Performers usually want photos of themselves, so if you can make them look good... and she saw that I had a bunch of performance shots
BTW, jugglers and acrobats are a challenge to shoot at this time of year. I took a few on Saturday at 800iso, f/4 and 125. They were soft: while the image stabilisation can easily cope with me shaking the camera at 1/125, it can't deal with a rapidly moving subject. Jugglers seem to move their head a lot, and quickly. Musicians are much easier in low light. Sunday she called and invited me back to take some more, and 1600iso and f/2.8 seemed to do the trick at around 5pm.
It appears that the eye can more easily tolerate a bit of fuzziness amongst the grain, then a fluffy head in an otherwise sharp picture.
Here's a B&W version which I rather like:
