by Hazel Flynn
In March 2007 we hit the road. Joining Adam and me was Ben, who had done the stage production course with Adam; Jim, who was a friend of Adam’s from uni; Jai, who we’d met when his father made our road cases a couple of years earlier; and lighting designer Stuart Sinclair. The venues ranged from 300 to 800 seats (though most were under 500) and they supplied sound and lighting techs but our tight little crew had to do everything else. This began with loading and driving the vehicles — an eight-tonne truck and a Jeep towing a 3.5-tonne trailer, all brand-new, purchased as carefully considered investments in confirmation of the fact that this was the beginning of something big. Not only did the crew unload and set up the illusions, they took part in the act.
After we paid our crew award wages there was enough left for Adam and me to pay ourselves a (very) basic salary. It was a lot less than we would have made in a regular job but we were having so much fun we didn’t care. Who’d want a normal job when you could travel the country putting on magic shows? And we saw ourselves now as true businessmen. This was the meagre-paying start-up phase of the enterprise, laying the ground for bigger and better things to come.
In between performances I made sure to keep up my fitness. I’d always been active as a kid and when I was about twenty I’d started working out in addition to running. It didn’t have any dramatic effect at the time but fortunately I persisted because I turned out to be a bit of a late bloomer in that regard; it took a couple of years for my body to really mature into strength work. I ramped up my fitness routine even more in the lead-up to Evolution and figured out a way of being able to work out no matter where we were: I bought a small weightlifting bench, took it apart and modified it so it could be broken down to fit in a road case and reassembled.
Doing such a big tour gave me the opportunity to tweak and improve the show. Some of it was the result of my practice of paying close attention to audience reaction and some of it was a serendipitous side-effect of a problem that had to be solved. An example of the latter was Adam saying to me that he and the guys needed a bit more time at a certain point in the show to set up a particular illusion behind the closed curtain. I needed to figure out some way of going out front and filling for a few minutes by stretching out an existing routine, one I was already doing solo. As I had done on the cruise ship I ran through the possibilities. This time I settled on the floating table piece, in which I put a cloth over a small table, which then rose into the air. Inspired by the sights we’d seen while on the ship plus a very liberal application of poetic licence, I spun a story that I thought might work.
I told my audience I’d spent three months travelling around Alaska and in the city of Ketchikan had picked up the little wooden table they could see before them. The place where I bought it wasn’t a big furniture mart, it was a strange little store, tucked away, which sold intriguing and unique things. The lady who sold it to me told me a story and ‘here you’ll have to bear with me’, I would tell them, ‘because it sounds simply unbelievable. But the story she told me was that the table was very, very old and many years ago a spirit had been banished into it. If you concentrate hard enough sometimes you can awaken the spirit and you’ll know if you’ve done so because the table will mysteriously move all on its own.’ Then I would say, ‘I don’t know if the story is true or not, but let’s give it a shot.’ I would put the cloth over and the table would levitate.
It got a big response, but thinking it over I realised there was still room to do more with the piece. I decided to get a volunteer up, a smallish child so that I could get the table to levitate above their heads. I thought that would be cute, a little girl or boy reaching up on their tiptoes with a look of wonder on their face. It was. Inspired by my school show interactions I also saw an opening for some humour. If I got a little girl up I’d say, ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Isabel,’ she might say. ‘Oh that’s funny,’ I’d say, pulling on a lock of my quite long blond hair, ‘that was my name when I was a little girl.’ The audience would burst into laughter and the response to the levitation would be even bigger.
There were a few instances like this, where my original objective was just to buy the guys another three minutes to set up until I noticed something else really interesting happening along the way. In the foyer signings afterwards people would make a special point of saying how much they’d enjoyed these bits — the Alaska story or other little fillers I’d come up with. I began to truly understand how important flow and texture is to a show. It’s all about peaks and troughs in energy: big flashy routines followed by quiet, intimate pieces. That doesn’t just apply to magic shows. Think about a skilled skateboarder doing an ollie, then a kick-flip, then a grind, then a jump and on and on, one straight after the other. At first, watching it, you’re really impressed but it doesn’t take long until you feel a bit bored or complacent. There’s a lot of skill but no artistry, no dramatic flair.
Cosentino family collection
When you wrap a magic trick in a story you create a much more interesting flow than you would doing the same trick in an unvarnished form straight after the previous trick. It also draws your audience close to you. We human beings love stories; we’ve been telling them to each other ever since we first had language. Hearing the beginning of a well-told story pulls us into the storyteller’s world. We want to hear the middle and the end. From the performer’s perspective if the story has a personal element, so much the better. When you share something about yourself you break down barriers between you and the audience; a human connection forms and the effect is even greater if you add in bits of comedy — as long as it arises organically from the material. In the case of the floating table, the illusion had worked perfectly well when I simply presented it, but when I wrapped it in a story about my trip to Alaska and the mysterious shop and the legend of the spirit it became much more powerful and the payoff for the audience when it levitated was much greater. (The tone for a story like that is crucial; I must have got it right because not once did I get a complaint about the supposedly otherworldly nature of the material. People understood the fiction and were happy to play along.)
Jilda and John’s first child was born while we were on tour, in March. He was named in keeping with family tradition on my dad’s side, which sees the eldest son in a generation christened Giovanni, or the English equivalent, and the eldest son in the next generation christened Giacomo, or the English equivalent. Hence my Nonno Giovanni, my dad Giacomo, my brother John and John’s new son, James. John gave me the huge honour of asking me to be the godfather. That’s a special thing in any family but, all bad Mafia jokes aside, it is a particularly important role in an Italian family and I was extremely touched.
That was the year’s personal high. The professional high was the brilliant news that Evolution had been nominated for a Helpmann Award. I was absolutely floored. These prestigious annual awards recognise the best in performing arts and live performance in Australia — they are the local equivalent of London’s Oliviers or New York’s Tonys. There were only four nominees in our category, the Regional Touring Award, and the others were all from much bigger organisations than Cosentino Entertainment. They were Clan from the acclaimed Bangarra Dance Theatre; The Messiah, from Albury-Wodonga’s HotHouse Theatre; and Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre’s Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks with Todd McKenney and Nancye Hayes.
I made a quick trip to Sydney between gigs to be there on the night of the presentation, but I felt very self-conscious, very much an outsider. The other nominees were all so different to me and my act that I wasn’t sure I really deserved to be there. The award went to Six Dance Lessons. I can honestly say that while it would have been wonderful to win, I’m not sure I would have been able to believe it — I was beyond thrilled just to have been nominated for our first touring show.
The success of Evolution opened the way for us to plan an even bigger and better tour for 2008. We lined up forty-four venues, covering every state and territory. Although we would perform in state and territory
capitals for the first time, with gigs at the Canberra Theatre, Darwin Entertainment Centre and Hobart’s Theatre Royal, as well as in some suburban venues such as Essendon’s Clocktower, the venues were mostly regional and this time around we were awarded a Regional Arts grant to help with costs.
I wanted to really push the limits of the human body in the new show and I needed a name to suit. I settled on Threshold. We needed a dedicated space where we could try out ideas, test equipment and rehearse. The company Dad owned had built some factories in the Melbourne suburb of Clayton and he cut a deal with the owners of one that gave us exclusive access to it for six months before the new tenants moved in.
My mind was buzzing with the creative process. I felt completely free to develop ideas and experiment with them and had the time, money, crew and space to do so. Like me, my crew were all young and keen. This was a great opportunity for them and they made the most of it; we all got along wonderfully well.
State Library of Victoria P230/PC.2
The scale of the tour meant we could afford to have cameras and screens set up so I could do close-up magic. (I had done card tricks in Evolution, but I had used oversized cards that could be seen from the back row.) So for the first time I could include all three elements of magic in one show: conjuring, illusions and escapes. And I could also have full-scale pyrotechnics. I’d done a pyrotechnics course a few years earlier on the ‘it’ll come in useful some day’ principle and undergone the licensing procedure for all the various states but so far I’d only used ‘baby’ pyro effects, like a modest shower of sparks when I turned on a saw prop. Now I had the space and money to use proper indoor fireworks, controlled remotely by foot pedals or buttons in my pockets.
I commissioned some new illusion apparatus from the Vegas builders and came up with some other pieces with Dad. The new tricks I added into the act included bending spoons and wine-glasses, ‘unzipping’ Adam’s chest and dancing with a floating microphone. I developed a levitation where I rose three metres in the air (the theatres offered me the use of a harness or safety wire for that one, but since that would totally defeat the purpose of a levitation they settled for me signing waivers to say that I took responsibility if anything went wrong). I came up with another piece where I lay rigid between two chairs, supported by only my head and ankles, while Adam stood on my chest. For a complete change of pace I brought Snuggles out for a ‘mind-reading’ piece in which he amazed the audience by nibbling into a piece of paper the identity of a chosen card.
Water Trap was too good to leave out. In fact, the improved version with the tank raised by chains to hang in a kind of scaffold-like framework would be the climax of the second half of the show. I was itching to come up with a brand new escape stunt as the climax of the first half, something suspenseful and dramatic and breathtaking.
There are good reasons why very, very few people do escapology: it’s hard and the stakes are high. And there is a very good reason why few, if any, other magicians do escapes as part of an act that also includes illusions and conjuring — the dynamics are completely different. In fact, they’re diametrically opposed. Both conjuring and illusions aim to baffle and amaze. If the trick is good enough even a mediocre magician can impress, because the audience can’t figure out what just happened — mystification is the name of the game. But there’s no mystery in a full-view escape like my Water Trap. There’s suspense and there’s fear, but no mystery — the audience watches me pick the locks one by one. The question is not, ‘How did he do that?’, it’s ‘Will he get it done in time?’
Illusion and conjuring rely on an outcome that the audience can’t predict. But in escapology an unpredicted outcome means something has gone terribly wrong. The audience knows the escape artist has to survive because, apart from anything else, they’ve got to perform a show the following night. That predictability can drain all the tension out of a situation, which is where showmanship comes in, as Houdini knew better than anyone. A well-constructed and executed escape can be almost unbearably tense for an audience, with the right showmanship.
Library of Congress 3j00081r
Robert Piccoli
Don’t misunderstand me. By showmanship I do not mean faking it. In Water Trap and every escape I’ve ever done since, there is true danger. We are not kidding when we say, ‘Don’t try this at home.’ The thousands of hours I’ve put into building expertise allow me to minimise the risk, but it’s there and it’s very real. A momentary lapse in concentration or a move that is even fractionally out could see me get seriously injured or, in some stunts, worse. The showmanship I’m talking about is the ability to make the audience truly feel that peril.
My locksmith friend and I have different opinions about this, by the way. He thinks that literally drawing a veil over the escape is a good thing, that it increases the suspense. But I operate on the belief that since I am genuinely doing the escape there is more suspense in showing it. In fact, as I learned the hard way, any concealment at all just makes people suspicious. For a while I performed Water Trap with a canvas cloth suspended over the tank: once the drum was hoisted into position the cloth would be dropped so that its bottom concealed the very top of the tank. I would free myself from the cuffs, chains and locks and pull myself up out of the tank. As the chains started to lower the drum to the stage my assistants would whip off the cloth, revealing me standing on the rim of the drum.
Some people assumed that the cloth was used because the routine was an illusion (like Houdini’s Milk Can), not a genuine escape. Well hang on a minute, if I was going to go to all the effort of actually doing the stunt for real I wanted to get credit for it! So out went the cloth. I had to learn that for myself because there was no-one to ask. Very few people anywhere in the world were doing escapes and those who were approached them as one-off special events, not something that was part of the act every show. I knew that my approach was unusual but I had no idea that back then it was a world-first to combine genuine escapes with illusions and conjuring in a show performed night after night. Sometimes you can be a pioneer without even realising it.
I tossed around various ideas for a new big first-half stunt but kept coming back to something based around a traditional illusion whereby the magician steps inside a box with menacing looking spikes overhead. The magician is concealed from view and the spikes fall onto the space they had occupied mere moments before. When the spikes are raised the magician reappears, unharmed. That piece is an illusion that relies on specific apparatus. How great would it be to do something similar, but do it as a real escape? I knew I wanted to involve the straitjacket and that gave me the idea of making the box a padded cell. But that wouldn’t be very satisfying for the audience; far better to make the front and sides clear Perspex and keep the back wall padded to give the idea.
So, I would be in a straitjacket with spikes overhead and I’d need to get out before they fell. That was a good basic concept but it needed ‘the wasabi’: the extra element that would lift it from good to great, from applause to ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe he just did that!’ It needed even more danger and drama. The fall of the spikes had to be triggered by a timer. How about if it wasn’t just a boring clock timer but a burning rope: when it burnt to the end, the metal grid from which the twenty-two spikes were suspended would crash down?
It took a huge amount of trial and error from Dad and me to get it right: making rope burn at a precise speed turns out to be an incredibly hard thing to do even indoors in a controlled environment (and of course you have to replace the rope every time you do the stunt, and trust that the replacement rope is made to the exact same specifications), but eventually we had it working. The stunt was nearly there, but it needed a couple more levels of difficulty. We added a hasp to the front door which would be secured by a big padlock and I decided I would be locked in leg-irons and chained to the floor. Why? Why not?
We sent the specs off to a prop-builder in Las Vegas. He came back to me with a question: ‘Okay, so what’s the trick?
’ I told him there was no trick. He came back to me to check about the spikes: they were going to be rubber, right? No, I told him, they needed to be steel. This was going to be a full-view, genuine escape. He said, ‘I sure hope you know what you’re doing.’
There was still more testing and work to do when the completed equipment arrived in Australia because when we gave it a test run the spikes hit the bottom so hard they bounced up, twisted, and smashed through one of the walls of the box. We replaced the 2 by 2 metre sheet and worked on a wood and leather brake that would reduce the speed just enough so the spikes didn’t bounce. But we couldn’t slow them down too much or the audience wouldn’t experience the suspense and thrill that was the whole point of an escape stunt. The danger was very real — if those spikes hit me the consequences would have been horrendous. We needed to let the audience feel that, without crossing the fine line from controlled risk to recklessness. I named the piece ‘Crazy Cell’.
Dad, John and Adam were caught up in the mechanics and the problem-solving aspects of the stunt so they didn’t stop to question the wisdom of it but I was a bit surprised by the fact that Mum was fine about it. I found out why the day she came to rehearsal and saw it in action for the first time. She, too, had assumed it would be an illusion. When she realised it wasn’t she was absolutely horrified. It speaks volumes about her that she put her own fear aside and trusted me, just as she had when I was teaching myself to eat fire.
I learned a potentially life-saving lesson one day when I was rehearsing the piece and dropped my lock-pick, only to have it slide away from me. There was a moment of panic as I fumbled for it, losing valuable seconds of the little time I had before the spikes smashed down. I was very lucky that time, because it didn’t slide right out of reach as it easily could have. In rehearsal there was always someone standing watching close enough to help, but if it happened onstage the outcome could be disastrous. I could not believe that the need to have a spare pick within reach had never occurred to me before, but that’s what happens when you’re figuring things out for yourself, not following someone else’s blueprint. I vowed I would never make that mistake again.