Michael Moschen

Michael Moschen is an American performance artist who transformed juggling and object manipulation into a language of choreographed theater. Born in April 1955 in Greenfield, Massachusetts, Moschen emerged in the late 1970s at the intersection of new circus, mime, and experimental movement. His early associations with the Big Apple Circus and performer Bill Irwin positioned his work within both circus technique and avant-garde performance contexts.

Moschen's institutional presence in dance began with his 1979 appearance at Jacob's Pillow with Lotte Goslar's Pantomime Circus, followed by his solo debut there in 1983. In 1985, he brought *Fool's Fire*—an Obie Award-winning collaboration with Fred Garbo and Bob Berky—to the festival. By the mid-1980s, Moschen had developed the transparent-ball manipulation technique for which he became widely recognized. His crystal-ball performance appeared on screen in Jim Henson's 1986 film *Labyrinth*, enlarging the audience for a practice built on controlled rolling, balancing, and visual isolation.

The MacArthur Foundation selected Moschen as a fellow in 1990, recognizing him as a performing artist who combined choreography and physics, drawing on dance, mime, philosophy, architecture, and kinetic sculpture. The foundation highlighted his triangular apparatus: a ten-foot equilateral frame in which bounced balls generate audible and visible patterns while the performer responds through timing, posture, gaze, and spatial placement.

PBS's *Great Performances* presented *In Motion with Michael Moschen* in 1991, with an original score by David Van Tieghem, documenting works built from rings, spheres, curves, light, and rebound. His 2002 TED presentation, "Juggling rhythm and motion," made explicit the interdisciplinary dimensions of his practice: the relationship between object behavior, rhythm, geometry, and bodily coordination.

Moschen's mature work treats a prop as part of a single compositional system alongside the performer's body, the architecture, and the sound of impact. Through this integration, coordination, weight transfer, phrasing, focus, and spatial design become visible through the behavior of objects—the defining reason his work belongs in dance history.