Different kind of Crowd Magic...

[dark11kenshin]

so guys i have this small class performance coming up the week after next. now my little dilemma: me and my friends want to perform magic...ok, so that's clear..but we have to perform as a group...i have 25 classmates who are willing to perform.what effect would you suggest which will entail all our participation?something that makes us all look like magicians...i mean, we could perform individual tricks, but we won't have enough stage time nor time to practice...but that would be good too if you could suggest like 5 tricks with 5 people involved in them...by tricks it could be anything, like illusions...no mentalism please nor cards, we will be performing for old people who might not see small scale tricks nor have the attention span to keep up with mentalism...please do help a brother in need...

 

[YRAMagicMan]

First off, 25 people is a huge crowd of performers for one show, especially if you don't have a production team to work out the logistics and blocking (where you are supposed to be on stage), and choreograph the effect. Also, 5 people doing one trick would be rather confusing to anyone. Your request to avoid cards and mentalism eliminates much of my knowledge base, and some good tricks.

If you do things right, you could actually do a massive prediction effect, but that's mentalism. (and I don't know anything specific for a situation like that.) There's always the old arm twist joke where you can untangle your arms but no one else can. If you can get your hands on illusion EFX by Andrew Mayne, (look on the Wire), you might find something there, but there's nothing that large scale. Other than that, I could see you doing a montage of different tricks. Cut and restored rope, vanishing milk (the one where you poor the milk in the news paper and it's gone), simple stuff that doesn't take much time or patter. A progressive linking rings where each person does one link might look cool.