Interview: Wes Peden

Sporting a baby-blue jumper adorned with a butterfly, the magenta-haired Wes Peden is all smiles and passion when we speak over Zoom. Widely considered one of the best – or at the very least, most inventive – jugglers in the world, the American returns to the Fringe this year with a brand new show: Rollercoaster.

Working once again with master innovators Gandini, Peden has crafted a pop-punk circus hour full of neon rings, transparent tubes and gasp-inducing tricks. And it’s not just inspired by roller-coasters, it’s a conscious reflection on their thrills, architecture and histories. And all thanks in large part to Peden recently returning to that beloved theme park simulator game: RollerCoaster Tycoon.

“I was playing it again, building roller coasters as you do, piece by piece, and realised that it was tickling the same part of my brain that making juggling tricks does,” he explains. “I'm using gravity and momentum to shape pathways into an interesting construction or composition.”

What followed was a deep dive into roller-coaster lore, even going as far as learning about the quietly tragic fate of rides that lost popularity and got torn down. “That's pretty devastating,” he muses. “So [in the show] I perform a ceremony for the death of these beautiful rides.”

The overlap of circus and thrill rides is certainly a fertile Venn diagram. “The show takes juggling in lots of different directions, always mirroring juggling, roller-coasters and the human experience to create this kind of abstract metaphor between the three.”

Moreover, Rollercoaster stands as proud testament to the near limitless potential of the art form, something Peden is deeply passionate about. “One of the things I love about juggling is its insane depth, you know?” he says. “It almost makes me want to cry when I think about how beautiful it is. Literally any object, any colour, any texture, your neurodivergence, your history all goes into what you make. And I think what's beautiful is when people put their personality and what they love in the world into their juggling.”

Peden even seeks to challenge some of the more fundamental pillars of the sport. “The common understanding of juggling is ‘don't drop’. You keep stuff in the air, and if it lands on the floor, that wasn't the plan, right?” he says. “I find, if you use that premise for an entire hour, it gets a little bit old. Wouldn't it be nice if we could change the game a little bit?”

Instead of being in thrall to that binary tension – catching good, dropping bad – Peden leaves room for branching paths within tricks (“it kind of turns into a Choose Your Own Adventure book”) so that even ‘failures’ are impactful, narrative-spawning events. This allows him to attempt much more ambitious stunts, something otherwise seen as too risky in a show performed every day for a month. “I change the rules around juggling and allow for it to go in different ways.”

Rollercoaster looks set to be a fresh, energetic addition to the festival’s circus repertoire, combining the best of Gandini’s compositional and musical nous with Peden’s own punk creativity. And his passion for the discipline is both apparent and infectious.

“I love juggling so much, and I want to compose juggling in a way that when people watch it, they're like, ‘Oh, I love juggling too!’ I've had 25 years to get into why juggling is so great, and now I have an hour to convince the audience that isn't this an incredible, incredible world?”

A culmination Rollercoaster may be, but it is far from the peak in Peden’s career. “I feel like I've been juggling my entire life and barely scratched the surface of where I want to go with it.”