This Big Apple Circus Juggler Is Full of Hot Air
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Francisco Tebar Honrubia likes to be called “Paco,” except when he’s juggling five ping-pong balls with his mouth, at which times he goes by “Picaso Jr.” (And no, that’s not a typo – his paternal grandfather was named Picaso.)
Mr. Honrubia could be a matador in an old Warner Brothers cartoon. He lays it all on thick – the eyebrow raises, the hip shakes, the razzle-dazzle knee-drops. Of all the performers in the Big Apple Circus, he’s unparalleled in flamboyance, sometimes even topping it off with a “Ba-ba!”
Last Sunday morning, hanging out in the production trailer before an early afternoon performance at the Big Apple Circus, he was still in plain-old Paco mode. Wearing blue jeans and talking about his soccer-playing days in his native Valencia, Spain, he seemed worlds away from Picaso Jr., not counting their shared affinity for hair gel.
Mr. Honrubia’s act is one of the more astonishing ones in this year’s lineup, rivaled by the Russian teeterboard troupe and the Chinese vase balancer. “Picaso Jr. has this very exciting fire and rhythm which is very Latin,” said San Francisco-based circus historian Dominique Jando. “There are hundreds of thousands of jugglers and hundreds of very good ones. Picaso Jr. is among the great ones, one of the top 10.”
His routine starts slowly, with one ping-pong ball shooting up out of his mouth and sailing in the air. It’s joined by another, then another, and all of a sudden he’s got five of them moving at such a velocity they look like electric eels. Even when the balls start bouncing off the floor and shooting up 50 feet in the air, he still catches them in his mouth and blows them back up, managing to hold onto his persona – and avoid choking.
He swears the persona isn’t an intentional thing. “It’s what comes out; it’s just what happens,” he said. “It’s what I feel. I pop the first ball and my movements start coming out.”
When asked to describe his technique, he tilted his head back and demonstrated on several imaginary balls. “You just pop them,” he said, waiting for a pretend ball to land on his tongue. He mock-blew it up toward the ceiling, exclaimed, “Pop,” and followed the imaginary ball with his bright brown eyes.
It’s key that his mouth not become too dry when performing, or else he risks losing control. To be safe, he flanks himself with women who keep his pingpong balls in buckets of water. He also must avoid air conditioners, heaters, fans – and even circus popcorn. “You get the things stuck in your throat and the salt dries out your lips, he said. “But I still eat it when I go to the movies.”
As seems to be the case with most circus performers, Picaso Jr. entered the circus world early in life. He grew up in the midst of it, as his father, who went by “El Gran Picaso” before retiring, invented the ping-pong ball juggling technique. He was in his early 20s, working as a farmer and a trumpet player at a circus. It occurred to him that the musicians were making far less than the performers, and juggling seemed easier to teach himself than, say, mastering the trapeze. “You get paid four or five times more for seven minutes of work,” said Picaso Jr. “And the musicians are always blowing, blowing, blowing. He was like, ‘What am I doing here?'”
Before long, El Gran Picaso had invented and mastered the technique of using one’s mouth to keep a collection of ping-pong balls aloft, and was working at variety shows everywhere from Las Vegas to Paris. The family came along and stayed with him, and it wasn’t until high school when Mr. Honrubia was back in his native Valencia, Spain for an extended period of time.
Mr. Honrubia picked up the pingpong ball trick and spent hours working on it under his father’s watch. He had a knack for the juggling, but his shyness kept him from considering performing. So he studied economics in college, after which he was drafted into the Spanish military, serving at Melilla, a Spanish base in northern Africa.
During his stay there, a family-run circus whose owners were friendly with El Gran Picaso came to town. Picaso Jr.’s father urged his son, who was working in the military base’s kitchen, to go and pay them a visit. Mr. Honrubia claims he didn’t want to go because circus people always asked him the same question: “Why don’t you make like your dad and join the circus?”
Yet when he walked into the tent, he felt at home. It didn’t matter what anyone asked him. He knew he belonged there. Soon he was spending his three free hours practicing his tricks until he was good enough to call his father and say the magic words. He was ready.
El Gran Picaso arranged for an agent to send a fake contract to his son, which was used as a prop to get out of the military and go home six weeks early.
After a few months working on his father’s clementine farm in the morning and practicing in the afternoons, the call came. The manager of a variety show in Benidorm, a two-hour drive from Valencia, needed to replace an act that had fallen through at the last minute. El Gran Picaso accepted – so long as his son could be part of the act. The manager had no objections; he’d get two performers for the price of one.
The pair remained with the show for a year and a half, but one week Mr. Honrubia went to Paris to perform in the Cirque de Demain festival, where there would be agents and circus managers from across the world. He was the last act, which made him nervous. But he didn’t slip up, and people started contacting him to come perform at their venues. In the years that followed, he performed at the prestigious Budapest Festival, spent two years touring with the Barnum’s Kaleidoscape troupe, and he even won the silver clown at the Monte Carlo International Circus Festival and to top that off he made the Guinness Book of World Records for his ping-pong ball talents. He’s now fulfilling a yearlong commitment with the Big Apple Circus, after which he’s lined up a gig at a Parisian Christmas show.
Does he hope he’ll be able to juggle more balls with his mouth? No. He’d prefer to get to the point where he’s totally confident and there’s no chance of making any mistakes.
It’s still a long way off. “I want to be the boss, and play with it,” he said.
When it was time for him to go back into his RV and change into his harlequin costume, we walked out of the production office’s trailer, and started down a path in the middle of the RV village. Vallery, a slapsticky performer who spends a lot of his time in the circus falling down and getting spilled on, was wandering around in his bathrobe, looking desperate for a cup of coffee. Mr. Honrubia took in the view with a smile and said, “Offer me a hotel room and I’ll always pick the RV. It’s nice to be so near the circus.”