CoLab - It's A Kind Of Magic - Show Time

So, wow, just done the magic show. It. Was. AWESOME! Butlers bar has never had such a buzzing atmosphere, like, ever. The show went amazingly well and everyone was really impressed with it. The most terrifying thing about it was that we opened the show.

We opened with Quiajing pouring a glass of wine into a newspaper and the wine magically disappearing and the reappearing at the end, after the newspaper had been opened over a poor unsuspecting member of audience who just came out to enjoy the show, poor girl. While this was happening I was accompanying with a cheerful, jazzy tune on bassoon and Quiajing played on the humorous aspect of the music to create a brilliant performance without saying a word. It was brilliantly done. I then put down the bassoon and took to the stage with accompaniment of dramatic piano. My trick involved filing a glass full of water, placing a piece of paper over it and then turning it upside down over the poor audience members head (I do feel a bit bad about that). The water stays in and then I rip the paper off before letting the water fall out into a bowl. The crowd loved it and we pulled it off spectacularly, in my opinion. The whole project has been brilliant fun and working with the group has been brilliant. A big shout out to Max for organising it and, until next year, farewell :)

CoLab - It's A Kind Of Magic - Wednesday, Thursday and Friday

Hey there friends, examiner and any other person who is reading this cos they've got nothing better to do. So, just finished the magical ( I am so funny) week of Colab rehearsals. It's been a blast and working with the other members of the project has been such good fun, we are all really looking forward to performing on Monday and are really hoping for a good audience.
The last few days have been spent preparing for the show. The first two days were more about the actual technical aspect of magic but we have now started collaborating with the musical elements. We have all been working in pairs and trying to work music in with whichever trick we are performing.
I have been working with Quiajing and we are tackling the water based tricks. It's been interesting trying to add a musical element and designing the performance around the music and vice versa. We have a nice juxtaposition of a light hearted trick with a couple of shock moments and an extremely tense second trick which immediately follows. I'd love to go into details but I don't want to spoil it for anyone who is coming to watch on Monday.
We've also all been watching the other groups learn their tricks and been assisting as test subjects and helping with planning. The entire group have been really fun to work with and all the tricks are going to be amazing on Monday. It's been quite interesting how the increased confidence has translated back to instruments as I know I definitely have been playing with a lot more self belief even when it has been going wrong. Sorry about the shortness of this post but hey, don't want to spoil anything so here's a picture of Ben being taught his trick as well as a copy of the plan of action for Monday, Deanna out.

CoLab - It's A Kind Of Magic - Monday and Tuesday

So, it's that time of the year, CoLab is back and this year I've been assigned to the magic music-hall project. I was originally a tad dubious about this but I have never been happier to not get my original choice. The project is being led by magician Max Somerset, who is phenomenal btw, and has so far been amazing fun.

Monday started with Max wowing us all with a mini show that had us all amazed and raring to learn more. The focus for the day was 'creating realities'. In magic, it is sometimes essential to make the audience believe something that is not exactly true and we worked at mastering a few tricks that rely on the concept and discussed how that applies to music. The point of the project is to look at performance skills through a medium other than music so we looked at how having complete outward confidence can mislead the audience into believing you played something correctly when it was actually less than perfect.
This morning began with an interesting occurrence.  4 people singing swing low sweet chariot while their chairs were removed. The rest of us thought it was hilarious, those involved were not so amused, not sure why...

We followed this up by learning a trick involving cutting and putting together a piece of rope which I imagine people will not be able to stop practicing, it's weirdly addictive. The tricks this afternoon were more focused on 'mind reading' and presenting it in such a way that it's believable. We worked in pairs and spent the afternoon perfecting and demonstrating to the rest of the group. Myself and Kathy were working on a trick where I had to choose a random name from a list and somehow, using the help of said person, telepathically send the name to Kathy who was waiting outside and unable to see or hear what was going on. It was really interesting devising a system to do this and we worked well together. It was good fun and the improvement in certain members of the group is amazing, they are a lot more confident. I also feel a lot more confident in the purely performance aspect of the tricks and I am looking forward to translating this into a musical situation.

P.S Here's a link to my youtube video about today