By JESSICA NEU
Miguel Muñoz, World Champion of Magic, opens Liberty Magic‘s 2024-25 season with his show What is Magic for You? Muñoz is a magician, circus artist, and Puntocero co-director. He won the World Champion of Magic (Grand Prix Fism 2018), FISM award (2015), Spanish Grand Prix (2011), FISM Europe 2014, Frakson to the best Magician of the Year 2010 and Grand Prix at White Magic Convention (Russia2014).
He uses his immense talent and unassuming charm to deliver a magical show that intertwines the unusual, the impossible, the imagination, and reality. I want to call forth the title of Muñoz’s show: What is Magic for You? He does not ask, “What is something magical?” or “what does magic mean to you?” Muñoz’s verbiage is deliberate, as his actions and words are subtle yet concise throughout the performance. From the beginning of his show, Muñoz poses this intriguing question with the caveat that some audience members will see something impossible or even extraordinary in his performance. In contrast, others may see nothing at all. He evokes the audience’s sense of imagination and clearly explains that magic is truly in the eye of the beholder. Magic takes on a different definition based on one’s perspective.
Muñoz’s gentle yet endearing approach to his tricks makes his likeability as high as the improbability of his tricks. He makes a series of balls disappear, reappears, change locations, and even multiply.
Muñoz is one of those magicians where even if you think you have an idea of how he may execute a trick, his sleight of hand finesse is so advanced that you cannot be sure of his approach. Perhaps that is magic for you.
As many magicians do, Muñoz calls on audience participation and even dares them to be the ones to do something extraordinary that evening. He can seemingly memorize a deck of cards faster than I can type this sentence – a trick that pays off repeatedly throughout his set. That memorization skill alone can be magic for you.
While Muñoz is undoubtedly skilled in sleight-of-hand tricks, he incorporates a myriad of skills into his 70-minute set. Muñoz is also an experienced juggler, and he uses this skill to show how magic can be so much more than card tricks and vanishing/reappearing objects. He is also somewhat of a comedian. He utilizes pantomime and silent comedy to punctuate his entry into the unusual or absurd with unique illusion tricks. Maybe the unusual is magic for you.
Muñoz certainly saves his most compelling trick for last. As he delicately sits down at the card table, Muñoz uses his gift of storytelling to transport the audience to a place rooted in their own imagination and the fantastical. He equates shuffling and maneuvering a deck of cards to telling a story, and the story becomes more interesting with every shuffle. Muñoz tells the tale of a prisoner who lived in solitary confinement and survived with just his imagination because “to live with imagination is to live free.” What do you hear when you shuffle a deck of cards? Does it sound like the keys to a typewriter? Or footsteps on the stairs? Perhaps raindrops on the roof? Muñoz puts on a masterclass in creating a story centered around the mundane using only your imagination.
I promise you that you will never hear a deck of cards the same way again – just as long as you remember that the “Joker is the link between reality and imagination.” And it is in this space, situated between imagination and reality, that is magic for me.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Pittsburgh Cultural Trust presents Liberty Magic: Miguel Muñoz in What is Magic for You? from now to November 3rd, 2024. Tickets at: https://trustarts.org/production/95823/miguel-munoz-in-what-is-magic-for-you
Categories: Arts and Ideas, Reviews
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