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IMMEDIATELY cover the woman without any hesitation. Sure, there will be some movement as the fabric settles around her, but she is alive, isn't she? Unless you have a very interesting monogram boldly imprinted on the fabric, there is no logical reason to hide the woman with it, as I have seen so many illusionists do.
A light-reflecting, glittering (or
shimmery) curtain is almost 100% required to conceal the modus operandi of Asrah. However, this important curtain does not have to be immediately behind the prop. In fact, if the illusion is presented well away from this backdrop the effect is so much prettier. The performer can easily walk around the floating figure and she will seem to be levitating very well away from any curtain or stage masking unit.
Finally, we have adopted the use of an aerial pyro unit when the woman vanishes. It produces a nice shower of sparks, but little noise. It has a momentary blinding effect on the eyes of the audience and insures that no one sees what they shouldn't as the cloth falls. I should also point out that our version does not require the illusionist to pull the cloth from the woman; the cloth just slips off automatically. I always used to have the woman reappear in the audience, running down the aisle, sometimes shouting: "Here I am!" It is interesting to point out that never once did she run around the outside of a theatre and mistakenly enter the lobby of the wrong auditorium and burst into
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a play or concert, shouting and/or firing a blank .22 calibre revolver. Lately, I've taken to holding the cloth with just a puzzled look on my face, shrugging and then remarking: "Easy come - easy go."
However, I've digressed from the portable Asrah which does not require any of this major theatrical hardware. Last fall I asked my friend, Alan Zagorsky of Owen Magic Supreme, to come to Milwaukee for a weekend and to bring one of his Gossamer Flight illusions with him. He brought it as checked baggage; it is that compact and light.
With many of my cast and crew members over on a Saturday night, we set it up in the living room and examined this luxury version of the illusion.
On several of my visits at the Owen facility in Azusa, CA., Les Smith has shown me a couple of dog-earred cardboard cartons filled with a hopeless jumble of piano wire, brass fittings, tiny hinges, and taut cord. These are examples of collapsing Asrah forms that did not make it. I do not want to suggest there were one or two of these; there were literally dozens, representing untold hours of painstaking manual labor. They just didn't work. Every last one had been judged a failure.
What materialized in our living room, though, was something else. I suspect that something was learned from each failure. The Owen form is very lightweight, but extremely rigid. It
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