“Thank You’s” are in place to our following 4 members for their generous contributions that helped us to be able to bring Kiko Pastur to Singapore: Adeline Ng, Ashish Lodhavia, Kenneth Chia and Baharudin.

We had a turnout of 29 people at Kiko Pastur’s lecture on the evening of 18 October 2018 at the Chinese Success Media auditorium at Bras Basah Complex.

Usually we sit in theatre-style, but Kiko had us sit surounding his performing table.

Kiko commenced his lecture by alluding that he could detect the scent of a person through the card he or she chose.  A lady spectator selected a card and then lost it in the deck.  All this was done behind Kiko’s back.  When the deck was given to him, Kiko was immediately able to locate the chosen card by smell!

This was followed by an Ace Assembly type of effect beautifully performed to a musical background.  3 cards were added to each of the 4 Aces to form 4 packets.  One by one, each Ace vanished from its packet, leaving only 3 cards in each packet.  Finally, the 3 indifferent cards in the leader Ace changed into the 3 different Aces.

Kiko spent 40 minutes explaining this effect, not so much to teach the techniques he used, but to establish his performing philosophy and principles.  We learnt the following important lessons from him:

• The principle of perception is more important than the principle of reality, and he illustrated this with the Ose False Cut;
• The concept of delayed action;
• The concept of a vanish is more difficult to accept than the concept of a transformation. That was the reason he made each of the 3 Aces vanish from each pile, leaving only 3 cards in the pile, instead of making an Ace transformed to another card, as in the usual Ace assembly plot;
• The importance of body language and gestures;
• The contrast between a visual action and a thought affects the perception of the audience.

This was followed by a short break where the delegates had snacks and coffee and tea and fellowship with one another.

After the break, Kiko caused each of 4 Aces to spring out of the deck, each one in a special fashion.  He confessed that he usually does not use any gimmick in his card tricks, but in this effect, he resorted to the use of the elastic loop.  Kiko’s handling of the loop was an interesting lesson to all of us.

The next effect was his “Unshuffling Shuffle”.  A deck was shuffled, and a card freely chosen and then lost back in the deck.  Yet the entire deck was found to be in perfect new order.  Here we got to learn Kiko’s famous false riffle-shuffle.

Kiko switched on his music, and narrated a prose as he performed a beautiful piece of visual magic.  The 4 Aces changed to 4-of-a-kind to match each chosen card.  In this narrative, the element of time was deliberately absent, only images were impressed upon the audience’s minds.  Here he expounded the following principles:

• The impact of story-telling in magic;
• When an action is carried out, there is no need for explanation; on the other hand, when something is explained, no action is needed.

In his last effect, Kiko performed a kind of impromptu ACAAN which depended on subtlety rather than on sleight-of-hand.  A borrowed deck was shuffled, and Kiko attempted to memorise the arrangement of the cards.  He changed the locations of some cards, and made a written prediction which was shown to a spectator.  He said his prediction would be correct within an error range of 2 cards.  Someone randomly called out a number between 1 and 52.  Another spectator counted down to this number in the deck.  Unfortunately, the card at this number was not the predicted card.  The predicted card was found 2 cards away from this number, exactly as stated by Kiko earlier!

Kiko did not bring along any products for sale, not even his lecture notes.  He encouraged us to go to his web-site to purchase his videos and downloads.

Kiko’s magic was truly beautiful poetry in motion.  His lecture made us re-think our philosophy in performing magic.