Magic Silk — 30cm Square
$12.99Beginner
← The effects
Silk Magic
Squares of fine silk produced from nowhere, vanished, knotted, coloured and changed — the material that makes stage production possible.
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Performs
- Stage, Parlor, Close-Up, Corporate
- Type
- Appearance
What they see
The effect from the front
A hand is shown empty and a silk appears in it. Then a second, a third, a stream of them, then one far longer than anything that could have been concealed.
Silks knot themselves while held at arm's length. Two separate ones tie together in mid-air. A white one pushed into a fist comes out red.
What makes silk work on stage is physical: it compresses to almost nothing and opens to fill a space, so a production reads from the back row and the load reads nowhere. No other material does both.
Provenance
Where it comes from
Silk work grew with the Victorian and Edwardian stage, and the fine, closely-woven silk that made it practical was an industrial product before it was a magical one.
The great manipulation acts of the early twentieth century — the dove and silk workers, the Chinese-costumed acts of Ching Ling Foo and Chung Ling Soo among them — built whole routines from production and vanish, and the vocabulary of modern stage manipulation still comes from that period.
Learning it
What it takes
A broad category rather than one trick, and the range inside it is wide.
A single production from a thumb tip is a beginner's effect learnable in a day. A full manipulation routine — continuous production, colour changes, a streamer finish — is years of work and the stuff of competition acts.
What every level has in common is laundry. Silks crease, hold folds, pick up dirt from hands and pockets, and a creased silk telegraphs where it has been. Performers who use them seriously own far more than they need and iron them.
What you need
Props for the Silk Magic
Next
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