Focus on: Magical Bones

What is magic? And does it mix naturally with breakdancing? Jenni Ajderian speaks to Richard Essien aka Magical Bones

feature (edinburgh) | Read in About 3 minutes
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Magical Bones
Published 24 Jul 2019

As an art form with a history spanning thousands of years, magic performances often centre around the same kinds of tricks: appearances, disappearances, transportations and transformations.

The real trick for each magician is to make it unique. Misdirection is misdirection – instead of waving a magic wand, you could sprinkle magic dust, or maybe do a magical backflip.

Enter Magical Bones (Richard Essien), a professional hip-hop dancer-turned-magician, who melds his two passions together to create a far more dynamic performance than your average close-up act. "What I want to do is find ideas that naturally fuse together," he says.

His history of combining street magic and escapology with breakdancing speaks for itself. "I used to do this thing where I would do windmills out of a strait-jacket, and it naturally verged on dance. It feels like a natural way, for me, of doing this standard trick. I wanted the organic feeling of two abstract ideas combining."

This move from pure dance over to magic occurred naturally in Bones’ professional life. From dancing in music videos and commercials he moved into the cast of circus troupe ​Afrika Afrika​: "I was among a whole range of talented performers with a whole different range of skills, and that encouraged me to play around with ideas. When I was on set, I’d always have a pack of cards with me. People would say to me 'you’re quite good at this stuff, you should look at trying to fuse these ideas together' and I thought, why not?"

Another element of Bones' background comes to the fore in his debut hour at the Fringe, ​Black Magic.​ In the show, Bones aims to explore the history of black people performing tricks, and wants to break down the negative connotations of the show’s title. "There’s stuff on voodoo that I look into, and misconceptions about that, and also the history of black magicians – not many people know about that."

In particular, Bones namechecks Henry "Box" Brown, a former slave who escaped captivity by posting himself in a wooden crate to abolitionists, and then used his freedom to perform magic and give anti-slavery speeches.

But it’s not all about daring feats and picking the right card. Bones believes his dance-and-magic act works so well because both elicit the same feeling. "Magic is defined as the art form, and then we have the actual feeling: it’s the wow factor. I believe that that can be experienced whether it’s Whitney Houston singing that amazing high note or Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk. It’s that feeling of astonishment.

"Obviously the art of magic creates that feeling with deceptions, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be magic. When you watch someone breakdancing or body-popping, the way they can manipulate their body gives this visual illusion. There’s an element of mystery and magic to it. It’s all related."