Kati Yla Hokkala

Kati Ylä-Hokkala is a Finnish juggler, performer, and co-artistic director who redefined contemporary circus by treating multi-person object passing as choreography. Her career began in rhythmic gymnastics, where she developed a trained awareness of line, balance, apparatus, and musical phrasing that would shape her approach to movement for decades. In the early 1990s, she worked with the British avant-garde circus company Ra-Ra Zoo before meeting Sean Gandini in London, with whom she co-founded Gandini Juggling in 1992.

From its inception, Gandini Juggling explored the intersection of juggling and postmodern dance. Ylä-Hokkala and her collaborators, including choreographer Gill Clarke, developed early experiments that organized throws not only by difficulty but by spatial relationship, rhythm, and ensemble timing. Works such as *Remembering Rastelli* (1999) explored rhythmic club vocabulary, while *Smashed* used repeated fruit-passing and theatrical disruption in dialogue with Pina Bausch's movement language. *4 x 4: Ephemeral Architectures* (2015) brought jugglers and ballet dancers into a single choreographic system.

As both performer and co-director, Ylä-Hokkala developed more than thirty productions across thousands of international performances. Her physical presence—a calm bearing shaped by rhythmic gymnastics training—became a visible counterpoint to the complexity of the patterns she helped create. Her distinctive quality lies in composure under combinatorial pressure, with a torso that often remains visually quiet while the arms articulate crossing or passing patterns, making each catch read as a continuation of ensemble phrase.

Her practice extended into opera. She performed in the skills ensemble for Philip Glass's *Akhnaten*, first with the English National Opera production and later credited in the Metropolitan Opera's 2019 premiere run, where juggling functioned as part of the production's ceremonial movement language rather than as a separable specialty act.

In 2023, Ylä-Hokkala and Gandini premiered *The Games We Play*, a lecture-performance reflecting on roughly thirty years, more than 6,000 performances, and their evolving repertoire. The piece made their methods—notation, rhythm, object exchange, and choreographic inquiry—the subject of performance itself, underscoring Ylä-Hokkala's role as a maker of ideas as well as patterns.