TEULON, Man. – Robin Chestnut is a city-born 32 year old who makes his living providing entertainment at corporate events.
So what’s he doing living in a farmhouse in the Manitoba countryside?
He admits that living on a 10 acre plot of farmland with a red barn was never part of his vision of the future when he was a young, aspiring juggler.
“I used to think when I’d drive through places like this: rural life? Who the heck would want to live out here?” Chestnut said on a cool May morning as he sat on his deck with a number of red-winged blackbirds trying to shout him down.
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“Well, here I am.”
Chestnut’s move to the farm followed his heart. The woman who is now his wife, also a city person from Winnipeg, had obtained the property so she could take care of her five horses and he took the leap of faith that he could operate his juggling business from the farm.
So far, it’s worked well. He’s able to line up juggling gigs over the internet and by phone, and the nearby town of Teulon allows him to practise for free in a hall.
“I give them a couple of shows a year and in return they give me a key to the hall,” said Chestnut, noting that this is better than the situation confronting most city-based jugglers.
“There you need a permit to practise in a gym and you have to compete with all the aerobics classes.”
Corporate and association meetings provide Chestnut with the bulk of his work.
The juggling act involves much more than throwing and catching objects. Liberal amounts of humour and drama are thrown into the mix and he often adds elements of sports psychology, something that clients seem to like.
“If it was just me up there juggling for five minutes, people would get bored after a couple of minutes,” said Chestnut, who recently placed fourth in an international juggling competition.
If Chestnut had grown up in a rural area, he probably wouldn’t have become a juggler. It was a Plan B activity he picked up only after he was cut from all the sports teams at his highly competitive junior high school.
“What do you do if you don’t make any of the teams at a big city school? I found juggling and off I went.”
A step-cousin taught him some elementary juggling tricks and he developed from there. In his last year of university, in which he was studying English and psychology, a co-worker at the retail store where he was working goaded him into taking his juggling seriously.
“She had some terse words for me, telling me I had to do it. I quit my job and never looked back,” said Chestnut, who has been a professional juggler since 1998.
He has appeared across North America, recently performing in Victoria, but he prefers to stick closer to home.
His farm-based promotional efforts have become more effective in the past year since he added a microwave transmitter to the farm. Now he has high speed internet at home, which allows him to send data-heavy promotional photos and to receive complicated files, which used to “choke my connection to death.”
Until the tower was installed, “I just had ‘farmernet’ for the first three or four years, and that made things difficult.”
Now “the world has shrunk.”
Chestnut is happy that he can live a relaxed rural lifestyle, where his wife can have her horses and he can have space and quiet in which to practise. So far, so good.
“It’s getting better. (The juggling business) is growing and growing. It’s a nice simple business I can run out of this farmhouse,” he said.
