JÉROME CADEAC

Magician

To find out more

TRAINING

His passion for illusionism began when he met Jean Faré, who was the only pupil (and later a close friend) of the legendary Ed Marlo of Chicago.

Ed Marlo revolutionised card magic, and all specialists in the discipline owe him a debt of gratitude. In turn, Jérome’s mentor was able to pass on to him the pleasure of the journey towards perfection and the taste for sharing the fruits of it.

INSPIRATION

It is linked to the drama of magic. American mentalist Max Maven sums it up very well: In less than a hundred years, 20th-century magicians have achieved something quite extraordinary:

They have taken an intrinsically profound art form, with a history spanning millennia, and made it childish. It’s an art form that, when mastered, requires knowledge of several disciplines: science (physics, mathematics, chemistry), psychology, mechanics, directing, acting…

What’s more, if it’s just a distraction for children, then why is it that the intelligence of sometimes highly cultured adults comes up against the challenge of understanding a simple magic trick?

He draws his inspiration from a wide range of fields, from music to painting, literature, cinema, travel and even certain encounters…

AMBITION

He has been a magician for almost 25 years. But only recently did he realise that magical art, with its history and its creators, was the only field in which his representatives had nothing to say.

By this he means that unlike painting, music or literature, no message is conveyed. No position taken. We don’t “give ourselves away” to the public. And we don’t make him think. He’s not talking about a reflection on how the trick they’ve just seen works, but a reflection on its meaning. After all, isn’t a stage a platform?

So his ambition for the next few years is to use this forum to make sense of it all. To use his art as a means of expression, rather than as a succession of “puzzles”. This inevitably involves writing, choosing new effects, re-dressing old ones… and, on a personal level, challenging oneself.

FIRST JOB

At the age of 26.

ANECDOTE

The one he’ll never forget: After a show on stage at the Musée de la Magie in Paris, a family with two children let the other spectators leave, and shyly came up to him to congratulate him, but above all to ask him a question he really hadn’t expected. “They say that if you magicians put a dead toad in the left pocket of your jacket, you lose your powers?

For a split second he was tempted to reply that it was in the right pocket, but as he listened to their accents and watched them, he quickly realised that they probably came from a village in a rural area where this kind of ancestral belief is still very much alive today.

Which was the case. They were farmers in Berry. To mock would have been inappropriate…even mean.