 Booting 2020 away with the gusto of Music Hall legend Marie Lloyd kicking off a special Spurs vs Variety Artistes football match in 1913!
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In September I did a show called 'An Afternoon with Ada Campe' at the Phoenix Arts Club in London. It was the longest bit of live performance I'd done since February, and was packed full with new material including a socially distanced magic trick and some songs - the first time Ada had sung on stage. It was great fun - and a second show called 'A Late Afternoon with Ada Campe' happened at Above the Stag Theatre in Vauxhall in November - simultaneously my first and last live appearance that month due to the implementation of the second lockdown in London.
After both shows I had a sort of post-show 'hangover' that lasted for days - the rush and excitement of performing live again and packing in so much new material at once was wonderful, but whereas in pre-COVID times I was used to finishing Ada shows with a great release of tension, for both of these the tension seemed to stay in my body... presumably because the chance to perform live has been so rare during 2020 that I didn't want to let the feeling or memory of it go.
Part of the joy of research is finding surprises in archives, newspapers, autobiographies and ephemera.
Often these stories don't fit the narrative of whatever writing task is at hand at that moment and so get forgotten, but since 2017 I've been thrilled to give many of them a wider audience on BBC Radio 3's Time Traveller series - broadcast every morning just after 10am as part of the live Essential Classics programme on Radio 3 and then subsequently collated into themes for the Time Traveller podcast. Through this series I've been able to tell over twenty stories from the past about magic, art, sport, theatre, music, dance, and of course the suffrage campaign.
This article was published in the Observer newspaper on 24th August 2014 - it was originally published by the same paper on 24th August 1986 and is about the vote of the Magic Circle, the International Brotherhood of Magicians, in that year on whether to allow female magicians to become members of the organisation.
I've found myself doing fortune telling gigs as Ada Campe quite a lot recently and it's been really fun researching and even more fun creating my own methods!
I did a lot of research on cold reading and traditional methods of fortune telling - all fascinating stuff. Having also learnt to do and perform a bit of Mentalism in my magic shows helped too. In Glasgow at the Britannia Panoptican - a fabulous old music hall that I heartily recommend you visit - I had my first encounter with a tarot card reader and found it very interesting watching her and seeing how she worked the whole encounter. As it's intended for amusement purposes only I don't use tarot cards or do palmistry or anything that people have heard of and therefore might believe. I've created my own cards and methods which are intended to be so blatantly silly that hopefully no one will take them to heart - although as I've discovered this means that people think I'm double bluffing them and am in fact psychic. I'm not. I'm just interested in people, want to amuse them and have discovered that with enough ambiguity, you can make anything seem relevant. Feedback from events so far includes: "Spookily accurate", " What a fun idea!" "You are a little bit psychic, aren't you?", "Spot on!", "That's amazing!" and "They really are chickens, aren't they!" Basically it involves me telling lots of strangers how lovely they are and to have confidence in themselves... an asset at any event, surely? |
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Naomi Paxton - Researcher and Performer
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