• 2 weeks ago
David Blaine brings his magic to Abu Dhabi.
Transcript
00:00Choose any one that you want.
00:09Who shuffled these?
00:10You did.
00:11I shuffled them.
00:12Okay, so take one out.
00:13Doesn't matter.
00:14Doesn't matter?
00:15Nope.
00:16Just take one that you want.
00:17The two of diamonds?
00:18Yeah.
00:19Are you sure?
00:20You can change if you're not sure.
00:21It was one I wanted, but no, I want this one.
00:22Okay.
00:23Well, that's good.
00:24That's fine.
00:25So sign it.
00:26Sign it.
00:27Yeah, yeah.
00:28Put a signature on it.
00:30Great.
00:31Okay.
00:32That's good.
00:33I'm shaking.
00:34Now, hold on.
00:35Now, to make sure I don't cheat, can you hold my wrist?
00:38You can hold it.
00:39Yeah.
00:40All right.
00:41See, now I can't do any sleight of hand.
00:42Okay.
00:43So I take your card and I place it, give or take, about middle, okay?
00:48Name a suit other than the suit of your card to eliminate.
00:51So not diamonds.
00:52Hearts.
00:53Hearts?
00:54Yeah.
00:55Okay, so look.
00:56See how it's a deck?
00:58See how I make the cards start to just disappear?
01:01See how the whole deck starts to vanish?
01:03You're not bringing me back.
01:04See, everything disappears except for hearts, because that's what you thought of, of course,
01:08the card that you signed.
01:09Oh, my God.
01:10I don't know.
01:11You can keep the...
01:12Are you kidding me?
01:13David, thank you very much for joining us for an interview.
01:14My pleasure.
01:15First off, is it...
01:16Can I ask to start off with, is this the first time in the UAE, or have you had a sneaky
01:17visit before?
01:18Well, I've been to Dubai before, but this is my first time in Abu Dhabi.
01:28And is it your first time performing here?
01:30It is.
01:31Well, I mean, in Dubai, I would, you know, do what I do, which is just close-up stuff,
01:34but this is my first time performing a live theater show, and it's the beginning of my
01:40actual tour.
01:42So this is the very beginning of something that I've been dreaming about doing for over
01:4720 years.
01:48And in this show, I'm doing back-to-back endurance feats, so it's pretty difficult.
01:52So I've been training for the last couple of months as hard as I...
01:56Fully prepared for it.
01:57Trying to.
01:58Not fully prepared, but trying to get prepared.
01:59It shows.
02:00Behave yourself.
02:01Sorry.
02:02Oh, my goodness.
02:03Stage or street?
02:04Well, this is a combination of the two.
02:06So this is a chance to do close-up magic and street magic-type improvisational stuff, but
02:13as well as stage magic, which is endurance pieces put onto a theater show.
02:19There is some classic type of illusion stuff, which is new for me to do, which is also exciting,
02:26but I think this has a combination of that street feel combined with physical death-defying
02:31challenges.
02:33So it's a combination of everything I've ever worked on in my life.
02:36And do you have a preference?
02:38Which one do you prefer?
02:39If you had to choose one?
02:41Well, I've done the street magic thing for so long, this is a new challenge, so it's
02:46exciting because I haven't done this before.
02:49And I think it's always good to try to recreate what you're doing.
02:52So trying to reinvent as much as you can, otherwise you become lackadaisical and everything
02:57that you do becomes repetitious, even if you're learning new stuff in the same field.
03:02So this is a whole new learning curve for me, and it's exciting because of that.
03:06Just for instance, your ice one.
03:08Did you think, right, I want to do something where I'm encased in ice, and then work the
03:11trick backwards?
03:12That's how I did that one, but they're all different.
03:14But with the ice, I was on an airplane coming back from Jamaica, and it was really hot in
03:20Jamaica, and I started thinking about just a piece of ice with something in the middle
03:27of it.
03:28So that was the beginning of the idea, then how do you get there?
03:30So then I started, that was the original idea, then I started working with an ice sculptor,
03:35and we found out that I couldn't press it, so I needed a little bit of space, and that
03:39had an igloo effect, so it made it possible.
03:41But it was the most difficult one that I've ever done, is the ice specifically.
03:46Anything in particular that's ever gone wrong?
03:48Have you ever been seriously hurt by, because we know that you lost 25 kilos in one of your...
03:5321 point something.
03:54Yeah, I think it was like 56 pounds, what's that, four stone?
03:58That was, that I went into organ failure with, so that was more difficult than I thought.
04:04I just do.
04:05But I think it was to be expected, I just didn't know that that would be the actual
04:08outcome, but I recovered.
04:11So I think all of them have things that go wrong, but they're expected, so you anticipate
04:18the outcome.
04:20And you're left with one card, correct?
04:23One card that we started from before, against your heart.
04:28Yeah.
04:29Let me see it.
04:30You want to see it?
04:31Yeah.
04:32Okay.
04:34Okay, that is geeky as, because we just randomly picked those cards in the car.
04:42How did you even see it?
04:44That is just, that is really weird.
04:48That's the next one then.
04:49Oh my goodness.
04:50That's my way of seeing all the questions ahead of time.