scholar    •    magician    •    consultant

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 other morning session events are free. For the full day w/tours of Cirque du Soleil headquarters, the TOHU, and the National School it costs $50. See “The Art and Theory of Contemporary Circus” for more details.

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 language and culture in this city. Many Montrealers speak both French and English, but for every native anglophone there are about four native francophones. This means that there is simply more happening in French than in English here.

Therefore, it’s easy to miss out on many cultural activities if you can’t hold a conversation in the dominant language. I’d already attended three other improv workshops in English at Théâtre St. Catherine. Now, it was time to give it a whirl en français.

Even though I speak and write in French daily, performing spontaneous improvisation onstage in your second language is a bit terrifying.

But who cares?

Failure is necessary for improv, communication, and success in life. When the fifteen of us onstage played a word association warm-up, I had to remind myself that it didn’t matter if I misunderstood a word given to me: “guirlande” / (“garland”), for example.

It was more important to say whatever response popped into my head: “Irlande” / (“Ireland”).

It’s ideal, of course, if you understand exactly what another player says. However, like all daily communication, language is a tool used to accomplish goals. If the goal is to react quickly to create words, imagery, and interesting associations, then why stop the fun to ask: “C’est quoi une guirlande?” / (What’s a garland?)

These errors happen when native speakers interact too. What if a scene partner gives you the name of a celebrity you don’t recognize? The same goes for specific jargon of whatever kind. Improvisers don’t have to understand exactly who or what was said. They must do their best to listen, understand and accept.

This is true for body language and physical communication onstage as well. Reading, listening and responding to the posture, facial expressions, and pantomime of other performers is key. In fact, these visual skills sometimes trump verbal ones.

Impro Cirque a performance series combining improv comedy and circus is a perfect example of this.

Over the course of this weekend-long event teams of circus artists play short-form improv games to score points (awarded by the audience) before either being eliminated or advancing to the championship match.

What I found particularly interesting about this mixture of two performance styles — improv and circus— is that the teams who were most successful didn’t always have the most virtuosic individual performers. Instead, the teams that won expertly wove their specialties (silks, Cyr wheel, juggling, acrobatics, contortion), character, and clown together while listening and watching one another. They made fun of their superhuman talents as much as they displayed them. Above all, they entered into the aisles of the Tohu to get the audience to actively participate in the imaginary world of whatever scene was being created.

The scene that clinched the victory for this year’s winners of Impro Cirque, was a spontaneous reenactment of The Lion King. When one of the team’s acrobats bravely took over the band’s microphone to sing “Nants ingonyama bagithi Baba . . . ,” he belted it a little too loud at first. I could feel the scene teetering between greatness and fiasco, but only for a moment. As the rest of his team used their contortion, acting, and movement skills to become distinct animals from the famous Disney film, the singer hit his stride and the scene took off. The scales tipped to greatness when a bunch of the children from the audience as well as eliminated improvisors from earlier matches were pulled onstage to create a giant menagerie. The audience cheered as the human Lion King, a foolish-clown of a king, received his crown.

The champions of Impro Cirque failed together, beautifully, as a team to create that moment. They knew that it wasn’t a perfect reenactment, but that didn’t matter. They made-up a wonderful scene on the spot, out of nothing, and got the whole audience involved. That kind of failure is something to strive for.

In improv, it’s called success.

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, while remaining humble. Second, Pollock attended one of the few official magic schools that I know of in North America: the Chavez School of Magic. I am currently attempting to locate and map magic institutions to get a clearer understanding of how magic as a performing art both has and has not built schools. So this aspect of his life story is of great interest to me. Finally, Pollock is also from the city where I was born and raised — Sacramento, California. He retired in 1969 and moved to Moss Beach where he and his wife set up an organic farm. Even though he traveled and performed all over the world, I’ll always think of him as a Northern California guy — a hometown hero.

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 and other circus disciplines, I enjoyed hearing Kaplan’s thoughts on variety material. He performed a version of the torn and restored newspaper for us that ends with a giant, over-sized newspaper that he gets tangled up in. The inspiration for this piece came from a Buster Keaton film. After some searching, I found this gag in one of Keaton’s films. Here is the relevant clip from the first few minutes of The High Sign:

The shared history of clown, silent film, and magic is important.

This is true for the relationship between juggling and magic as well. I’m interested in hat juggling, so I brought the one that I use to the lecture. Mr. Kaplan kindly taught me a couple new moves. So did actor, director and magician, Bob Fitch, who happened to be sitting right next to me.

I’d like to thank Grant McSorely, Marc Trudel and the rest of the Montréal Magic Jam team for putting this event together. Thanks also go out to David Kaplan, for ending his lecture by playing “When You Wish Upon a Star” using only a turkey baster.

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 you this? Che sara, sara:
What will be, shall be! Divinity adieu!
These metaphysics of magicians,
And necromantic books are heavenly!”

. . . Christopher Marlowe . . . Doctor Faustus . . . c. 1594 . . .

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 creative idea, the work of Cirque du Soleil and the music of Danny Elfman, I was not — not for one instant, sadly — swept up by a sensation of magic while watching this. At no point did I experience wonder or astonishment as a viewer, because my mind was completely focused on thinking about drones rather than the imaginative world of the clip. The title of this clip “A Live Interaction between Humans and Quadcopters” results in the spotlight being on its method.

I actually feel bad writing this critique, because I love this kind of creative and experimental work. But as someone who is still enchanted when watching the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” scene from Fantasia or live performances of Peter Pan’s magical ability to fly, I had to disagree with the “likes” of the masses on YouTube. If this team had produced the two magical masterpieces just mentioned, they might have titled them: “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: The magic of thousands of hand-drawn images, high-tech recording devices and a synchronized classical score” and “Peter Pan: A live interaction between state-of-the art stage-riggers, steel cables and an acrobatic actor.”

Titles can kill the magical mood of a piece, particularly if you’re seeing it for the first time. This clip, for me, demonstrates the power of the title and its influence upon the viewer’s reception of a performance that promises magic. Change the presentational frame to focus on the clever methods of even the most magical performances in recent memory and that framing destroys the ability of some viewers to willingly suspend disbelief. Next time, please don’t brag about your artistic application of new technology first. Let me, as a viewer, fall into the dream of your storytelling and your art first. Then, if I really love it, I’ll be curious enough to watch the “making of” documentary.

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 it, here is the link:

“Maraşdondurmasi: Secrets of a Magical Ice Cream Commodity”