THE THEORY OF MAGIC
Teacher, creator, ‘circademic’
Joseph Culpepper loves pranks, has loved them for as long as he can remember: One of his best pranks ever was sending an impostor in his place to his 10-year high-school reunion. The other was convincing two Turkish police officers to pretend to arrest his best friend.
And ever since his best friend — yes, the same one who thought he was being arrested at a youth hostel in Turkey — turned him on to magic as a teenager, he has also loved magic. The two did their first magic shows together when they were 14 and for Culpepper, “magic is always associated with friendship.”
At 18, he started to work in a magic store in his hometown of Sacramento, Calif., that sold everything from magic tricks and juggling equipment to rodeo lassos and exploding pens. He and his boss “would play lots of pranks on each other,” he said.
Fast-forward a couple of decades. Culpepper is 39 and magic remains a big part of his life. He’s doing a two-year industrial post-doctoral fellowship in Montreal at Concordia University’s department of English and at the Cirque du Soleil, working on new ways to practise and experience magic.
Jokingly, he refers to himself as a “circademic.” Seriously, through a program jointly funded by government, academic partners and research partners, he is developing prototypes of pieces of circus apparatus at the Cirque du Soleil’s C:lab, its research and development centre.
As an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Culpepper studied modern literature and language. He minored in French, in a program that required him to learn French to study its literary works. “Whenever I would write an essay on poetry, I would write about poetry as magic spell and the poet as magician,” he recalled. “Magic had already changed my way of thinking.”
As a graduate student at the University of Toronto, he wrote an essay on terms of magic in the writings of Karl Marx — in his descriptions of how capital appears and disappears and is transformed.
His master’s coursework was on language and power — on “how words have the power to do what they say: I call them magic effects,” he said. That led him to consider how magic is adapted across various storytelling media, which became the topic of his doctoral dissertation.
While in Toronto, Culpepper continued to perform magic semi-professionally, and he volunteered teaching magic to kids in a low-income neighbourhood in an after-school program called My Magic Hands.
He was drawn to Quebec after graduate school in part for its thriving contemporary circus industry — a billion-dollar industry, according to Cirque Globale (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), co-edited by Culpepper’s post-doctoral supervisor at Concordia, Louis Patrick Leroux. There is the Cirque du Soleil, with its global presence; there are troupes like les 7 doigts de la main and Cirque Éloize doing innovative work; and the National Circus School of Montreal, the only government-funded elite training facility of its kind in North America.
Leroux, a professor of English and associate dean of research in Concordia’s Faculty of Arts and science, helped to develop contemporary circus studies and research in Montreal.
As a guest lecturer for Leroux’s course on the circus arts, Culpepper gives a brief history of the golden age of stage conjuring between the 1880s and the 1930s.
He is proposing a course on “magic languages — performance and otherwise,” publishing articles and planning an international symposium that will bring together academics, circus performers and practitioners of magic to consider the cultural importance of these variety arts.
As someone doing practice-based research, Culpepper believes it’s important to devote time to performing. He performed at a juggling festival in Waterloo in March, for instance, and in early May, he will be doing magic at an event at the University of Toronto’s Massey College. “Some of the magic that I develop is original, some of it is an homage or a cover in my voice, and some of it is a variation on something that is hundreds of years old,” he said.
He teaches magic to children aged 7 to 9 in an after-school program at College Stanislas in Outremont — “I love it,” he said — and he is an associate researcher and instructor at the National Circus School of Montreal, teaching magic history and its adaptation to the circus arts.
“I have always had a foot in industry and performance and a foot in magic history and academic research and publications related to magic as a cultural phenomenon,” he said. “I might take more of an industry path or more of an academic path — or maybe I will continue to have a foot in each world.”
Oh, and the friend who thought he was being arrested that day in the Turkish youth hostel? Culpepper had cooked up the plan with the front-desk guy, who’d got the two police officers to pretend it was an actual arrest. “I went outside the hostel and came in as if I were discovering the scene,” he recalled. “My friend was saying, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. I have to go down to the station to answer questions.”
Everyone else at the hostel was in on the prank and, eventually, Culpepper confessed. His friend gave him the silent treatment for a time after that, he recalled.
“He got his revenge eventually, but that is another story.”