Anything is Possible

by Hazel Flynn

  It was, however, as handsomely paid as the agent had promised. I was getting over $100 an hour and I didn’t have to do anything other than turn up and start work. Even after the agency’s cut it was very lucrative, so I hung in there and put away every cent I earned. I figured I’d stick it out as long as possible and build up a pot to pay for some of the larger and more complicated illusion apparatus I wanted. I was so glad, though, when the contract came to an end. I’d learned another useful lesson: if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing and feel a hundred percent genuine about it, no amount of money will change that.

  Your audience can always, always, tell if you genuinely love what you do.

  My real education in how to manage audiences was about to begin. After the VCE exams, which resulted in me getting a university admission score in the top 10 percent of the state (‘See,’ the twelve-year-old inside me said, ‘I wasn’t stupid after all!’), Adam had worked with the agency to line up a small schools tour for us. At this point we’d done around a dozen school shows. The comments going back to the agency had been universally good, so they were happy to give us a solid booking of thirty shows in the lead-up to the end of term. It was a kind of baby-steps introduction to being on the road. We did a show in a different school every day but they were all within reach of Melbourne. Adam drove and we came home after the show and slept in our own beds each night.

  It was incredibly useful for honing my performance skills. Performing for kids, especially younger ones, you get instant feedback on whether they’re liking it or not. If you’ve lost their attention they fidget and wriggle and chatter no matter how much the teachers try to shush them. If they are involved they lean towards you, rapt. I had a huge amount to learn about how to engage school audiences and keep them engaged, how to manage participation while still maintaining control, how to deal with the ‘class clowns’ in the audience who threatened to derail the whole thing. There was no-one to train me, I just had to figure it out by trial and error. Doing thirty shows in a row was a useful way to begin. I started to really learn about timing, audience control and above all commitment to the moment — kids can sniff out insincerity in a heartbeat. To keep their attention, the act needed to be tight and flow well, but above all it had to be entertaining and genuine.

  That year, the biennial Australian Convention of Magicians was, conveniently, held in Melbourne. I was still eligible for the under-18s section but that would have seemed like a step backwards after my open-category win in 1998 so I entered the open (non-pro) stage category with an act that was bigger than anything I’d attempted before. The idea had come to me as an extension of the alien theme at the end of Time Warp. TV’s The X-Files was still huge and there was a lot of interest in sci-fi. I thought it would be fun to do a whole act based around alien abduction, with me as the alien and Adam, my assistant, as the subject of my experiments.

  Using some of the money I’d saved, I had a full-body alien costume made up to my design. It was cumbersome and very hot because it basically combined two suits: a foam-padded muscle costume with exaggerated abs and biceps, and a Spandex alien costume complete with hunchback and blue strobe light running across the chest. It sounds a bit threatening but the soft pink-and-grey highlighted mask gave it a more friendly feel. I built some new illusion apparatus with Dad and bought other pieces. The act began with Adam opening the doors of a solid-looking chamber Dad and I had made. After showing the audience the chamber was empty Adam would close the doors, at which point there would be what looked like a flash of lightning inside. He would open the doors again and there I’d be. (Despite their solid look the walls were made in such a way that they enabled me to quickly slip through.) I would then set to work ‘experimenting’ on him, including putting a spike through his neck and cutting his arm in two. It finished with Adam lying down on a table and me covering him with a cloth, levitating him a little and making him vanish (that part sounds better than it was, to be honest).

  Adam came up with some fantastic moody, futuristic music and we worked on the act for weeks and weeks, practising and refining and practising some more. It was important to put a lot of time into it because it hadn’t been broken in before an audience; the convention would be the first time we performed it. We were feeling really good about it all when, two days before the competition, we performed it for Mum and Dad. We expected them to love it but they didn’t. In fact they didn’t think it was entertaining at all. Adam and I had been so enthused by the idea and so close to it for so long that we’d lost all perspective on the big picture.

  With my first doves, Little Troop and Churchill, 2001.

  Cosentino family collection

  There was a short period of panic when we debated pulling out of the competition but instead of running away we decided to take a fresh look and try to fix the problem. Adam and I worked feverishly all the following day trying to come up with a new approach and make it work. We kept the same tricks — we had to, there was no time to change those — but we ditched the alien abduction theme. That meant I had to come up with a new costume from whatever I could find. I had a cool new mask, gold on one vertical half, black on the other, and I worked the clothes around that. I wore a black and yellow t-shirt under a long trench coat — The Matrix style, but yellow.

  Wilson Du

  We kept my initial appearance at the start and Adam’s disappearance at the end but rearranged the entire rest of it, putting the tricks in various different orders until we found the best flow, and redoing the music. Finally we were happy with it . . . but then we’d been happy with the first version before we tested it on an audience. I was more nervous preparing to go onstage than I had been in quite a while but our last-minute act went over very well, in fact so well that once again I was awarded the trophy. I took another valuable lesson away from the experience: follow through on your vision but don’t get so wrapped up in it that you forget to get feedback.

  Afterwards one of the judges commented on the unusual moves I had made in some of the tricks, ones that featured Adam as the assistant. I said, ‘Oh, that’s just the way I thought they would look best.’ It wasn’t anyone’s business that the reason they were unlike other magicians’ tricks was we’d adjusted them around the difficulties Adam’s cerebral palsy caused him with certain moves. He and I never had to discuss it. We were so close that I instinctively created the routines that way.

  I decided that convention would be my last. I hadn’t lost my interest in magic, just the opposite. But three years earlier I’d been a starry-eyed kid in Adelaide and now I was privy to the politics and rivalries and gossip that ran through the magic community (just as they run through any other closed group, be it plumbers or plastic surgeons). I wasn’t interested in any of that stuff. If another magician had ever wanted to discuss the influence of the Davenport Brothers or Houdini’s fixation with Robert-Houdin I’d have happily talked for hours. But if the subject was who had landed what juicy gig and who should really have got it, I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t a loner and I hadn’t set out to be a maverick but, just as I had at school, I’d reached the point where I preferred to stand apart and do my own thing.

  The conventions had also proved frustrating in terms of the difficulty of being taken seriously, despite the awards. At previous conventions I’d met a couple of prop-builders, people who specialised in creating apparatus for magicians. In America this is a serious craft with many highly respected practitioners, but there was a bare handful of people doing it here. I’d already had a disappointing experience with one of them, having commissioned a piece and excitedly unpacking it only to find it was so far off the mark that Dad and I had to completely remake it. At the convention in Melbourne I met another builder who I wanted to work with but he seemed strangely reluctant to engage with me. Okay I was young, but I knew what I wanted and because of Dad’s expertise I knew exactly what was involved in making various pieces, and thanks to the Orange job I had the necessary money. But while the builder didn’t turn me down
as such he never quite seemed to commit to taking on the job.

  That experience made me turn my focus to something I could control on my own terms. Ever since I’d seen photographs of doves and rabbits in the Encyclopedia of Magic I’d wanted to learn to work with animals. It was time to make it a reality. Doves are used because they’re so placid and docile, but even so you can’t just stick them into the act. You have to get them accustomed to your presence and used to being handled, always very carefully and delicately. When they’re at ease with that you can take it to the next stage, gradually getting them used to being slipped into or whipped out of a hidden pocket.

  I tracked down a magician in a nearby town who had a dove act and bred and supplied them to other magicians. I got two birds from him which turned out to be a male and a female. In due course they had babies and I started working with the little ones as early as possible with the intention of including them in the act. I named one Churchill from the town where I’d got their parents and the other Little Troop because he was a true tiny trouper, always willing to train and play. They were lovely little pets to have and very interesting to work with and care for. As I saw when I started showing other people the tricks I was practising with them, there’s something undeniably powerful about making a living creature appear. Making silk scarves materialise is impressive, but there’s a different, more visceral response to a bird or animal. For the audience on some subconscious level it’s as though you’ve created life.

  Not too long afterwards I got a rabbit, an adorable Netherland Dwarf baby I named Snuggles. I went through the same familiarisation process. I nurtured him and played with him and sat watching TV with him snuggled on a towel on my lap. If I was working at my desk or sitting reading he would curl up in the front pouch-pocket of my favourite hoodie. I trained him with positive reinforcement — every time he got a move right he would get a little food treat. If he got it wrong, no treat. With rabbits and doves and any other animal, if you yell or bring force into it you only create counter-productive tension. The secret to training them is that there is no secret, just lots of time and attention and patient repetition. (And always be gentle. Never, ever pick a rabbit up by its ears, no matter how many times you’ve seen it done in cartoons. Support and lift them as you would a cat.)

  Always be gentle. Never, ever pick a rabbit up by its ears, no matter how many times you’ve seen it done in cartoons.

  By this time, I’d started my university course, a Bachelor of Business majoring in Marketing, at Monash University. I liked being a uni student. I enjoyed the subjects I’d chosen and the fact that you could study in whatever ways worked best for you. I enjoyed the social life and the freedom. I was focused and I worked hard and got high marks. I could download lecture notes online, which gave me a lot of flexibility with my schedule and allowed me (with Adam’s help) to continue to do magic shows part-time, mostly at schools. I’d started to use the doves and rabbit in the act, and that went over very well. I didn’t talk about magic with my new uni friends — it wasn’t a secret, I simply didn’t bring it up — so the first anyone there knew of it was when I decided to use my skills to give a tutorial presentation some pizzazz. The task was an analysis of Johnson & Johnson’s marketing. Talking about my findings, I blew up a balloon then popped it to make a tin of talcum powder appear. It was a big hit and there were lots of questions afterwards about how I’d learned magic and how long I’d been doing it. I said magic was my part-time job the way that other people worked at McDonald’s or Bunnings. That was true but it was far from the whole story.

  As much as I enjoyed university, magic’s pull was very strong. It occupied a lot more of my mental life than a simple part-time job would have done. I practised every day to keep my muscle memory strong and to stay dexterous. (Young magicians need to understand they can’t skimp on rehearsing. You can’t be a good magician if you don’t like to practise: making something unnatural look natural requires endless repetition.) I was also constantly coming up with new ideas for the act. Adam was my staunch collaborator and every Sunday night we rehearsed whether we had a show coming up or not.

  Adam has been asked many times over the years if he ever wanted to be the star getting all the applause; if he’s ever resented my place out front. I completely understand why people ask the question. They can’t quite believe that there isn’t at least a little bit of friction within the family about my success. But that’s the thing. I’ve never seen it as ‘my success’ and nor have my family. It’s ‘our success’ and before that it was ‘our struggle’. Adam always answers those questioners by pointing out that he has absolutely no desire to be a performer and he never has had. He became my assistant (and still appears onstage on those odd occasions when the situation demands it) because it was a solution to a problem. He stepped up. I know how lucky I am, believe me. People throw the word ‘blessed’ around very freely. Well, an incredible, sustained group effort has gone into creating the career I have today and I am truly blessed to be part of a family that thinks helping one another in every way possible is what families do.

  We started planning our first ever big family holiday for mid-2001. John and Jilda had just got married so he wouldn’t be coming, but Mum, Dad, Adam and I would take off together during school and university holidays. We tossed around ideas about where we might go. America looked good and apparently I was very persuasive in arguing that Las Vegas, the Mecca of magic, would offer some special experiences. We could stay somewhere nice, see some big shows and I could go talk to prop-builders to get the lay of the land and visit LA on the way home: an excellent three-week break.

  I subscribed to the American magazine Magic, which was considered the ‘must-read’ for those in the trade. Naturally it carried advertising from suppliers of various kinds, including many specialist prop-builders based in Vegas. I emailed a number of them and set up meetings. The idea was for Dad and me to go talk to them in order to make contacts and see how things worked, not necessarily to commission any pieces.

  Vegas was bustling. It was the American summer, peak tourist season. Adam, Dad and I enjoyed the surreal, heightened feel of it all, but Mum not so much. She liked being with us and having this special break together but the constant dinging and buzzing of the inescapable slot machines got to her.

  It was very interesting meeting the prop-builders. Having hit roadblocks and indifference in Australia I wasn’t sure what to expect. These guys (and they were all men) worked with the biggest names in the business. Protocol forbids builders from telling who they create for — that’s a bit too close to revealing the trick — but once you’re on the inside it’s not hard to figure out. I was meeting builders who created illusions for David Copperfield, Siegfried & Roy, Lance Burton and every other major act you could name. They could have blown me off as some unknown eighteen-year-old kid from the other side of the world, but instead they were welcoming and generous. They realised Dad could talk on their level about design and engineering and that I was serious about magic.

  I commissioned a couple of small pieces while we were there. One was a prop that appeared to be a solid ghetto-blaster but could be made to vanish after I’d covered it with a cloth. The other was a ‘dump box’ or ‘drop box’. Again it appeared to be solid, although it could be folded flat for transport, and it enabled me to make my fedora change colour from black to yellow and my shoes to do the same.

  We got on so well with the builders that as well as referring us to colleagues they thought we should meet, various of them took us out to shows. (Prop-builders have easy access to complimentary tickets, ‘comps’, by performers they’ve built for. When a builder takes you on comp tickets to a particular show, discretion might prevent them claiming credit for any particular illusion but the implication is obvious.)

  David Copperfield wasn’t in town during our visit but we saw Siegfried & Roy, with their tigers and lions and elephant and horses and macaws and all the rest. It was done on such a big scale and with such over-the-to
p theatricality that it was literally awesome. We saw Lance Burton’s show which was also incredibly impressive in a completely different way. Burton was a Vegas mainstay, having signed a record-breaking thirteen-year contract in 1994, and had a special theatre built and named for him. His image was all about sophistication: he wore a top hat and tails and performed to a soundtrack of classical music. His tricks were classics too and he was particularly famed for his work with doves. He would make a candle appear from a silk scarf, then set the candle alight, then make the flame explode to become a dove. It was done with stunning precision and fluidity and his audience participation was deft and charming. We went to Cirque du Soleil’s water show ‘O’ at the Bellagio, which I watched without a single twinge of wanting to be in it. I enjoyed the show and admired the acrobats but magic had my heart.

  Entertainment in Vegas is split into daytime acts and night-time acts. Siegfried & Roy and Lance Burton and Cirque were night-time acts, headliners. But daytime performers like Mac King and Rick Thomas were extraordinary — anywhere else they would have been headliners. Hell, Thomas had tigers in his show; that’s some high-end matinee entertainment! Penn and Teller had been around since the 1970s doing their spiky, intelligent, sceptical act but the new breed hadn’t yet hit it big and street magic wasn’t yet a thing. David Blaine was starting to get some attention and so was Criss Angel but they were still cult names, not household ones.