Travis Bernhardt’s new magic show is a delicate balance (photo Lindsay Elliott).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBernhardt has been doing magic for 10 years and has been a full-time professional for six, doing everything from corporate shows, birthday parties and performing at nightclubs and bars. But with Unpossible!<\/i>, a show he toured on the Fringe Festival circuit in 2013 but didn\u2019t make it to Victoria, Bernhardt has created a show with material that has more layers and takes longer to play out than the simple, direct tricks he uses in his day job.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn a theatre show where people have already bought a ticket and agreed to be there that gives me a little more leeway to make a statement about what I\u2019m doing and do material that has more layers to it,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m in the room for an hour trying to do stuff that requires an audience\u2019s attention. So I enjoy doing the richer, more layered material in this show, because it\u2019s the only place I get to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mostly self-taught, Bernhardt says it\u2019s hard to explain how he learned his magic and mind-bending skills, other than to explain that magicians, although sometimes secretive about their work, are happy to share their knowledge with others who are keen to master it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m asked a lot about how you learn magic and it\u2019s a difficult question because every magician is, to some degree, self-taught,\u201d he explains. \u201cMagicians are generally pretty solitary, alone-in-your-workshop sort of people. But there\u2019s a huge tradition in magic of writing down your work, so I\u2019ve got bookshelves full of giant, heavy books about magic and if something catches your eye, you just practice it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Similar to flipping through a cookbook to choose that night\u2019s dinner, Bernhardt says he uses his extensive library of magic books to pique his interest and as a starting point for a gourmet trick with his flair and style.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe trick then becomes how do you make it your own,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s true you can pick stuff out of a cookbook and throw together a meal and everybody will be happy, and certainly a lot of magicians do that, and there\u2019s nothing wrong with that. But the more I\u2019m into this, the more I want to do stuff that has a little more of a twist to it, a little more my own, and that\u2019s the biggest challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n
After undertaking Unpossible!<\/i> on the Fringe circuit last year, Bernhardt says by the end of the tour he had the show pretty much airtight, but that doesn\u2019t mean that its smooth veneer doesn\u2019t have some hidden blemishes behind the scenes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot in this show that can go wrong, and there\u2019s a lot of scrambling in my own head about how I\u2019m going to get out of certain situations,\u201d he says. \u201cIt hasn\u2019t gotten to the point where I\u2019ve been stuck, but there are definitely a couple of points in the show that are risky and that haven\u2019t worked every time. And since I\u2019m doing the one show at UNO, we\u2019ll have to see…\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the kind of pressure that could crack most performers: this just isn\u2019t remembering your lines and where you need to be on stage; this is highly involved trickery that is very difficult to execute, with a different audience every night. One wrong move, from Bernhardt or audience participants, and the whole show is a bust.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s terrifying and stressful, of course. It\u2019s the worst,\u201d confirms Bernhardt. \u201cOne of the things about magic is that you are trying your hardest to create this idea of spontaneity, but at the same time it can\u2019t be spontaneous because everything has to go according to plan, so it\u2019s this crafted illusion of spontaneity. So I wrote this show with the idea that there would be some chance of disruption from the audience, and I would have to figure out on the spot how to react to that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unpossible!<\/i> (at UNO Fest)
\n7:30 pm Friday May 30
\nMetro Studio, $20
\nticketrocket.org\/uno2014<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vancouver magician Travis Bernhardt\u2019s new show, Unpossible!, may stick out on the theatre-rich lineup of the annual UNO Festival, but his one-hour long demonstration of psychological trickery was written in the same spirit of adventure as the rest of the acts in the 17th\u00a0annual festival of solo stage performers. \u201cI wrote this show to challenge […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":9018,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,126],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-may-14-2014"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9019"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9026,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9019\/revisions\/9026"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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