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Spotlight feature in the MAGIC ANNEXE

Here is a recent nice article about your truly.
http://chronicle.durhamcollege.ca/story.php?id=5080&issue

Magician wins international competition

Magician Richard Forget recently won the International Brotherhood of Magicians stage competition and the Mandrake D’or, an award given annually to the elite group of magicians who have achieved a highest degree of skill and showmanship.

When Richard Forget was eight years old, he wanted to be Harry Houdini.

After getting a magic kit for Christmas, he begged his parents to take him to the Houdini Museum on Niagara Falls' Clifton Hill. "I always assumed his life was on the line with every stunt that he did," the Scarborough magician recalled last week.

Years of polished stage performances in Europe and Asia have given Forget a taste of the international fame the long-departed Houdini had, though in Canada, he admitted, "you wouldn't know me from your mailman."

This summer, Forget won first prize at an International Brotherhood of Magicians stage competition in Nashville. Then he was awarded a Mandrake D'or, or Golden Mandrake, in France.

Those awards from the French Academy of Illusionists are given out on a two-hour taped special, broadcast this week, on which Forget performs. "They call it the Oscars of magic," he said.

Despite his early preferences, it was the Canadian magician Doug Henning, not Houdini, who had a lasting influence as Forget grew to adulthood presenting magic to his extended family.

Clips of the late Henning once played on video loops at the now-vanished Houdini Museum. In the tie-dyed 1970s, when a magician's top hat and tails "didn't transfer" for audiences, Henning ushered in a new vision of magic in style, said Forget.

The tall Forget has a classical "leading man" look on stage, but he's a "techno-magician" of modern methods, relying on manipulation to make objects appear and re-appear.

In An Urban Phantasy, he centres his act around a public telephone and in News of the World, he makes a newspaper come to life. Both acts are set to music - it means language is no audience barrier - and are done as theatre pieces, Forget said, not a series of disconnected tricks.

In China, where magic is appreciated "almost like it's new," Forget signs autographs. This month he was in Chengdu, a city at the centre of last year's Sichuan earthquake, and he will return to China in November.

But Forget's ironically had to work harder in Canada, where, he said, "magic has sort of fallen into the category of clowns and jugglers. As an artistic endeavor, it's a harder sell."

In a time of seamless special effects, magic still has a future, but not always in television, he said. "Magic is a live art; it's something to see live."

Forget endured early lean years, performing at "a million birthday parties," store openings, bar mitzvahs, recreation centres. But whether there were five or 500 people watching, in his head, he saw every show as taking place in Toronto's Massey Hall. "Every audience is a good audience."

Forget tells aspiring magicians not to bother learning tricks from YouTube videos or other internet sources. "You can learn secrets but you learn diddley squat about how to perform," he said."I always say learn acting, learn movement, learn theatre."

Go to a magic shop (there are still a couple in Toronto) and speak to magicians. Read books, then maybe get a DVD, Forget advised. "Nobody's ever going to pay you to see a trick; they pay to see you."

Mike Adler - Inside Toronto