of the juggling company blink, the Maine-based duo that entertained a nearly full house Saturday afternoon at the Maine Center for the Arts. Blink’s founders, Morten Hansen and Fritz Grobe, are essentially science geeks who have translated the burning questions of their intellectual lives into an amusing and heady sleight-of-hand show.

They juggle balls and rings and lights in the dark to illustrate that there is “much outside everyday understanding that is entirely real and possible.”

Not too many of the little kiddies in the audience had much interest in the philosophical underpinnings that have come to the fore in blink’s repertoire in the four years since its founding. Indeed, it’s possible that not too many of the adults had much interest in the poetic epilogue that reflected on the difficulty of matching time and space with objects.

No matter, though. Even if blink is drifting artistically toward performance art these days, there’s no debating the level of skill these two limber chums have. Hansen is as graceful as a swan. Grobe is wiry and understated. At one point, he contorts his bones to shimmy a clothes hanger down the length of his body. The piece is a digression from the troupe’s usual feats, which tend to take place in the air. But this squeeze skill was oddly fascinating. (Who wouldn’t love to know exactly how and when Grobe discovered such a talent?)

The afternoon, for all its sensational gravity-defying object manipulation, could nevertheless be a bit dour. Obviously, Grobe and Hansen want their mechanically pert show to come off as an intelligent inquiry into physics. And it does. The time they’ve put into perfecting their talents is clear and laudable, and they want us to take juggling seriously. That they ask us to wonder with them on the difficulty of their chosen fields is less interesting.

What works with blink is all the stunts that make you want to keep your eyes wide open. Even the acts that aren’t technically clear or thematically rich are engaging visually. And there’s a wryness here and there that keeps you guessing as well as laughing. Blink has some sensibilities in common with Cirque du Soleil and with the dance troupe Momix. What’s less tantalizing, however, is that they sometimes take themselves just one juggling ball too seriously.