New Class Schedule Posted

“Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.”
– Bill Moyers

Dear Friends:

Jeff and Abbi are safely arrived in Stockholm for FISM, the international championships of magic and probably the world’s largest magic convention. They are in for a very busy week, teaching 3 seminars, 2 lectures, and appearing on two gala shows. I understand a large portion of the convention is being video-taped for release in various markets around the world, so you may have a chance to see them, along with some of the other 2,500 magicians
participating.

Among other things, Jeff is introducing his new Zoom, Bounce & Fly DVD at FISM. This is his long awaited DVD teaching the special techniques he uses to spin cards in the air, bounce them off the stage, and send them sailing into the balconies of so many theatres. The DVD includes a special tool, “The McGrip Tip,” which has been amongst the most closely guarded secrets in magic until now. It will be available exclusively from Jeff at lectures and other speaking events, and on our web site for the next several months (Oh…and, through a special arrangement, at the Fantasma Magic Store in New York City!).

Our big news this week is that we’ve just posted our schedule for classes here in Las Vegas through October of 2007. Many favorites are back, including the two extended summer master classes, which have proved to be among the favorites of both the students and Jeff and Eugene. Please visit www.magicalwisdom.com to see what’s coming, and register early for your next class!

Which reminds me: we STILL have one slot left for the August class. This is the extended class that includes visits to Mac King’s show and Lance Burton’s show, with question and answer sessions with both Lance & Mac afterwards. We’ve all developed new things for our various workshops (I’ve shifted to “Theatre Games & Magical Creativity,” myself). The extended class may not be offered again until next summer, so if you think you want to take one, now is the time to register and get your deposit in! Our July class was certainly among our most exciting and successful yet! All the photos with today’s Muse Letter were taken at that class.

I’ve been fairly busy myself, writing articles for Magic Magazine
(the first one appeared in the August issue, just out!), outlining a book on the creative process for magicians that uses techniques I’ve discovered since I began studying the art of performance over 35 years ago, and trying to keep up with all of Jeff’s varied projects. In addition, I’ll be holding my second “Get your Career in Gear” intensive later this month, from August 25-27th, here in Las Vegas. Attendance will be limited to 5 people (or acts). We’re including a photo session with Richard Faverty, who shoots so many of the Magic Magazine covers, and our students will be spending most of the month preparing themselves for the weekend by reading short articles, then filling in questionnaires for my comment, in order to develop their sense of just what they really have to sell. The idea is that you’ll leave the workshop with the knowledge and materials you need to market and run your own successful business as a magician. You can read more (and register) at: www.yourmagic.com/catalog. Also, check in at the catalog in another week or two to get your own copy of “Zoom, Bounce & Fly.”

I’d like to wind this up by sharing a single technique you can use to help jump start your own creativity – whether it is in developing a new piece of magic, or in any other aspect of your life. I call it “The Contrarian’s Way.” Here’s how it works. Many magic presentations, or other things we need to be creative about, can be broken out into a series of processes. Imagine yourself doing whatever each process in the sequence just exactly as you have learned it. Then stop yourself and ask “How could I accomplish this in a way that seems the opposite of THIS way?” For example, suppose you have learned a new card trick – one which begins with you asking someone to “please select a card.” Can you think of at least two “contrary” ways to achieve what is needed here? Think about it for a moment before reading on.

Okay…here are a couple of ways I thought of: You could hand the deck to someone else, ask them to fan it, and YOU could select the card, without looking at it. Another alternative: “I’d like you to take away half the cards. Okay…now another half…take some more” and so on, until you are left with just one. Both of these are different and contrary to the normal, but I’d like to create a trick that is really VASTLY different. Perhaps I could ask someone to take the deck, fan it, and throw the fan high into the air. I would reach into the flurry of falling cards and grab any card out of the air as they fall to the floor. That should create a bit more exciting effect! How many more can you come up with? Imagine you take every moment in developing your new card trick (or whatever you are working on) and create a new, contrary, way of accomplishing the things you need to? Can you think of how this might be effective in other areas of your life? Maybe at work, or in a social situation? One of the jobs we undertake when we become magicians is that of showing people new and different ways of looking at life – so being creative in how we approach things other than our magic tricks might be just as much part of being a magician as learning a new card trick!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this Muse letter. We’ll have another one for you later in the month, with a full report on the happenings at FISM, the upcoming extended Master Class, and Jeff and Abbi’s trips to the various festivals, including Burning Man at the end of the month.

Till then, may all your journeys be magical!

Sincerely,
Tobias Beckwith

Summer Solstice

“All people dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind, wake in the morning to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people, for they dream their dreams with open eyes, and make them come true.”
–T.E. Lawrence (AKA Lawrence of Arabia)

Greetings Friends and Magi…

Summer Solstice is upon us, a time of enchantment and metamorphosis, a time of long sun-drenched days and short, balmy nights, perfect for magic! William Shakespeare, writing of Solstice night in A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream, said, “Whatever is
dreamed on this night, will come to pass.” As magicians, many of us find our inspiration from our dreams. These next few nights are especially good ones for dreaming in new ideas. Before retiring for the night, place a notebook, a pen, and a small flashlight in easy arm’s reach from your bed. Before going to sleep, tell yourself, “I will remember my dreams. I will remember my dreams. I will remember my dreams.” As soon as you wake up, even if it’s in the middle of the night, jot down a few notes or keywords about whatever you remember from your dreams— a phrase, a feeling, or a small snip of a dream can give you a good place to start from. If, on waking, you remember nothing about your dreams, don’t worry, just write down a few sentences about what you might have dreamt, if you could remember….

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” –Eleanor Roosevelt, American First Lady

Here in the waking world, Jeff is looking forward to being up at Lake Tahoe this weekend. He is doing a video shoot with Max Maven and Paul Potassy, and is excited about working with Louis and the gang at L&L Publishing to help them put together something wonderful. In a few weeks, we’ll be traveling to Sweden for the FISM Convention, where Jeff and I will be performing, lecturing and teaching a 5 hour seminar. If you’re planning to be at FISM, be sure to say hi! When we return from FISM, we’ll be getting ready for our Extended Master
Class here in Las Vegas, and we look forward to seeing some of you here!

Make the dream of your life a sweet and magical one, and remember that we are the dreamers, the dream and the dreaming….

Abbi McBride

Museletter from Eugene Burger

This month, Jeff’s magic teacher and the Dean of the Magic and Mystery School writes to us about his dreams and magical formulas for life and magic.

A Muse letter from Eugene Burger:

“The first step in following our dreams is waking up.”

Hello everyone, this is Eugene Burger. The words I have quoted above came to me in Amsterdam this past spring when Jeff McBride and I were conducting our Master Class. We all have dreams, but to make them a reality we really do need to wake up and put them in practice.

Although I live in Chicago, I spend a considerable time of the year in Las Vegas where I have my own room in Jeff’s House of Mystery.

The first thing I do each day is come downstairs and have coffee with Jeff and Abbi and we share our dreams from the night before. Jeff keeps extensive dreams journals as does Abbi and it’s fascinating to see how sometimes the images and symbols in dreams find their place in our performances, shows, and even our teaching workshops. Do you keep a dream journal? Do you pay attention to your dreams? If you never have, you might find it a surprisingly rewarding experience.

I love visiting Las Vegas. Not only because I have many magic friends here, but because I love teaching magic with Jeff and Tobias. In fact, we are in the middle of a Master Class as I write these words. Last night, we took the class to see the Lance Burton show and Lance kindly invited the entire class back to his dressing room after the show for a pizza party, where he answered many questions from the students.

Speaking of dreams, Lance shared the story behind the creation of his world famous Double Levitation. On stage, he tells the audience the inspiration for the effect began in a dream, in fact it did. Lance told our students that each night before he went to sleep, he would visualize the Floating Lady illusion to the Pink Floyd song “Comfortably Numb”. After years of this creative visualization technique, he brought his dream into reality. Dreams do come true and they take a lot of work and thought and patience. That’s what it takes to become one of the great magicians of our age.

Today, we saw the Mac King Show and Mac also met with the class and parents and families between his shows. He shared some delightful stories of things that had gone wrong during his career. When these “terrible” things happened to Mac during his performances, they weren’t funny at all, but time and distance has turned the lead of tragedy into the gold of humor. As Jeff would say, “Tragedy plus time equals comedy.” This is a formula for creativity.

Have you ever had an embarrassing thing happen to you during one of your magical performances? I suspect you have. All of us have and we can either beat ourselves up and become very negative about these “horrible” situations or we can learn from them – and grow. As Channing Pollock once said to me, “Eugene, you can judge a magician by how well they cover their mistakes”. I’ve always remembered this because he didn’t say we could judge a magician by their successes or by their “perfection.” Channing was much more realistic. He wisely understood that we all make mistakes and that part of the art of magic is learning to deal with them creatively. This reminds me of something Gurdjieff said: We can’t always change what happens to us, but we can change how we respond.

It really is wonderful that Lance, Mac, and the late, great Channing Pollock have supported Jeff and my teaching by passing on their wisdom to our students.

Well it’s getting late now, and I really should go to bed so I’m alert for tomorrow’s class. Perhaps I’ll have a new dream of magic.

Good night and sweet dreams.

–Eugene

TV News and New York City

Greetings, friends! This is Tobias writing in Jeff’s absence, in a bit of a hurry, because we have lots of news in, and it’s time sensitive:

We’ve just heard from Criss Angel that Jeff will be featured on the premiere evening of this year’s “Mindfreak” on A&E, on an episode airing at 10:30pm on May 31st (check local listings…it’s the second of a double-header). Jeff performs a surreal version of his popular mask-magic piece “Transformation.” Later in the series, Jeff will be featured in two more segments, and we’ll do our best to let you know when they’ll be on.

“The Mindfreak shoot was one of the more challenging I’ve been on,” said Jeff in a recent interview. “We shot in a dry lake bed outside Las Vegas, and while we were shooting there were 40 mile per hour winds gusting through the set. It was all I could do to keep the masks from flying away. If it weren’t for my years of performing in similar situations at the Burning Man festival, I don’t think it would have worked. Fortunately, what we ended up getting on tape was really spectacular.”

JUST IN: JEFF AND ABBI WILL APPEAR AT THE FANSTASMA STORE IN NEW YORK CITY ON JUNE 10 AND 11. THIS IS HIS ONLY SCHEDULED NEW YORK AREA APPEARANCE OF THE YEAR. Saturday will feature a commando-style show and lecture, and one Sunday, Jeff will conduct one of his “no-holds-barred” one-day master class workshops for up to 20 people. He is performing a similar event in Baltimore earlier the sane week, which sold out in two days! Contact Fantasma at (212) 924-8345 or by e-mail at: info@fantasmatoys.com for more information.

More TV news: Jeff is featured in a couple of other upcoming video projects, as well. We’ve just received a DVD of the “Las Vegas” episode of Franz Harary’s “Magical Planet,” which features Jeff’s full Kabuki suite. My understanding is that the show hasn’t yet be sold in the U.S., but that talks are under way. We hope it is sold soon so you all can get to see this terrific footage for yourselves.

Finally: Our friend Donald Zuckerbrot is in the final stages of editing his one hour special “Real Magic” for the Enigma series on Canada’s Vision Network. “Real Magic” is all about – guess who? Our most magical of magician friends, Jeff McBride! The documentary is set to air in Canada “mid-year” – we don’t have anything firmer than that at this point – across Canada. We’re talking with them now about being able to sell copies of the show in DVD format from our web site as soon as it has aired for the first time in Canada. Donald was here earlier this year, and shot lots of amazing footage. We’ll be interested to see what parts actually made it in once he cuts it down to an hour special!

Beyond the television projects, things are going strong at the McBride Magic & Mystery School. Our Extended Master Class in July is sold out, and the one in August is filling up quickly. After the great response we had after the first few of these extended classes, and always building on what we’ve learned, we’re expecting these classes to be our “best ever.”

In the fall we have three really exciting events, one of which is brand new for us: The first is the “Magic & Meaning” conference with special guest Robert Neale. This conference, in many ways, carries on the traditions of The Mystery School, which we haven’t done for several years now. The focus on the underlying meaning and reasons for doing our magic, on building our connections with our fellow magicians, and on a somehow deeper exploration of magic and what it means to be a magician all make this a truly special event.

Following Magic & Meaning we will have our second annual “Magic for Medical Professionals.” The response to this class last year was strong, and we learned a lot. We expect this year’s class, featuring special guest Dr. Jay Ungar, to be an even bigger success, with lots more hands on magic and applications for using magic in your practices. Finally, we’ve just added “21st Century Mentalism,” with special guest Ross Johnson. This is the one I’m personally looking forward to most, as I have a long and abiding interest in mental magic.

I’ve really only touched on what’s happening here – please go to www.magicalwisdom.com to learn all about each of the new classes.

Thanks for bearing with me for all the news while Jeff is away in Austria.

Best wishes.
Tobias Beckwith
tobias@yourmagic.com