When husband-and-wife quick-change artists David Maas and Dania Kaseeva appeared on NBC’s America’s Got Talent, they didn’t manage to advance beyond the semifinals of the TV talent contest. But, as so often these days, the Internet, not TV, had the last word on the success of performers: a video of David and Dania’s act has gotten over four million hits on youtube.com. Millions of people are rushing to watch a magic act with no fancy special effects, no flashing lights, no talking to the audience or comic business. It’s just two people rapidly changing their clothes and challenging the audience to figure out how they do it. An old-fashioned magic act has become a hit in new-fashioned media.

While old-fashioned magic is sweeping the Internet, it’s also coming to movie theatres. Recently released was The Illusionist, a thriller starring Edward Norton as a 19th-century Viennese magician who may or may not have actual magical abilities. And coming later this year is The Prestige, a film by director Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins), in which Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale play two more 19th-century magicians, battling each other to see who can pull off the best tricks. Even Woody Allen played a magician in his most recent movie, Scoop.

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These movies, like the David and Dania act, promote the concept of magicians as people who entertain audiences in a simple way: by doing things that can’t be easily explained. That’s not the kind of magic audiences have become used to lately. In modern popular culture, magic is represented by David Blaine, whose best-known stunts are basically presented as feats of endurance, like hanging above the River Thames for weeks. Or Siegfried and (before he got mauled) Roy, with their emphasis on spectacle. Or Penn & Teller, a comedy team that happens to do magic tricks. These performers don’t primarily aim to surprise the audience; instead of using lights or jokes to distract the audience from the tricks, the tricks are almost a distraction from the real source of entertainment.

The new movies, like some of the less-publicized magic acts, are trying to restore the idea that magic is inherently glamorous and fascinating; it doesn’t need the multimedia trappings that Las Vegas acts provide. Fred Casto, the current president of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, says that the original appeal of magic comes from the old touring magicians who “would play the vaudeville circuits and theatres all over the country. Those were the true travelling illusion shows, and that’s where a lot of the classic magic came from, and a lot of the ‘How do they do that?’ type of attitude.”

That attitude is what comes through in the reactions to David and Dania, or veteran magician Norm Nielsen, who specializes in making a violin float in mid-air. Their audiences are focused on the basic question: how did they do what we just saw them do? The arguments over David and Dania, on message boards and in the YouTube comments section, are about whether they’re using wires or trick fabrics to make their costume changes.

And as the NBC and YouTube success proves, this kind of trickery isn’t popular only with people who normally attend magic shows. David and Dania’s main performance venue is not the Las Vegas stage but the basketball floor: they’re regular performers at NBA games, and Slate magazine recently noted that their act had become “the league’s most requested halftime attraction.”

These old-fashioned illusionists, a throwback to what Christopher Nolan has called “a time when magicians were really the premier entertainers,” can be found even in the home of Siegfried and Roy, Las Vegas. Casto cites Vegas performer Lance Burton as someone else who has achieved success with classic, simple tricks: “He got known with a classic act of producing the doves, and the cards, and the silks, and the candles, and the set of tails — very elegant and sophisticated. That’s a little of the old school that started with Robert Houdan in the late 1800s, who put on the tuxedo and started performing.”

Casto adds that nowadays, because of the expense and difficulty of taking a magic act on the road and trying new things in front of audiences, “it’s not as easy to come up with the classic type of act.” Not as easy, perhaps, but not impossible. And that’s why when David and Dania performed on NBC, the studio audience reacted not by laughing, but by gasping. That’s the old-school reaction to a magic act.

By: Weinman, Jaime J., Maclean’s, 9/11/2006

Blue smoke swirls around Eagle Scout Jason Latimer as he holds up a card. Poof! It’s gone. Whoosh! It reappears. Jason taps one card that becomes two…three…four. He links his arms, and cards start pouring out of both hands.

The audience claps wildly. And that’s just one of his easy tricks.

“I was raised by a pack of wild magicians,” Jason says, laughing. Well, maybe not. Actually this 24-year-old learned his first magic trick – how to separate black from red playing cards – on a cruise ship. He was 9 years old and bugged the ship’s magician to teach him something, anything.

After that Jason took classes, read books and watched videos. There was no stopping him. Now Jason is a world champion, touring the world and wowing crowds with his amazing acts of prestidigitation (that’s magician talk for magic tricks).

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Practice, Practice, Practice
There’s no big trick to becoming a great magician.

“You don’t have to be double-jointed, though it helps to have some dexterity,” Jason says as he pulls two giant steel hoops out of thin air. “The real trick is practice. When you’ve finished practicing, practice some more.”

All that practice helped Jason become only the third American to win the World Championship of Magic. That, and his college education, helps him create his own tricks.

“There’s a lot of physics and matt behind the magic,” says Jason, who designs all his own tricks and props “You start with a goat — like doing the famous cups and balls trick, only with clear glasses — and work backward. If you can think it, you can draw it. If you can draw it, you can make it,” he says.

Success!
Jason’s ability to “reverse engineer” resulted in his invention, the Latimer Cups. “It’s really a large twist on an old trick,” be says as he appears to instantly move small yellow balls from one clear glass to another, One second each cup covers a ball, the next all three balls are under a single cup.

How did he do that?

He’ll never tell. “It took me two years to perfect that trick,” he says. But it was worth it. Now most everyone in the magic world knows Jason for his crystal cups trick.

“In Scouting I learned to set a goal like making the next rank or getting the next badge. Then you dedicate yourself to achieving the goal. Never give up,” he says. “It’s the same with magic, except I use my imagination to set the goal.”

THE TRICKS
Like any professional magician, Jason Latimer is very secretive about his tricks. He’ll reveal only that he’s working on a full-stage act and would like to teleport himself to another dimension and then back to the stage, sort of like a Stargate. Can he do it? As Jason likes to say with a big smile on his face, “In magic, anything is possible.”

You can find the magic here, as Jason teaches you a few beginning tricks:

A KNOTTY SITUATION
Show a handkerchief to the audience. Tie a knot in it. When the knot is untied there’s a coin inside!

The trick:
Hold a coin behind the handkerchief with your thumb. Do not let the audience see the coin.
After you show the handkerchief, hold it as shown here.
Twirl the handkerchief until it looks like a Scout neckerchief rolled.
Drop the coin down the tube formed by the handkerchief.
Tie a knot in the handkerchief.
Give it to an audience member to untie.
Surprise! There’s the coin inside the knot.
THE UNBROKEN TOOTHPICK
A wooden toothpick is put under a piece of cloth. Someone in the audience breaks it, but you pull it out unbroken.

The trick:
Before…

Get a piece of cloth with a wide hem. Put another toothpick in the hem before you do the trick.

Spread the cloth on the table and place another toothpick in the center. Roll the cloth…

…and have someone in your audience feel the toothpick. Be sure he feels the toothpick in the center.

Have your audience member break the toothpick.

Say some magic words. Unroll the cloth to show the unbroken toothpick, which you have sneakily removed from the hem.

Hold onto the still-wrapped broken toothpick–don’t let it fall out of the cloth.

IT’S A SNAP!
Hold a piece of cloth by one corner. Give it a snap. Presto! There’s a knot!

The trick:
Before…

Tie a knot in one corner of the cloth.

Hold the cloth by this corner with the knot hidden in your hand.

Now do the trick:

Show the cloth to the audience. Put the other corner in your hand.

Give the cloth a snap…

…and release the corner with the knot.

HYPNOTIZED HANKY
This handkerchief stands by itself and mysteriously moves.

The trick:
Hold the handkerchief as in this photo. Pull it up about four inches through your left hand.

Using your right hand, wrap an imaginary hair around the handkerchief.

Secretly use your left thumb to move the handkerchief back and forth. Ta-da!

Catch Jason on the Web: www.jasonlatimer.com

By: Daily, Laura, Boys’ Life, Sep2006

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