by bronz » Feb 4th, '07, 18:37
Having heard good things about this DVD I picked it up a couple of weeks ago. I must say it didn't disappoint at all. Pretty much all the routines will require quite a bit of work but when you get them down.... beautiful.
The card stuff wasn't to my taste but then again not much card work does excite me at the moment, if I bothered to learn it I could certainly predict good reactions. In places some of the material also seemed to fall into the category of 'clever' rather than impossible, the Tip Flip being a case in point. It's the sort of thing you see and think 'that's skillful but I know the coin's somewhere in his hand' instead of 'where's that gone?'. After all, if you're genuinely showing your hand empty you display it fingers spread palm up and down, you don't contort your digits as if you're trying to make a particularly elaborate shadow animal. At the end of the day you could do a spider vanish and get a more inexplicable result.
Having said that the ideas and routines presented here are lovely and visual, often look impossible and require the entire gamut of spectator handling without verbal patter (they are designed to mostly be performed in loud environments where speech is partially redundant) and the way that Shoot handles tricky angles in the coins to glass by clever spectator control for example is worth watching the DVD for. That's often said but it's often true too, particularly in this case.
The artist who does not rise, descends.