Cards and Strings: A Late Night EG Collaboration

Among the many wonderful experiences at the 7th EG conference last week was an unexpected little bonus at the end.

At about 2am on the final night, I sat down in a hotel room with Jon Luni (videographer), Phillip Shepard (cellist), Charles Yang (violinist), Eric Mead (magician), and about fifteen other assorted friends, volunteers and EG conference goers all pictured above. The following video was the result:

The routine began life quite a while ago as a live performance piece. The idea of adapting it to a live collaboration of music and card manipulation had been bouncing around in my head, and I thought EG would be a great place to try it out. I contacted Phillip and Charles about providing accompaniment for it, and thanks to their enthusiasm and talent we used the piece as one of my five unusual card tricks at the conference.

Jon then came up to me afterwards and suggested he'd like to shoot a video of it. While the piece wasn't designed for video, I figured it wouldn't play too badly, and since Phillip and Charles were up for it we decided to take a few minutes aside to shoot it one night before getting back to the post-conference party.

What began as a quick ten-minute exercise with six of us in a hotel room eventually grew into a multiple-hour hilarious group collaboration as more people kept turning up to hold lights, give suggestions, and generally have a great time.

Had I designed the routine for video I would have approached it very differently, but the final result is still something I'm very happy to have my name on. It's also set my brain on fire with ideas for future evolutions of the concept.

Thank you Jon, Phillip, Charles, Eric, and everyone else involved. It was wonderful little coda to an already amazing conference.

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