“I try and get that little moment,” Ulric says. “Even if it only lasts for a bit, the emotion that it brings will stay forever, of not understanding how something is possible. It’s pretty cool. Some people fight it, but if you do your job well, you win over the spectators in just playing along, essentially, in enjoying not understanding something – even if it’s only for that hour.”
In his second trip to the Melbourne Magic Festival, Ulric promises a no-holds-barred onslaught into the otherworldly with his show Hard Core Mysteries. An updated version of his smash-hit, sell out performance at the Perth Fringe World Festival, it’s a wild, multifaceted ride of entertainment that will inspire awe and keep you guessing.
His illusory antics include mentalism, slight-of-hand, escape, hallucinations (“all perfectly legal”, he assures me) and even a hint of hypnotism, drenched in a wicked wit. He likes the thrill of taking risks, and that can often yield some amusingly unpredictable results – much like what happened at last year’s Magic Melbourne Festival.
“I do a lot of metal-bending,” Ulric reflects. “Really visual hallucinations where things look like they’re floating or bending before the eyes of the audience. I had this old lady – she would’ve been 75, perhaps? – and the audience was a pretty small crowd; maybe 50, 60 people. It was dead silence as people were watching this metal bend. I had that right in front of her face, and in front of everyone, she just went, ‘fuck‘. She swore, really loud, because she couldn’t believe it. Everyone cracked up, because for this old, dignified lady, her reaction was just to swear.
“Other times you get people just laughing. Some people just shake their head and they refuse to accept it. They cross their arms and they just say, ‘I want to know how you do it’. Mainly, you get a mixture of laughter and just astonishment, when people don’t say anything, but their jaw drops – literally. Those are my two favourite reactions. But the swearing was a good one.”
Ulric identifies with the principle once uttered by famed French magician, Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin: “A magician is an actor playing the part of a magician”. He sees his pursuit as primarily theatrical, and though he appreciates the internet and film for delivering the wonder of magic to a wider audience, he values the raw awe that the traditional vaudevillian style of stage performance can instill. Presentation is king, and each delicate factor matters if you wish to create that perfect moment of impossibility.
“The reality is that the secrets don’t matter,” Ulric reveals. “Anyone can go to the library, or on the internet and go buy magic, or learn it if they’ve studied well, but it’s how you do it that makes it magic. As a magician, I’ve been studying it for 25 years, and I still get fooled all the time, and I love it. I go and watch good magic, or if I meet a really good magician that – without explaining – shares some of his favourite routines, I will get fooled and I will have that moment of mystery, even if it only last a few seconds, or a minute, or an hour until I do my research or until he jams it with me, and that is invaluable.
So, it doesn’t matter how much secrets may have become a bit more commercialised these days; the reality is that there’s still so much scope to create with magic, but we’ve just got to keep refining the methods, and also, the presentation is a key one. Not everyone is a performer.
“We all want to do it, but then we forget and we grow up, so my job’s to keep that little mystery alive “
BY JACOB COLLIVER
