An Artful Collaboration

One thing that children learn at My Magic Hands is that putting on a magic show is a lot of work.

There are tricks to learn, scripts to write, moves to practice, words to say, … and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But it will all be for naught if you don’t have an audience. So, you also have to get people to come to the show… but how?

In our latest My Magic Hands session, Magicana partnered with Harbourfront Community Centre (HFC) to introduce magicians and arts students to the idea of collaborative efforts and production design.

Participants in HFC’s Healthy Choices after-four art program were enlisted to be the designers for the posters and invitations for The Big Show. Other participants where recruited as magicians for Magicana's My Magic Hands. The Big Show is the culmination of the magic program where magicians invite family, friends and members of the community to share their magic and celebrate their accomplishments.

The artists – mostly students from a nearby elementary school – meet after school at HFC. Their task was to find images that would make people think of magic and transfer their thoughts to paper. Posters were displayed on the walls of the community center and a neighbouring school in the weeks leading up to the show.

A second team of artists, this time audio-video specialists (again, part of HFC’s Healthy Choices programming) were also brought in to add a new dimension to The Big Show: large screen projection. Thanks to the arts media students, our magicians will be able to present close-up magic quite comfortably to a larger audience.

This artistic collaboration is the next evolution with My Magic Hands and the Healthy Choices programs at HFC. It adds new layers of education and interactivity to staging The Big Show. Special thanks to HFC program coordinators and instructors Michael Brown, Adeyemi Adegbesan and Neda Skific-Lee and, of course, the multi-talented artists HFC.