Author Archives: jculpepper

Come discuss circus (and magic) with me and my friends: Carlos Alexis Cruz, Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva, Louis Patrick Leroux and many others. I’ll be there to answer questions about teaching magic at the National Circus School during the round table discussion. You’ll have to be at The Queen Elizabeth hotel early in the AM to catch it though! This and the […]

Improv comedy is about listening, acceptance and failing beautifully. In Montreal, lately, I’ve been watching and learning from such failure in at least two performance languages: French and Circus. Recently, I took an improv comedy workshop at Théâtre St. Catherine: As you can tell from the name of this theatre, Quebecois French is the dominant […]

Channing Pollock Born: August 16, 1926 (Sacramento, California) Died: March 18, 2006 (Las Vegas) The work of Channing Pollock in the performing art of magic is important to me for several reasons. First, his magic is filled with elegance, grace, and class. His understated showmanship reminds us that it is possible to be a virtuosic sleight-of-hand performer, […]

Last night I attended my first magic lecture since moving to Montréal. David Kaplan, also known as The Great Kaplan, shared some tips, tricks, and stunts from his professional repertoire. A recent clip of the act that he tours with can be seen here: Since I’m in this city to research the relationship between magic […]

This magic quotation comes from one of literature’s most notorious magicians: Faust. There are many versions of the Faust story. My favorite has always been the play written by Christopher Marlowe. Here is the moment when Faust, dissatisfied with his degrees and the limits of Earthly higher education, decides to study magic: “What doctrine call […]

Cirque du Soleil, ETH Zurich (a Swiss university), and a company called Verity Studios published a clip on YouTube yesterday titled “SPARKED: A Live Interaction Between Humans and Quadcopters.” Friends who know that I love magic sent me the link: One problem: There’s something missing here — mystery. As much as I love this very […]

I recently wrote a short piece on the Turkish ice cream vendor as street magician for an online publication called In Media Res. The video clip that I chose to contextualize for this week’s theme — magic and sleight of hand — was published today. If you’d like to see some delicious magic and my initial thoughts on […]