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