Naquada

After a bit of a sorry start to the day with lectures, Steve Shawn Farqurhar pulled it out of the bag with his lecture. Not only was he funny, both in his act, and his explanations, but what he did was just class, clean, clever and innovative.

The three time Fism Award winner delivered what he classed as classic stuff with a twist from his working material. He started his lecture by doing a classic matrix, but with a twist. He only used two coins, and he used photos of his hands to cover the coins, as opposed to his actual hands. He did a clean matrix effect, and repeated the effect to show the coin physically still in the photo on his hand. He repeated it again, but now with the classic four coins, and again with photos of his hands.. again ending up with the coins in the photo.

Another really nice effect that he explained was a great signed CD effect. Getting a spectator to sign a blank CD, he removed the silver from it, to leave the signature on a clear see through CD. Following this with another CD effect, where the names of two selected cards appear on the back of a previously signed and blank CD. The interesting twist was that only one selection appeared at a time.

The crowd really loved Shawn’s performance, and he continued to wow the audience with deck vanishes, where selected cards transposed places, and left the ‘deck’ as a solid clear block of glass, again he repeated the same effect, but instead of a solid block, he vanished all the faces and backs of the cards, except the spectators card.

The ended up by performing and explaining a really nice torn and restored photo of his daughter. Well, it was actually a torn and almost restored photo. In fact the signed photo was restored in the wrong order, leaving the spectator with quarters mismatched on the photo, but their signature still in place.

The whole lecture was really great, full of comedy, clever and visual magic, and really was a fantastic evening session.

Note that the reference to Steve Farqurhar not Shawn Farqurhar was an in joke and part of the competition to see who read all the posts in detail from Blackpool. It was also a play on the awful compere on the Saturday night misintroducing Shawn as Derek, and then David!!! You can see just how insulted Shawn was by this on his blog.

Derek Lever, The Convention organiser for the Blackpool Magic Convention announced today that the Blackpool Magicians Club, would be buying their own Theatre club, and hoped to have the venue up and running for next years convention.

This is pretty big news, that was hidden away in the convention program. Effectively, this means that the Blackpool Magic Club is the first magic club in the world to own it’s own performing theatre. Derek Lever said, that “This would make the Blackpool Magic Club the envy of the magical world “. He also added that the theatre would be used for various events around the convention period next year, possibly hinting at a repeat of this years Shazam shows in the run up to the Blackpool convention this year.

The idea of a magic society or club having it’s own theatre to perform in is certainly a great idea. The potential for lectures, shows, events and further methods for creating income huge.

It will be interesting to see where this takes the convention next year.

Update: The location of the new headquarters for the Blackpool Club, and its theatre is the old Claremont Theatre Club on Sherwood Road. The full address is at the rear of 1, Sherbourne Road, North Shore. Blackpool. FY1 2PW.

Chris Priest lectured on his ‘Close up Masters’, items from his professional close up act. Starting with a nice coin appearances followed by a clean coins across, finishing the effect with a very clean looking coin through spectators hand. He also had some very nice ‘invisible and re=appearances of a coin, in both his own, and spectators hand. Finishing with a jumbo coin production.

Chris really brought up the quality of the lectures today, filling the first 10 minutes with very strong and clean coin magic from his Masters Coins DVD. Chris worked through the explanation of the coins across, and coin productions.

Next Chris moved onto a gambling themed effect with two spectators, with a nice clean transposition of red and black aces. Performing much better than the previous lectures, Chris did some very solid and workable card transpositions and effects, focusing a lot on how to work receptions and tables. All very valuable stuff, and very much focused on those magicians working residences and table magic at restaurants and I assume wedding receptions and corporate events.

Chris lecture was solid, and had good content, and for those of us working real world situations like tables, it was a great session.

FFFF regular International Magic Convention second place winner Patrick Przysiekchi hopefully was going to pull up the lecture standard, starting with a flaming intro to a six card repeat, he at least woke up the audience. He talked about various ways to introduce business cards or normal cards with a flaming start (fires always a good hit with me, second to big pyrotechnics!).

He did a fairly nice effect based around football, a variation I think (dont quote me on it) based on Jim Steinmeyers Bermuda Triangle from his book Impossipuzzles (or as Richard Morrell mentioned Paul Harris’ Art of Astonishment) The basic effect is that four people have 10 footballs on a ‘pitch’ on the table. A fifth spectator adds a ball at a time, the balls on the pitch are moved around, and each of the four spectators still end up with 10 balls each. The routine continues until the fifth spectator is left with, guess, 10 balls, meaning all five spectators have 10 balls.. a very puzzling effect, but again, seemed to miss something.

The next effect involved a chose card reappearing back in the deck reversed as a small card. In a quick add on effect the chosen black 8 card turned into a billiard eight ball, and then a red 3 balls.

Patrick then ran into a multiple location routine, 6 cards were chosen and appeared at various different locations, in the deck, pocket, and wallet, the routine was based around some principals of marking and locating cards, but these really weren’t only well explained, again leaving us a little bemused and confused.

The classic gypsy thread was revolutionary re-invented with… Dental Floss.. with newspaper clippings of reports of people escaping from prison using dental floss as a reason for the effect.. slightly odd but…

The actual effect was no different to a classic Gypsy Thread routine, and to be honest I missed the point of why we needed to be shown this. Following on there was a fairly nice ring on rope under hank , that seemed to use again an older principle, but was fairly convincing. A water in newspaper vanish (using the very standard method), reappearance of the water, into a cup and a final re-vanish of the water was the penultimate effect, followed by a three ring linking ring routine set to Christmas music and poetry.

Again, potentially a good lecture.. but wasn’t as great as I’d hoped.

David Sousa’s lecture was around, I think, stage craft. Although it was Davids first lecture in English, and his first lecture outside portugal, the lecture was a little bit confusing. What David was basically explaining was very good advice: Watch and consider your angle and visibility to your audience when performing on stage.He spent a good 10 minutes running through large flip sheet drawings of Audience to Performer location diagrams, with angles and measurements.

This section really started to feel like a maths lesson, as 90 degree, 180, and 140 degree view points were discussed. Unfortunately a large number of the audience started to leave part way through, and David tried to pull them back with showing more effects, that then personally just confused me more about what was going on.

A White to Black Dice transposition failed because the effect hadn’t been setup, after setup, it was then shown as almost a throw away effect. A named king was produced from an previously displayed large envelope, but again, it seemed confusing as to what happened, and why, and the whole lecture seemed to end up as a rushed dealer pitch, with a hint of desperation to keep the audience in the room, and focused on the performance.

It was a bit of a disappointing start to the lectures for today, but might have been partly down to language, David’s first lecture outside his home country, and the fact he was lecturing for the first time in English. A shame really as the session had the potential to be quite good.

I had a good discussion today with Richard Kaufman about the April issue of Genii magazine. The monthly magic magic will contain an in-depth article about the recent performance of the hooker rising cards.

Richard was very excited about the article, stating that “this was the real deal”, the colossal 27 page article in Aprils issue is written and illustrated by Jim Steinmeyer, and from the preview issue that Richard was kind enough to let me look through, it details a lot about the illusive effect, it’s history, and even includes a good number of photos, and drawings of the setup from the recent performance.

The Hooker rising cards is one of magics most closely guarded and discussed effects. The performance containing a number of cards rising from a deck, under a glass jar, even any card called for slowly rising from the deck. It’s a great effect that few have been privileged to see, and if you weren’t amongst the lucky few to have witnessed recently, this article is definitely for you.