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A Beginner Zoom Course In Conjuring With Oliver Garwood

This Course Will Run over Four Wednesday evenings – the 14th, 21st, and 28th of April and 5th of May from 7:30-9pm. Ticket price is for the full course

Join professional magician, Oliver Garwood, for a beginner’s course in the conjuring arts. Learn the secrets of prestidigitation and legerdemain. No need to buy expensive magic props, everything you need is probably already in a draw at home! Over four 90-minute sessions Oliver will teach you sleight of hand and presentation along with a bit of magical history and probably a story or two, or three. Effects taught will include card tricks, coin vanishing and penetration, rubber band magic and the famous cups & balls trick! If you have ever wanted to be able to amaze and amuse your friends then this is the course for you, or even if you don’t want to do that want to know how the tricks are done then this is still the course for you.

Week One – Card Magic

Types of cards – poker/bridge

Holding and shuffling

Injog/ False Shuffles (card controls)/ Breaks/ Double Lift/ False cut

Simple routine – card between jokers

Forcing – slip force, cross cut (time delay)

Reveals and making a routine (narrative) – ‘moment of magic’

Ambitious card – injog card add, false shuffle, double lift, card in centre final reveal.

Alternatives to cards – business cards, slices of cheese?

Week Two – Impromptu Magic

Betcha’s – fun games to win drinks! 3 glasses, impossible knot

Hunters knot – false knot then routine.

Coin vanish – French drop, retention vanish

Palming coins – classic, finger, Ramsay Subtlety

Pen vanish

Pen & Coin routine

Jumping Rubber Band

Week Three – Parlour Magic

Cups & Balls – history, performance, discussion on cups and ball choices

Paddle Move – knife and dry wipe marker

Grandma’s Necklace – shoe laces and handkerchief

Week Four – Balls and Mentalism

Tissue Paper ball vanish, multiply, ten step routine.

One Ahead Mind Reading Routine

Coin Stack Prediction – multiple out

Equipment Required

Pack of Cards

3 cups

Tin foil

Coins – I will advise on the preceding week what coins and sizes etc.

Handkerchief

Pen and notebook

Rubber band

Knife (not sharp!) – butter knife if possible

Shoelaces (pair of, long as possible)

Cotton thread

Tissues

Viktor Wynd met Oliver a few years ago when he took some lessons and found them wonderful. Oliver Garwood has been a professional entertainer for over 20 years. From managing entertainment in hotels and holiday centres across the UK and abroad he has performed for thousands of enthralled audiences, Oliver was also resident magician at a dedicated magic museum. Oliver has been a keen magician since the age of 8 when received a Paul Daniel’s Magic Set for Christmas, his work in various areas of entertainment has helped hone this skill which he is sharing with you in this beginner’s course in conjuring.

Mark Cocker Master Class On Nature Writing

This is a four-hour seminar, split over two days in one week, to explore some of the techniques of nature writing. We will pay careful attention to language, and also to the power and importance of your initial observations. It is this preliminary work that often determines whether the words you choose will be original, fresh and suggestive.

The other key goal will be to explore how writers select their central theme, create mood and map out the psychological setting and the physical context quickly and in the fewest words. Economy of language is essential, since it is about distilling the essence of a place or season and using a part to evoke the whole scene.

This may be an exercise on nature writing, but it has deep relevance across the genres. All writers draw upon the landscape and the wider environment to create an atmosphere ad to set the scene. The class may be online but we will get as close to the living world as we possibly can.

Instructor: Mark Cocker is a multi-award winning author and naturalist, whose 12 books include Crow Country, Our Place and Claxton. Over the last four decades he has also published more than 1000 essays on nature in national and international newspapers especially the Guardian.

Me and My Shadow: Sympathy with the Devil in Folk Tradition – Jeremy Harte

Making friends with the Devil may sound like a high-risk strategy, but the dark one couldend up being good company – at least for a while. Working together, he’d help his partner magician do good deeds, channel rivers and create new highways. It must be true, because you can still see the works of the Devil in the landscape to this day…

Just as often, however, the two unlikely companions would fall into competitive bickering, matching their strength in simple games and their wit in commercial bets – storytellers loved to create new ways in which an ingenious mortal could get one over on his uncanny friend.

How did rural tradition create these rollicking tales of toxic buddies out of the much darker lore of ceremonial magic? Hell threatens anyone who accepts the Devil’s favour, but this terrible threat is always wriggled out of by a trick condition, a clever wife, or a disintegrating strand of sand rope. Even at the very end, when relations are about to turn nasty, the folk magician finds a burial place that will save him from damnation. (Faustus, on the other hand, was not so lucky.)

The folk Devil is an inconsistent character – frightful and wicked, but also silly, combative, vengeful and vain. It seems that Devil lore was transformed by the English peasantry, an eschatologically insubordinate class who listened to everything preached at them by the holy and the learned, but only heard the parts that fitted their world view. This way of seeing things was much less fearsome than that of the occultists, and much more forgiving than that of the Church…

Jeremy Harte is a researcher into folklore and archaeology, with a particular interest in landscape legends and tales of encounters with other worlds. His book Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape will be published by Reaktion at Halloween this year. Previous books include Explore Fairy Traditions, which won the Katharine Briggs award of the Folklore Society, Cuckoo Pounds and Singing Barrows, and The Green Man. In 2006 he was elected to the Committee of the Folklore Society and has subsequently organised the Society’s Legendary Weekends. Since the foundation of the journal Time & Mind, he has been Reviews Editor. He is curator of Bourne Hall Museum in Surrey.

Your host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

[Image: A man in prison praying to the devil to have him released. Etching by D. Stoop. Credit: Wellcome Collection.]

Magic, Medicine, and the Body in Pre-Modern Europe with Dr. Alexander Cummins

The influence of the magical world – the astrological forces of the shifting starry heavens, the impact of both helpful and haunting wandering spirits, and the myriad of stray witchcrafts – upon our physical bodies has been a perennial concern throughout human history.

In this class, professional diviner, magician, and historian Dr Alexander Cummins will take us through the history and magic of melothesia: the practice of understanding occult influences – from the stars to restless spirits and everything in between – upon the human body.

Such a study begins with the infamous “Zodiacal Man” diagrams so popular throughout Western magic, medicine, and astrology: that were used to chart the underlying causes as well as symptoms of various maladies, distempers, and dysfunctions. These maps of an “occulted anatomy” also provided schema for establishing therapeutic treatments and regimen, and even informed works of magical protection and prevention as well as cure.

Such a class aims to not only celebrate enchantment and magical ways of viewing the body, but also the actual anatomisation of occult philosophy and sorcerous activity themselves. That is to say, not only how magic could be located in the body, but how the body could inform and enrich our engagements with the spirits and sorceries of the world.