“We were standing with two men at one end of a long glass display case full of sunglasses and wallets and watches. Edoardo had one of the men pick a card. He showed it to us and put it back in the deck. He banged on the glass and told the man to go to other end of the case, unlock and open it. The man reached in, pulled out an envelope, and the card was in it. Edoardo never moved. It was crazy. I’d never seen anything like it.” —Bromfield junior Ben L’Ecuyer
“A kid was changing the wheels on his skateboard. He had all four wheels off and had put two of them on a TV stand. Edoardo grabbed a wheel in each hand and banged them together. When he released them, there were four wheels. It was jaw-dropping.” —Bromfield sophomore Ryan Ashe
Edoardo the Illusionist (Photo courtesy of Gregory Rosperich)
These eyewitness accounts describe the work of illusionist Edoardo Pignataro, who will be performing in the early morning hours of May 18 during Celebration 2013, Bromfield’s alcohol and substance-free after-prom party. Pignataro, who currently does seven shows a week in Boston, is not charging for his appearance in Harvard. He says Celebration sounds like a great event and is certainly a “great cause” in which he is happy to join the kids. He has been personally affected by drunk driving. During six years he spent in Puerto Rico, where the drinking age is 18, he lost a number of friends who were themselves driving while drunk or who were killed by another person who was.
Magic ‘outside the box’
Speaking by phone with the Press recently, Pignataro said he is looking forward to sharing what he does with the juniors and seniors at Celebration, entertaining them with something new and making them wonder. His intention in his work is to make people think outside the box, to challenge their imaginations. Often, Pignataro invites people in the audience to do a trick; he makes it work, even though the performer has no idea how it is happening. At Celebration he will walk around doing close-up tricks and then do a stage performance for the larger audience. He likes mixing it up and keeping everyone engaged and entertained. “I love sharing what I do,” he says.
As a child living in Italy, Pignataro was not at all impressed with the magic he saw on TV; in fact he could easily do all of the tricks himself. He began experimenting to see how far he could go in bringing the sleight-of-hand and the psychological together. He discovered he was very good at “reading” people and that once he figured out a person’s thinking pattern, he knew how to use sleight-of-hand to trick that person. He went “public” with his magic at age 14, first practicing on his friends. Using his understanding of them, he found he could trick each in a different way. As they grew up together, his magic changed as they did. Now, after 10 years, he can engage in what seems like casual talk with a person and in a matter of minutes, make that person think of a certain card, which Pignataro will then “guess” or make appear in some other place.
Asked if magic runs in his family, Pignataro replies that he is the only magician. His father is a musician, and so they are both entertainers. A perhaps closer connection is with his grandfather, who was a businessman. “He could read people,” says Pignataro, who sees a connection between reading someone to know how to sell him a product and reading a person to see how to make an illusion work. In both cases the person feels he is acting freely but is actually being manipulated.
Pignataro uses a combination of illusion, sleight-of-hand, hypnosis, and psychological and energy manipulation to create his more than 1,000 tricks, all of which are original. Many of them include the use of cards, but in ways that are fresh. He can move things—like an ice cube or the buttons on an elevator—and levitate himself; he can make things appear that weren’t there before. One of his most famous feats uses body energy. He takes a person’s finger and bends it back to a 90-degree angle; the person feels no pain whatsoever.
A love of skeptics
Pignataro admits he has some nervousness with every performance. He can “do a million great tricks,” he says, “but messing up just one throws off the whole mystique.” It’s not like a musician playing a wrong note; for a magician, a wrong move is a catastrophe. Surprisingly, Pignataro loves skeptics, and if he senses one in the audience he plays to that person because if a skeptic is won over, Pignataro is all the more validated.
Edoardo Pignataro not only performs his magic, he lives it. His hands are in constant motion. He practices eight hours a day, every day, and is always looking for new tricks. Before each event, he has some set ideas, but the performance itself is highly improvised. It’s a new show every time; he wants people’s minds always in motion. It bothers him when people get angry or frustrated at his tricks; he wants them to enjoy the illusions and be entertained.
Okay. But how did that card get into the envelope inside a locked glass case?
