Arts Performing Magic Magicians

“That second butterfly is just like a technological leap of the highest magnitude,” Ben says with a laugh, taking a break from rehearsals last Wednesday. A famous Japanese magic trick, passed from conjurer to conjurer through the centuries, Ben learned it from a fellow magician in exchange for revealing one of his own secrets. “You won’t see anybody else, probably in the Western world, do it. Like a lot of the stuff in the show. I have a lot of friends who are magicians, but — hopefully I’m not being too immodest — I don’t think there’s another magician in the world who could actually do this show. Period. None of them. But that’s not to say I could do theirs, either.” in 2004, the longest gap in the 50-year-old magician’s career. Lest you think he’s been sitting on his wand, Ben has kept busy writing books, publishing a quarterly magazine on magic history, and running Magicana, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the advancement and exploration of magic as a performing art. The 90-minute show takes its title from Giambattista della Porta’s famous tome, first published in 1558, the first book to describe optical illusions. “I think this is the best work we’ve ever done,” he says. “I’m at a point in my life where I’m hopefully hitting my prime.