Innovating tricks to engage the audience

HYDERABAD: “Never show anyone. They’ll beg you and they’ll flatter you for the secret. As soon as you give it up, you’ll be nothing to them,” says Alfred Borden, a magician in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige. The greatest challenge for magicians today is that when he is on stage, the audience is already aware they’re going to be tricked. “We have to continuously keep innovating tricks to engage the audience. Making a person sleep in a box and later cutting it into half is old. We now have to make a machine cut the box or sometimes make it look gory with blood,” city-based magician T Ramulu says. The profession is picking up and competition is tough. Hyderabad itself has more than a hundred professional magicians. Though there aren’t many crowd-pulling community fetivals where magic shows can be hosted, magic has found varied spaces to grow. One such being publicity for government welfare schemes. Ramulu says magic tricks are often adopted to introduce a new scheme in rural areas. He himself has given many such performances where he first shows a `2 coin, then the coin vanishes and instead one sees one kg of rice. The performer later explains about the scheme where they can get rice for a cheaper price. “If not for this, nobody in the village will turn up for government announcements,” he says.The other rapidly growing trend is having magic shows at birthday parties. People invite magicians for parties and are willing to pay well. “I once quoted a cheaper price for my performance at a businessman’s party and that is why I was not hired. People in cities want to splurge and do not like things that come cheap,” says Ramulu. A magician gets paid around `5,000 for a half hour performance and for a bigger event it can go up to `15,000.Magic is not just growing as an art, it has also become a part of academics. Years ago in 1989, Ramulu’s entry into the profession was humble. The Telugu University held a training for teaching magic tricks for students who could not afford to study after the Intermediate. He also attended various workshops to improvise his tricks. Now, he is a PhD scholar at TU, pursuing research on Performance of Folk Magicians.There is also a Magic and Hypnotism Academy in the city. Its founder Anand Goud recollects how he had to go around the town observing performances of his trainer, a street magician. Even now, a lot of people depend on individual mentors rather than joining an academy, he says. “Regular practice is key to a magician’s career,” Goud says. There is also a strong network among magicians in the country, with annual conferences held where people sell and buy new tricks. Indian magicians have also gone online and updated a list of all magicians in the country on indianmagicians.com. Anand Goud says audiences now prefer tricks with a dash of music. “Illusion, escapism, stage and other areas of magic performances are being improvised to match with the intellect of the present generation,” says Ramulu.