News of a new show coming to the Magic Research Group!

The Magic Menagerie – Todd Landman

…truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion…’
-Tennessee Williams

Harking back to his youth growing up in Hemlock Hollow, Pennsylvania, Dr Todd Landman explores the notion of re-enchantment through the medium of magic and mind reading. His early days were spent as a young magician exploring the virtues of the Hollow while practising and honing his skills as a conjurer.

Re-enchanting the self…
His intellectual journey led him astray from these important roots, but through life in a small English village he finds them again and shares with you an extraordinary and inexplicable set of demonstrations that simply defy rational explanation.

Part conjuring, part autobiography, and all magic in its widest sense.

‘We all start knowing magic. We are born with the whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow path and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.’
-Robert R. McCammon

What is magic?
The setting is a 1930s front room, adorned with polished furniture filled with boxes, goblets, and objects from a bygone era. Questions are asked and themes are explored. From glass beads plucked from thin air to memories extracted from the deepest corners of your mind, from stories of 1900 London to Dante’s Inferno, from amazing close-up conjuring to the importance of community during World War II, The Magic Menagerie is a mélange of delightful deception that delves into life’s bittersweet moments.

What can you rediscover about yourself?
This is a different kind of magic, one borne of deep reflection and a commitment to understanding whether we can rediscover the ‘whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us.’

Saturday 7th February at 7.30pm
Milton Theatre, Studio 1
The University of Huddersfield
Queensgate, Huddersfield
HD1 3DH

Tickets £8.00 / £4.00 (conc.)

For further details and to book please contact The Box Office: miltonboxoffice@hud.ac.uk