Transference Credits and Inspiration

I have long been interested in effects which focus on the participant being the ‘star
of the show’. Between 2000 and 2002, taking Gary Kurtz’s Sharing the Credit
(Continuations and Departures, 1989) as a starting point, I worked out my routine
Limelight which is a multiphase routine focusing entirely on the participant
accomplishing the magic. I eventually released Limelight as a manuscript in 2015.

In 1997 Francis Menotti devised his effect Sign Language (later released in his
booklet Mouthing Off, 2011) an effect where the performer has duct tape over his
mouth and the audience read out instructions from flip-chart signs, ending with a
selected card being in the performer’s taped-up mouth.

In 2005 Jon Allen released his effect Silent Treatment which went into the
repertoires of many professional performers, including mine. Jon’s effect was
created entirely independently from the Menotti one, but was very similar in effect:
You walk onstage and say nothing. You simply open a flip book that introduces you.
Through only words on the signs, you communicate with the audience in an
hilarious way, and have a card thought of. The big finish? You remove the thought-of
card from your mouth!

The Menotti method was great for stage, and the Allen one was perfect for close-up
or cabaret. Both methods require you to force a card.

Then in early 2012 my good friend Angelo Carbone sent me his brand new effect
Cue The Magic. Here is the effect: You ask your audience who would like to become
a magician and perform their very own trick. A volunteer joins you on stage and you
ask them to read out the script on the cue cards you are holding. During the routine,
a second volunteer comes up on stage who freely names ANY playing card.
Eventually when the last cue card comes into view an envelope is seen which
contains the freely thought of playing card.

For me, this improves on the Menotti and Allen effects in three ways: the performer
can communicate (since his mouth isn’t taped up and/or got a folded up card in it),
the selection is a genuinely free choice and, most importantly, it is the participant
who accomplishes the effect, not the magician.

Throughout the late 2000s I had been developing several Limelight-lite effects*;
single tricks much shorter than the Limelight routine, but still featuring the
participant apparently accomplishing the magic. I have long been a fan of that
concept, and so as well as my own material, I was also regularly using similar
material by other creators. Notably, a Terry LaGrould trick called Spectator Guesses
Better (Apocalypse Vol. 16-20 (Vol. 16, No. 9) and a Jack Parker trick called P.O.V.
(52 Memories, 2007), both of which feature the ‘participant as magician’.

So when Angelo released his Cue The Magic it was a no-brainer for me to use it.
Towards the end of 2012 I had the idea of transferring Angelo’s script onto my iPad
rather than using the cue cards, but couldn’t successfully solve the method of
revealing the selection without using the script boards. So I went back to Jon Allen’s
trick and adapted that to the iPad. Without any knowledge of what I was doing, in
2014 Jon himself released a digital version of Silent Treatment, which was optimised
for tablets and smartphones.

Inspired by José Carroll’s Instructions (52 Lovers, 1988) and an unpublished effect by
Sébastien Clergue, for several years I had also been experimenting with using a
pocket notebook (specifically, my SpyPad notebook) as a set of instructions for the
participant to perform a trick either on me individually or on the audience as a
whole.

In early 2013 all of these thoughts coalesced and I came up with several effects
where a hybrid of Jon, Angelo and my own scripts were displayed on my iPad using a
‘Prompter’ app. I soon realised that the app was unnecessary and simply made pdfs
of the relevant instructions which could be swiped through. When I got my new
smart phone later that year it featured a much larger screen so I retired the iPad and
started using just the phone.

After using the T Prime effect for a year so (occasionally throwing in the marked
deck version at conventions just to fool magicians!) I then worked out the Double
handling and the ACCAN handling. The Rainbow version was developed after I read
Wayne Dobson’s Rainbow (More Look No Hands, 2013). In researching the exact
credit citations for Transference, I also discovered that Mark Fitzgerald also
developed a trick very similar to the marked deck handling, called Turnabout (Steve
Beam’s Semi-Automatic Card Tricks Vol. 9, 2015).

So thanks to all of these stellar creators without whom Transference wouldn’t exist:
Gary Kurtz, Francis Menotti, Jon Allen, Angelo Carbone, José Carroll, Sébastien
Clergue, Wayne Dobson and Mark Fitzgerald. I am a big fan of all of them and if you
see the name of any of these gentlemen on a book or product, it will definitely be
worthy of your attention.

* A collection of these Limelight-lite pieces will likely be published in early 2020.