His sleight of hand is mesmerizing, and, wearing but a black blazer and bare before the audience, is so impressive it feels otherworldly. Audiences with cards Beth Ingrid Linus Larry Yara spell out BILLY, for example. He spells out people’s names using cards’ suits, stacked in order. Card effects vary greatly, from mathematical puzzles and highly visual eye candy to intellectually subtle mysteries. A deck of cards is cheap and easy to find, and the number of cool card tricks you can do with playing cards far exceeds all other tricks combined. A rumination on selfhood, assimilation, and perception pervades Asi’s 75-minute show, but never in a way that is treacly or detracts from the magic - which is so astounding it approaches a sixth sense.Īsi guesses the names other audience members might prefer to go by. Card tricks are the most popular form of magic tricks, and for good reason. More meaningfully, it places import on what we and others call ourself.Īsi Wind is a stage name Asi is Israeli and changed his surname to be more pronounceable. This offers a freshness to each show (by nature of changing audiences, the “DNA,” as Asi calls it, also changes each night).
Audience members are asked to write their names on cards along with the first letter of their first name in the corners, as if those letters designate a suit. At Asi Wind’s Inner Circle, presented by David Blaine, you become the deck: your name, not the queen of hearts, is among the cards he’s manipulating.