Vancouver magician Travis Bernhardt’s new show, Unpossible!, may stick out on the theatre-rich lineup of the annual UNO Festival, but his one-hour long demonstration of psychological trickery was written in the same spirit of adventure as the rest of the acts in the 17th annual festival of solo stage performers.
“I wrote this show to challenge myself and to do something that was a bit of a stretch for me, so it involves some material and skills that are at the edge of my comfort zone,” says Bernhardt. “It’s difficult to talk about the show without giving anything away. I think surprise is an important part of the show, but I’d say it’s a mixture of slight of hand and mind-reading.”
Bernhardt has been doing magic for 10 years and has been a full-time professional for six, doing everything from corporate shows, birthday parties and performing at nightclubs and bars. But with Unpossible!, a show he toured on the Fringe Festival circuit in 2013 but didn’t make it to Victoria, Bernhardt has created a show with material that has more layers and takes longer to play out than the simple, direct tricks he uses in his day job.
“In a theatre show where people have already bought a ticket and agreed to be there that gives me a little more leeway to make a statement about what I’m doing and do material that has more layers to it,” he says. “I’m in the room for an hour trying to do stuff that requires an audience’s attention. So I enjoy doing the richer, more layered material in this show, because it’s the only place I get to do it.”
Mostly self-taught, Bernhardt says it’s hard to explain how he learned his magic and mind-bending skills, other than to explain that magicians, although sometimes secretive about their work, are happy to share their knowledge with others who are keen to master it.
“I’m asked a lot about how you learn magic and it’s a difficult question because every magician is, to some degree, self-taught,” he explains. “Magicians are generally pretty solitary, alone-in-your-workshop sort of people. But there’s a huge tradition in magic of writing down your work, so I’ve got bookshelves full of giant, heavy books about magic and if something catches your eye, you just practice it.”
Similar to flipping through a cookbook to choose that night’s dinner, Bernhardt says he uses his extensive library of magic books to pique his interest and as a starting point for a gourmet trick with his flair and style.
“The trick then becomes how do you make it your own,” he says. “It’s true you can pick stuff out of a cookbook and throw together a meal and everybody will be happy, and certainly a lot of magicians do that, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But the more I’m into this, the more I want to do stuff that has a little more of a twist to it, a little more my own, and that’s the biggest challenge.”
After undertaking Unpossible! on the Fringe circuit last year, Bernhardt says by the end of the tour he had the show pretty much airtight, but that doesn’t mean that its smooth veneer doesn’t have some hidden blemishes behind the scenes.
“There’s a lot in this show that can go wrong, and there’s a lot of scrambling in my own head about how I’m going to get out of certain situations,” he says. “It hasn’t gotten to the point where I’ve been stuck, but there are definitely a couple of points in the show that are risky and that haven’t worked every time. And since I’m doing the one show at UNO, we’ll have to see…”
It’s the kind of pressure that could crack most performers: this just isn’t remembering your lines and where you need to be on stage; this is highly involved trickery that is very difficult to execute, with a different audience every night. One wrong move, from Bernhardt or audience participants, and the whole show is a bust.
“It’s terrifying and stressful, of course. It’s the worst,” confirms Bernhardt. “One of the things about magic is that you are trying your hardest to create this idea of spontaneity, but at the same time it can’t be spontaneous because everything has to go according to plan, so it’s this crafted illusion of spontaneity. So I wrote this show with the idea that there would be some chance of disruption from the audience, and I would have to figure out on the spot how to react to that.”
Unpossible! (at UNO Fest)
7:30 pm Friday May 30
Metro Studio, $20
ticketrocket.org/uno2014