Magicians get their hocus pocus in focus
ALL eyes are on the white haired man levitating in the mall. His body appears to hover above a table. Smiling widely, a woman waves her arms around the man’s body to indicate that no strings are being pulled.
One boy audibly gasps. Beside him a girl with pigtails claps her hands in delight. An elderly man adjusts his portable chair and rubs his eyes as if in disbelief.
It’s the September school holidays and this may just be the most exciting thing to ever have happened outside the NZ Post Shop at Christchurch’s Hornby.
Later, Greg Britt, better known by his stage name Elgregoe, admits it’s his first successful attempt at levitating in public.
Behind the curtain, his exotic talking parrots Ruby, Zazu and Ecce preen themselves. Fluffy Bum sits contentedly, eyes half closed. It’s the fourth rabbit bearing this name to be triumphantly plucked from Elgregoe’s top hat during his magical 35 year career.
Elgregoe and wife, Sue, have been married for 34 years. He still calls her his ‘‘beautiful assistant’’.
Together – the Britts, their birds and Fluffy Bum – travel to schools around New Zealand for eight months each year in a specially designed van donated by Trustpower to perform an anti-bullying show, You’ve Got the Power.
‘‘We’ve performed it for one million people since we started doing the antibullying show 17 years ago,’’ he says.
‘‘We do 350 shows a year, I’ve got a couple of schools to do today, but this week there’s a private function, a 60th birthday party, two other birthdays and a show in a retirement home.’’
His life in ‘‘edutainment’’ began when he sold his magic shop 17 years ago.
‘‘I was sitting at home with not a lot to do. I was working three nights a week in restaurants and a principal rang me and said they had a bullying issue at the school. He wanted me to see if I could talk to the kids and make bullying disappear. I was quite well known at the time, having been on the Son of a Gunn TV show with Jason Gunn.’’
Back then, he says, people didn’t talk about bullying and there was an attitude of ‘‘harden up and be a man’’.
‘‘I did some research, put a programme together and went and did it. He gave me a glowing reference. I got on the fax machine – in those days there was no email – and sent the letter of recommendation to every school. I ended up playing 200 schools in Canterbury and that’s how it started.’’
He is often invited to lecture in America on edutainment at conferences like KIDabra and is pleased to inspire other magicians to enter the field.
‘‘I started doing magic at high school. I left school at 15, having failed in every subject. I got the NZ Order of Merit for education, which is interesting as I failed that.
‘‘My old high school, St Andrew’s College, gave me an award for performances in 2012, and it was funny because when I was there they kept telling me to put my tricks away and get on with the real work. Thirty years later I was back at the school getting an award for the tricks which became my real work.’’
Each year children send hundreds of posters to Elgregoe. ‘‘They come up with some amazing poems. One boy came up with one about a keyboard warrior.
‘‘A poem written by a kid who has been affected by bullying can say a lot in 10 lines.’’
Wherever Elgregoe goes, someone will come up and say, ‘‘if you were a real magician you’d make my wife disappear’’.
‘‘They always think they are the first person who has ever said that,’’ he sighs.
In 35 years of making a living as a magician, working daily with both children and animals, Elgregoe has had his fair share of funny moments.
‘‘In Nelson I did a show at a college there. When I produced the rabbit at the end of the show, it peed all over the audience. Fluffy Bum got about 15 feet into the crowd. After the show a guy said to me ‘great gag with the squirter in your hand, you got us all there’. Fluffy Bum disgraced himself.’’
Next up for Elgregoe is a magicians convention in Wellington this weekend. ‘‘Every two or three years we have a national conference. The last one was in Christchurch in 2011. For this one there will be around 150 magicians from around New Zealand and Australia. There are competitions, dinners and performances.’’
He says magic is undergoing a ‘‘real revival’’. ‘‘For years it dropped off but now there’s Dynamo and David Blaine and there’s a new interest in magic from a different generation.’’
If you ring Elgregoe and he’s not home, his voice message will tell you the magician has ‘‘disappeared for a
while’’.