Jan 17 2009
Babbling - Holy Grails and Windmills
Like my friend Stevil said in a comment on the Trick Development post - sometimes a trick will sit on the shelf for years and then one day you’ll get a flash of inspriation and bingo - you have a new bit for the show.
ON THE OTHER HAND… sometimes there are tricks and effects which just lodge in your head and you wind up spending an inordinate amount of time and money to try and find the right way to do it for your show… until someone performs an intervention and stops you from obsessing so much.
For me, that obsession was, and to a certain extent continues to be Levitations.
Let’s be blunt here - I’m not a dainty magician. So the idea of being able to fly to, as David Copperfield puts it in his act “push against the air and fly” is a big deal. I spent four years looking for the right way to pull this off in a Renaissance Faire environment.
… I spent a lot of money looking for a way to pull that off in a Renaissance Faire environment.
So far, no dice. There are, of course, a few reasons for that. The first of which is if it looks like the thing is floating, something is holding it up!* That something has to be concealed from view. In an outdoor environment where sight lines can’t be policed… that just ain’t gonna happen.
There’s also set up time (because we don’t have a curtain to conceal the stage from the audience), portability, durability, weight considerations (see: not dainty)… and a lot of books, tricks and ebooks about self-levitation come and sit in my “stuff I don’t use” box for far too long.
Now the good news is that I’ve kind of got an idea about something in which something floats… just not me. I’m still playing around with it, but in the right circumstances and with the right preparaion… it might just be feasible. And on top of that, it doesn’t need any fancy apparatus beyond a silk scarf (got), a cane (got) and me.
Magicians tilt at windmills … but sometimes we find a giant.
* Remember waaay back when I mentioned that I talk about secrets here ? Well here we go.
