scholar    •    magician    •    consultant

This is a call for papers for special issue 16.3 (August 2018) of Early Popular Visual Culture that I’ll be editing with Matthew Solomon (University of Michigan). Please circulate it widely:

The Golden Age of Stage Conjuring, 1880-1930

The Golden Age of Stage Conjuring (1880-1930) in North America and Western Europe encompasses a period of rapid technological advances in the performing arts, cinema, photography, lithography, transportation and more. It also marks a fifty-year period of social and cultural transformations across the globe: power shifts in Europe and North America’s colonial empires, a new wave of Orientalism, disillusionment during WWI, the zenith of spiritualism, victories in women’s suffrage, and the stock market crash of 1929. What were the social functions of stage illusions and their performers during this tumultuous period? What pre-1880 conditions led to this Golden Age of magical entertainment? Finally, how does the legacy of this period influence the role that stage illusions play in society today?

This special issue of Early Popular Visual Culture seeks articles investigating these and other questions that engage primary source materials from 1880-1930, that think about such documentation in relation to public or private collections, and that apply those lines of thought to specific areas that have been overlooked or understudied in today’s scholarship dedicated to the performing art of magic. Investigators are encouraged to visit the McCord Museum’s online catalogue, which features a wealth of newly digitized material related to Harry Houdini and many others (search for Chung Ling Soo, Thurston, etc. as keywords). These scans are a glimpse into the exquisite 3-million-dollar collection of lithographs and Houdiniana gifted to the McCord by La Fondation Emmanuelle Gattuso to honour her husband Allan Slaight. The arrival and digital documentation of this material create new possibilities for the kind of research that other institutions, such as the U.S. Library of Congress, the Harry Ransom Center and the National Library of France make possible.

Proposals of articles (5,000-7,000 words) and an archive piece (300-400 words and 5-10 images) are invited. For consideration, please send an abstract of no more than 300 words for proposed articles and 150 words (and one image) for archive pieces. Abstracts should be attached as individual Microsoft Word documents along with a brief CV (degree, work experience, and recent publications) and sent to: goldenageofstageconjuring@gmail.com. The deadline for article proposals is July 4, 2017. Proposals will receive a response in two to three weeks from special issue co-editors Joseph Culpepper (Concordia University) and Matthew Solomon (University of Michigan).

It’s strange, but there are actually people out there who collect dissertations on magic.

I’m excited to present a talk tomorrow afternoon called “Doctoring Magic” for the attendees of the 44th annual Magic Collectors Weekend (MCW). As you can see above, I’ll have 52 signed and numbered copies for purchase by those who want them after my presentation. I would like to thank Magicana and the McCord Museum for bringing so many magic historians, performers and collectors to Montréal this weekend. We are all here to appreciate the beauty and wonder of the Allan Slaight collection of Golden Age lithographs that are part of the McCord’s Illusions exhibition. Thanks to the generosity of La Fondation Emmanuelle Gattuso, Montreal has a new world class magic collection that will increase and nurture magic scholarship in this city for many years to come.

The 52 copies of my dissertation that I’ve printed for this event will be sold for $45 USD ($60 CAD). Those who purchase one and add their names to my email list will receive a text-searchable PDF version of the dissertation for free. If you requested a copy years ago and will be present tomorrow, please email me a reminder and I’ll ensure that one is set aside for you.

Now, back to the magic history research!

We’re driving to beautiful Santa Cruz, California. This photo of its Del Mar theater captures some of the deep magic that I feel there. I took it while wandering downtown in the early 2000s, another wide-eyed UCSC college kid dreaming about the future. Fifteen years and many countries later, it fills me with joy to be returning to Santa Cruz. Artist Sarah Louis Bianco has invited me to be Apricity Gallery’s first magician in residence. We’ve been talking about and planning art, magic, and music based on the theme of Enchantment for years. This week we get to build, create, and, finally, perform this show with artists from many disciplines. Here we go . . . back to the Del Mar . . . back to the beaches and the redwood trails . . . back to that dreamplace: Santa Cruz.

What a thrill to be here for the Illusions festival in Châlons-en-Champagne where the CNAC is celebrating 10-years of magie nouvelle. I would like to thank Gérard Fasoli, Cyril Thomas, Barbara Appert-Raulin, Jeanne Vasseur and the entire CNAC team for making my participation at this international event possible. Pascal Jacob, Christian William and the CNAC resource centre curated two lovely exhibitions of magic posters and rare books with direct links to the circus arts. Locals can visit these exhibitions until they close on January 25, 2017. I am happy to have contributed a brief text celebrating North-American magic comic books and the wonderful graphic novel — The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam — by Canadian author Ann Marie Fleming. For those of you who don’t know, Long Tack Sam was a Chinese acrobat, magician, and international celebrity. You can learn more about him by watching the documentary film Ms. Fleming made about her great-grandfather at the National Film Board of Canada’s site.

After Pascal Jacob introduced the Ouvrez les grimoires and l’Épopée de la magie exhibitions to the general public, spectators attended a grand evening of close-up magic. Four different up-and-coming close-up magicians performed fifteen-minute sets in a uniquely staged environment.

On Friday the 13th, an auspicious day for any presenter, I had the pleasure of presenting a talk among a diverse group of fascinating individuals in the professional seminar titled La transmission en magie (Transmitting Magic). Raphaël Navarro, Valentine Losseau, François Bost, Alain Poussard, Véronique Perruchon and myself all spoke about different aspects of how magic is transmitted from one person to another based on our areas of expertise. The images below display the programme of the seminar. After this event, Pascal Jacob gave an engaging talk for the public filled with stories about magic from the time of Ramses II to the most recent J.K. Rowling books. We were then able to see the premiere of Thierry Collet’s Dans la peau d’un magicien, RDV#7.

As I write this, Philippe Beau’s Magie d’ombres et autres tours is about to start at the national theater here named La Comète! I’d better publish this post and head off at lightspeed to catch it.

Click on the text above if you’d like to take my workshop this Friday at McGill’s GRAPHOS writing centre for grad students and postdocs. I’m stretching right now as I think about how rewarding it is to treat the body and the mind as equal partners in the writing process.