David Blaine, who brings his Real or Illusion world tour to Abu Dhabi this weekend, takes a minute to think when I ask whether he has ever been shocked by anything in life.
“It’s a tricky one,” says the American endurance artist, 41, who has done everything to put himself in harm’s way in the name of entertainment. “It was more of a nature thing. When I was a little kid, in a field in Pennsylvania, a lightning bolt shocked me. I was blinded for an hour and was running around in circles.”
Cut to 2012 and Blaine, after years of preparation, exposes himself to an artificial lightning storm in New York, created with seven Tesla coils producing an electric discharge of a million volts over 72 hours.
That’s just one of his many outrageous feats that have astonished millions, triggering reactions such as: “Get out of my house!”, a remark famously uttered by the Hollywood actor Harrison Ford when Blaine squeezed a playing card out of an orange during a show last year.
Starting off with a slew of basic magic tricks in 1997, Blaine went from expanding his street act and illusions, captured on tape and packaged for NBC's audience in the David Blaine: Street Magic TV show, to training his body to withstand inconceivable pain. The Brooklyn-raised stunt performer began pushing his limits in 1999 when he buried himself alive in a plastic coffin for seven days, then froze himself in a block of ice for almost 64 hours in 2000, and remained suspended upside down from a crane without a safety net for 60 hours in 2002.
“What the audience will see in Abu Dhabi is the very beginning of my world tour and I will continue to build and add more death-defying stunts,” says Blaine.
And with the same elusive element that his acts hold, he adds: “You are going to be seeing things that are real. They look like illusions, but in order to prove they are real I am going to allow the audience to get very close. They can come up, examine and interact.”
To counter the idea that his physical stunts are deceptions, he firmly reiterates there is nothing fake about the challenges he sets himself. “This is a show where we are going to let the audience decide what they are seeing,” he says, and reveals that his famous “water tank” act, where he holds his breath under water for 17 minutes and 4.4 seconds – which earned him the world record in 2008 – will be part of his routine in Abu Dhabi.
Blaine’s fixation with endurance stunts stems from the need to make up for health issues he had as a child.
“I was born with my feet turned in,” says Blaine, who also suffered from asthma. “Because of these weaknesses, I tried to compensate in other areas. I used to try to hold my breath longer than the other kids in swimming classes when I was 5 or 6 years old.
“It isn’t about conquering pain. I think there is a reflex, where if you put anybody in a difficult situation their reflexes kick in and their mind overrides what their body is feeling. This is what I try to incorporate into the stunts.”
Blaine does not leave his actions to luck.
“Some of the stunts have come about after 20 years of practice,” he says. “Other times, like when I am making a TV show, I might not have much time, so those I have to practise quickly. But most of it has come from years of practice, like holding my breath, and improving on it.”
He explains that being well prepared also eliminates nervousness.
“I practise so much that I don’t have nerves,” says the artist, who draws much of his inspiration from the works of the 19th-century Hungarian-American escapologist Harry Houdini.
“I know what I am doing,” says Blaine. “But things always go wrong. You start hallucinating, sleep deprivation kicks in and when that happens, I have to be mentally aware of what I can or cannot do.”
Blaine has often thought about the repercussion of self-torture, but that just keeps him going even though he says it’s “definitely causing permanent damage to my body”. “Anything can go wrong at any moment, but that’s what makes it so exciting. If anything seems possible, it should be.”
Freak accidents, he says, are often the starting point of conceiving a new act.
“I keep reading, looking at other magic stuff that happened in history. Things that were accidents and I go: ‘Oh, this looked like an accident and the person lived. Maybe it is possible.’”
“It is interesting to try to do things that look like illusions but are real. That, to me, is the most interesting part of what I do.”
Take five with David Blaine
His early tryst with magic
Blaine got hooked on magic and entertaining audiences when he saw the amazement on his mother’s face when he demonstrated his first card trick, which he learnt from a librarian.
His favourite audience reaction
He has witnessed many hilarious reactions to his street magic and levitation acts, but says the funniest was when a member in the audience wet themselves when he “read their mind”.
His best celebrity response
He cherishes the response by Stephen Hawking when he showed a card trick to the astrophysicist on his celebrity TV show Real or Magic last year. Hawking, who suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a motor neuron disease, responded with a broad smile and said: "Amazing, I don't know how you did it!"
His book that came with a puzzle and prize
When Blaine released his autobiography Mysterious Stranger: A Book of Magic (2002), he slipped in a puzzle and scavenger hunt for a US$100,000 (Dh367,000) prize. The winner found the prize under a rock at a private Los Angeles property, 16 months after the book was released.
A stunt he will never try again
After his Frozen in Time stunt, for which he was encased in a block of ice, Blaine said it took a month before he was able to walk again. He has no plans to ever attempt a stunt of such difficult again.
David Blaine will perform at Emirates Palace from Thursday to Saturday. The shows start at 8pm; tickets cost from Dh200 and can be purchased on www.ticketmaster.ae
� aahmed@thenational.ae
