A MASTERCLASS IN MAGIC FROM THE WORLD'S COOLEST MAGICIAN: DYNAMO In this fully illustrated guide to modern magic, Dynamo shows you how you can perform magic yourself. Learn how to make water freeze instantly, read your friends' minds, make chewing gum float 360 degrees around your head, slice a banana without even touching it, discover superhuman strength and many more mind-blowing illusions. The Book of Secrets will be the first step on an exciting journey for budding magicians, providing hours of breathtaking fun for all the family. #BeTheMagic

A practical, accessible and inspiring guide to using puppetry in theatre - the perfect entry point for anyone looking to use puppets in their productions, to explore what puppets can do, or to develop their puppetry skills. Written by an experienced theatre and puppetry director, Puppetry: How to Do It focuses on the performer and the craft of bringing any puppet to life. No puppet-making is required to use this book: starting just with simple objects, it lays out the skills required to unlock a puppet's limitless potential for expression and connection with an audience. Inside you'll discover fifty practical, easy-to-follow exercises - for use in a group or on your own - to develop elements of the craft, build confidence and help you improve your puppetry through play and improvisation. Also included are sections on different types of puppet, thinking about how the puppeteer is presented on stage and how to direct and devise puppet performances Ideal for actors and performers, for directors and designers, and for teachers and students of all ages and levels of experience, this book will demystify the art of puppetry, and help you become more confident and creative with all kinds of puppets and objects on stage. 'Based on the workshops he developed for training performers for War Horse, Mervyn has written this book to share his craft... the exercises are clear and easily reproducible for many different types of participants... a wonderful gift to the field of puppetry. I hope that it will be used widely to introduce adventurous spirits to this dynamic art form.' Cheryl Henson, President of the Jim Henson Foundation, from her Foreword.

Magical Mathematics reveals the secrets of fun-to-perform card tricks--and the profound mathematical ideas behind them--that will astound even the most accomplished magician. Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham provide easy, step-by-step instructions for each trick, explaining how to set up the effect and offering tips on what to say and do while performing it. Each card trick introduces a new mathematical idea, and varying the tricks in turn takes readers to the very threshold of today's mathematical knowledge. Diaconis and Graham tell the stories--and reveal the best tricks--of the eccentric and brilliant inventors of mathematical magic. The book exposes old gambling secrets through the mathematics of shuffling cards, explains the classic street-gambling scam of three-card Monte, traces the history of mathematical magic back to the oldest mathematical trick--and much more.

Introduction to Puppetry Arts shares the history, cultures, and traditions surrounding the ancient performance art of puppetry, along with an overview of puppet construction and performance techniques used around the world. From its earliest beginnings in the ancient Middle East and Asia, through its representations in Medieval/Renaissance Europe, up until its modern-day appearances in theatre, television, and film, this book offers a thorough overview of how this fascinating art form originated and evolved. It also includes easy-to-follow instructions on how to create puppets for performance and display and an in-depth resource list and bibliography for further research and information. Written for students in puppetry arts and stagecraft courses, Introduction to Puppetry Arts offers a comprehensive look at this enduring craft and provides a starting point for creating a wide range of puppets, from marionettes and hand puppets to mascots and character costumes.

Introduction to Puppetry Arts shares the history, cultures, and traditions surrounding the ancient performance art of puppetry, along with an overview of puppet construction and performance techniques used around the world. From its earliest beginnings in the ancient Middle East and Asia, through its representations in Medieval/Renaissance Europe, up until its modern-day appearances in theatre, television, and film, this book offers a thorough overview of how this fascinating art form originated and evolved. It also includes easy-to-follow instructions on how to create puppets for performance and display and an in-depth resource list and bibliography for further research and information. Written for students in puppetry arts and stagecraft courses, Introduction to Puppetry Arts offers a comprehensive look at this enduring craft and provides a starting point for creating a wide range of puppets, from marionettes and hand puppets to mascots and character costumes.

The Routledge Circus Studies Reader offers an absorbing critical introduction to this diverse and emerging field. It brings together the work of over 30 scholars in this discipline, including Janet Davis, Helen Stoddart and Peta Tait, to highlight and address the field's key historical, critical and theoretical issues. It is organised into three accessible sections, Perspectives, Precedents and Presents, which approach historical aspects, current issues, and the future of circus performance. The chapters, grouped together into 13 theme-based sub-sections, provide a clear entry point into the field and emphasise the diversity of approaches available to students and scholars of circus studies. Classic accounts of performance, including pieces by Philippe Petit and Friedrich Nietzsche, are included alongside more recent scholarship in the field. Edited by two scholars whose work is strongly connected to the dynamic world of performance, The Routledge Circus Studies Reader is an essential teaching and study resource for the emerging discipline of circus studies. It also provides a stimulating introduction to the field for lovers of circus.

Spanning several decades and three continents, Modoc is one of the most amazing true animal stories ever told. Raised together in a small German circus town, a boy and an elephant formed a bond that would last their entire lives, and would be tested time and again; through a near-fatal shipwreck in the Indian Ocean, an apprenticeship with the legendary Mahout elephant trainers in the Indian teak forests, and their eventual rise to circus stardom in 1940s New York City. Modoc is a captivating true story of loyalty, friendship, and high adventure, to be treasured by animal lovers everywhere.

Dance researcher and movement analyst Adair Landborn introduces readers to the ongoing discussion in Spanish scholarship about the links between flamenco dance and bullfighting, and then moves deeper into the heart of these two quintessentially Spanish arts from the perspective of an anthropologist and from her own first-person experience as both dancer and student of bullfighting. Seeing flamenco dance and bullfighting as parallel arts within the same kinesthetic culture, Landborn describes their informal practice in private settings and their emergence as formal rituals in the public bullfight arena and on the flamenco stage. As Landborn discusses key bullfighting techniques and their sometimes direct, sometimes subtle influence on the flamenco dance style, readers are led to a greater appreciation of both arts and a deeper understanding of Spanish culture and worldview.

Freedom, adventure, romance; a spellbound audience, bright-eyed children, rolling drums, a brass band playing lively music; intrepid acrobats in colourful costumes and garishly made-up clowns. The same old stereotypes about the world of the circus are trotted out on many occasions. Over a period spanning more than 15 years, the photographer Oliver Stegmann visited different circuses to take photos of what happens behind the curtains. His muted images attempt to break the usual stereotypes. Again and again, the photographer captured protagonists in moments of unawareness, showing scenes that the audience would normally never get to see from the edge of the ring. Above all, Stegmann is interested in the atmosphere of tense expectation and utmost concentration when the artists are about to perform their hair-raising acts. Using neither colour nor flash, he creates an enigmatic atmosphere reminiscent of expressionist films. For his circus series, Stegmann develops a kind of imagery that has rarely been applied to the small world of the circus as consistently and confidently as in this case. In terms of subject-matter, design, and production, Circus Noir takes a different approach to this genre by adding an entirely unromantic perspective that focuses on the true essence of what it means to work in a circus. Text in English and German.

Costumes are an integral part of any performance, adding believability, conveying setting, or establishing the tone, a fact that is no less true when your performer is a puppet The only book of its kind, "The Well-Dressed Puppet" will show you how to create costumes and accessories tailored specifically for your puppet that will enhance any performance. Gone are the days of ill-fitting store-bought clothing that restrict the movement and use of your puppet. Author Cheralyn Lambeth walks you through every step of the costume-making process with detailed lists of the necessary materials, equipment, and patterns required to create a costume from scratch. She also shares multiple tips and information on how to modify off-the-rack clothing to fit any puppet. Suitable for both beginners and more advanced costumers, "The Well-Dressed Puppet" demonstrates basic sewing and construction techniques while still providing advanced projects for customers who have already mastered those skills.

These two great books of conjuring tricks: includes illusions, puzzles and stunts with 300 step-by-step projects for you to try, in over 2300 photographs. This title includes two fun and accessible step-by-step guides to more than 300 brilliant illusions, tricks, puzzles and stunts, including close-up magic and party tricks. Each fantastic trick is fully illustrated and expertly described, enabling you to amaze your audience with feats such as making someone levitate, walking through a postcard and defying gravity It includes a fascinating history of magic from its origins in ancient Egypt through the 19th and 20th centuries to today, featuring magicians such as David Copperfield and David Blaine. It provides more than 2300 specially-commissioned photographs that guide you through each illusion, trick and stunt, with information on preparation, patter and the performance itself. It is engagingly written by an expert, professional magician and member of 'The Inner Magic Circle'. Nothing delights and amazes more than brilliantly performed magic tricks and this comprehensive new box set contains everything the budding magician needs to put on a dazzling show. From the history of magic to card tricks, stage illusions and much more, these two expertly written books will help you to wow your friends and family. Step-by-step instructions show you how to perform each trick, and close-up secret views show exactly how each is done, along with tips on preparation and the patter you need to accompany it. With these books you can appear to have superhuman strength and x-ray vision, cut a volunteer in two, make everyday objects vanish and reappear, and restore torn-up paper napkins. It provides a special section on putting on a show provides invaluable advice on planning your performance, from selecting a venue to choosing running orders and sample programmes. This exciting and inspiring book collection will provide hours of entertainment for performer and audience alike!

This comprehensive book contains everything the budding magician needs to put on a dazzling show at home. Expert guidance from a professional magician reveals how to perform more than 200 illusions, ranging from party tricks, close-up magic and stage magic to confounding puzzles and awe-inspiring stunts. It reveals how you can make a coin vanish, have x-ray vision, read an audience member's mind and cut a volunteer in two. Whatever your previous experience and skill level, this exciting and inspiring book will enable you to confound and impress friends and family, providing hours of enjoyment for both performer and audience alike.

Explosions in November tells the story of one of Europes leading cultural institutions, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (hcmf), through the eyes of its founder and former artistic director, Professor Richard Steinitz. From its modest beginnings in 1978, when winter fog nearly sabotaged the inaugural programme, to todays internationally renowned event, hcmf has been a pioneering champion of the best in contemporary music.Now Richard Steinitz brings his insider view on the people behind the festival and how they made each year a success. He recalls his encounters with some true giants of music, including Boulez, Berio, Cage, Ligeti, Stockhausen and Xenakis. Discover how the author survived mushroom-hunting with John Cage, how the festival engineered a historic reconciliation between Cage and Pierre Boulez and how a ceiling fitting nearly brought Stockhausens career to a premature end. It is a compelling, inspiring and often entertaining story. Explosions in November reveals the full picture of a festival that continues to surprise, delight and provoke its audiences to this day.

How do Egyptian Muslims celebrate Ramadan? How do Copts - Egyptian Christians - celebrate Easter? What should you expect to find on the table when invited to eat in an Egyptian home? What do you say when an Egyptian colleague sneezes? Exactly what do Egyptians do with a mortar and pestle, a sieve, and a bag of nuts seven days after the birth of a baby? Samia Abdennour, once an outsider from Palestine, now thoroughly at home in Egypt, is here to tell you all about these matters - and many more. In a book that aims to introduce the unfamiliar newcomer or interested foreign reader to the hows, whats, and whys of Egyptians life, the author covers such diverse topics as birth, marriage, and death; religious festivals and fasting; food in the home and on the street; business etiquette and terms of politeness. She describes how some traditions differ between the two religious communities, the Muslims and the Copts, and how some customs are shared by all Egyptians - like the spring festival of Shamm al-Nisim ('smelling the breezes') that goes back to pharaonic times. With "Egyptian Customs and Festivals", you need never be at a loss in a social situation in Egypt - or fail to understand what your neighbors are up to. Illustrated throughout with color photographs of daily life and special occasions, this fascinating and informative book is a must-have for anyone new to Egyptian culture.

The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and voice. In this eloquent book, Kenneth Gross contemplates the fascination of these unsettling objects - objects that are also actors and images of life. The poetry of the puppet is central here, whether in its blunt grotesquery or symbolic simplicity, and always in its talent for metamorphosis. On a meditative journey to seek the idiosyncratic shapes of puppets on stage, Gross looks at the anarchic Punch and Judy show, the sacred shadow theater of Bali, and experimental theaters in Europe and the United States, where puppets enact everything from Baroque opera and Shakespearean tragedy to Beckettian farce. Throughout, he interweaves accounts of the myriad faces of the puppet in literature - Collodi's cruel, wooden Pinocchio, puppet-like characters in Kafka and Dickens, Rilke's puppet-angels, the dark puppeteering of Philip Roth's Mickey Sabbath - as well as in the work of artists Joseph Cornell and Paul Klee. The puppet emerges here as a hungry creature, seducer and destroyer, demon and clown. It is a test of our experience of things, of the human and inhuman. A book about reseeing what we know, or what we think we know, "Puppet" evokes the startling power of puppets as mirrors of the uncanny in life and art.

Magic, Simon During suggests, has helped shape modern culture. Devoted to this deceptively simple proposition, During's superlative work, written over the course of a decade, gets at the aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture. How can the most ordinary arts--and by "magic," During means not the supernatural, but the special effects and conjurings of magic shows--affect people?

"Modern Enchantments" takes us deeply into the history and workings of modern secular magic, from the legerdemain of Isaac Fawkes in 1720, to the return of real magic in nineteenth-century spiritualism, to the role of magic in the emergence of the cinema. Through the course of this history, During shows how magic performances have drawn together heterogeneous audiences, contributed to the molding of cultural hierarchies, and extended cultural technologies and media at key moments, sometimes introducing spectators into rationality and helping to disseminate skepticism and publicize scientific innovation. In a more revealing argument still, "Modern Enchantments" shows that magic entertainments have increased the sway of fictions in our culture and helped define modern society's image of itself.

In its heyday, the American circus was the largest showbiz industry the world had ever seen. From the mid-1800s to mid-1900s, traveling circuses performed for audiences of up to 14,000 per show, employed as many as 1,600 men and women, and crisscrossed the country on 20,000 miles of railroad in one season alone. The spectacle of death-defying daredevils, strapping superheroes and scantily clad starlets, fearless animal trainers, and startling "freaks" gripped the American imagination, outshining theater, vaudeville, comedy, and minstrel shows. This book sheds fresh light on the circus phenomenon. With photographic gems of early circus performers, as well as original posters, lithographs, sideshow banners and engravings from the 16th to 19th centuries illustrating the worldwide roots of the circus, readers are transported to a world of thrill and skill, grit and glamor. Highlights include iconic circus photographs by Mathew Brady, Cornell Capa, Walker Evans, Weegee, and Lisette Model, and little-known circus images by Stanley Kubrick and Charles and Ray Eames.

A chronicle of the "life," times, and travels of the famous puppets, this survey examines Punch and Judy's moral and cultural significance as well as the people who played them behind the curtain. Scholarly yet entertaining, it includes 30 illustrations by Victorian artist George Cruikshank, Dickens' illustrator of choice.

Women and Puppetry is the first publication dedicated to the study of women in the field of puppetry arts. It includes critical articles and personal accounts that interrogate specific historical moments, cultural contexts, and notions of "woman" on and off stage. Part I, "Critical Perspective," includes historical and contemporary analyses of women's roles in society, gender anxiety revealed through the unmarked puppet body, and sexual expression within oppressive social contexts. Part II, "Local Contexts: Challenges and Transformations," investigates work of female practitioners within specific cultural contexts to illuminate how women are intervening in traditionally male spaces. Each chapter in Part II offers brief accounts of specific social histories, barriers, and gender biases that women have faced, and the opportunities afforded female creative leaders to appropriate, revive, and transform performance traditions. And in Part III, "Women Practitioners Speak," contemporary artists reflect on their experiences as female practitioners within the art of puppet theatre. Representing female writers and practitioners from across the globe, Women and Puppetry offers students and scholars a comprehensive interrogation of the challenges and opportunities that women face in this unique art form.

Kicking Sawdust is a series of photos taken from 1988-1992 while on the road with the circus, carnival, sideshows. It is a personal documentation of friends and people Clayton Anderson encountered in his daily life while working and traveling in his family's food business. Shot on black and white film and developed by author while on the road, after hours.

Animal spectacles are vital to a holistic appreciation of Spanish culture. In Transoceanic Animals as Spectacle in Early Modern Spain, Beusterien christens five previously unnamed animals, each of which was a protagonist in a spectacle: Abada, the rhinoceros; Hawa'i, the elephant; Fuleco, the armadillo; Jarama, the bull; and Maghreb, the lion. In presenting and analyzing their stories, Beusterien enriches our understanding of the role of animals in the development of commercial theater in Spain and in the modern bullfight. He also contributes to growing scholarly conversations on the importance of Spain in the history of science by examining how animal spectacles had profound repercussions on the emergence of the modern zoo and natural history museum. Combining scholarly content analysis and pedagogical sagacity, the book has a broad appeal for scholars of the early modern Spanish Empire, animal studies scholars, and secondary and postsecondary instructors looking for engaging exercises and information for their Spanish language, culture, and history students.

Indonesia is blessed with vast and unique arts and culture-a result of being a melting pot of different cultures that ever visited the archipelago for centuries. One form of performance art that came from China and was warmly received in Java is Wayang Potehi. This hand-puppet performance art went through its own up and downs over the centuries from political circumstances and, yet, today still maintains it original format despite the fact that majority of the artists are now Javanese."WAYANG POTEHI OF JAVA" is a premium coffee-table book that aims to introduce the artistry of the past and current artists to the contemporary Indonesian and international audience. It is also a form of an invitation for Indonesians to appreciate and be proud of Wayang Potehi as a part of the nation's art and culture.Wayang Potehi is an iconic art form of Chinese puppet theatre in Indonesia. In the beginning, its existence was constrained mostly within Chinese temples in Java. But in 1967, the repression of Chinese under the New Order government in Indonesia for 33 years restricted and prohibited its activities and almost killed its existence. Wayang Potehi came back alive during the presidency of Abdurrahman Wahid and now it can be performed without any restrictions.Today, people-Chinese or non-Chinese, elderly or young-are keen on watching Wayang Potehi shows. Many of them idolize and discuss over its main characters such as Sie Djin Koei, Tek Djing, Kwan Kong etc. It slowly gains its popularity back. In rural areas such as Mojoagung, Gudo and Blitar, Wayang Potehi shows are watched mostly by natives. Even the artists (from the puppeteer, musician and puppetmaker) are majority Javanese and Moslem. Although the number of puppetmakers is pretty small, they all have their own unique perception and taste in their creations.Wayang Potehi went through a tremendous adaptation with the local culture during its proliferation and evolution in Java influenced by societal trends and power in politics. Nonetheless, the format and the elements of its original, root traditions embedded in the structure and the flow of the performance, as well as the look and shape of the puppets are still well maintained. It all formed what is called today: WAYANG POTEHI OF JAVA.

In the summer of 2008, nearly fifty thousand people traveled to Nevada's Black Rock Desert to participate in the countercultural arts event Burning Man. Founded on a commitment to expression and community, the annual weeklong festival presents unique challenges to its organizers. Over four years Katherine K. Chen regularly participated in organizing efforts to safely and successfully create a temporary community in the middle of the desert under the hot August sun.

"Enabling Creative Chaos" tracks how a small, underfunded group of organizers transformed into an unconventional corporation with a ten-million-dollar budget and two thousand volunteers. Over the years, Burning Man's organizers have experimented with different management models; learned how to recruit, motivate, and retain volunteers; and developed strategies to handle regulatory agencies and respond to media coverage. This remarkable evolution, Chen reveals, offers important lessons for managers in any organization, particularly in uncertain times.