Nothing Is Impossible: The Real-Life Adventures of a Street Magician (30 page)

The Chapéu Mangueira favela, though, was comparatively safe. It’s set on the borders of Copacabana and Ipanema, overlooking
the beaches and Christ the Redeemer, and it has the most stunning views. If you wanted an apartment with the best vista of Rio, Chapéu Mangueira is where you’d want it to be located.

Although Chapéu Mangueira is considered safe, you can’t just walk into a favela alone and you need to keep your wits about you. We met a guy called Tiago who agreed to be our guide. His home was at the top of the favela and he invited us over for lunch with his mum.

A couple of guys tried to test us while we were there, but generally it was one of the most warm and welcoming places I’ve ever visited and we were able to stay through the night. That said, while we were having lunch at Tiago’s, I heard a loud bang. ‘What was that?’ I asked him. ‘Football match,’ he replied, as another bang echoed across the favela. ‘Hmm, doesn’t sound like the kind of football I play,’ I said. Who knows what those bangs were, but they certainly didn’t sound football-based to my ears. There was a dangerous side to the favela, but for me it was just incredible; it was full of magical experiences.

There’s so much more to learn by visiting those communities. Although I was warned of the dangers, I knew this was where I needed to show people my magic. It was quite risky filming up there, but it was important to me to show both sides of Rio and not to dwell on the negative aspects of it.

The kids in the favela told me that it’s actually a lot safer for them in their neighbourhood than it is on the ‘tarmac’, which is what they call the beaches down below. It’s safer because most of the crime happens down there and not in the favela itself, unless you’re directly involved in drug dealing. A lot of these kids go down to hustle the tourists, so that’s when you might have problems. There they might see someone from a rival favela, hustle the wrong person or get pulled over by the police.

Brazil is a notoriously corrupt country. It’s known that in the past drug gangs have been supported by the police. The police seem to be a law unto themselves and are probably the most dangerous gang in Brazil. For the favela kids, the police are their biggest enemy and their greatest fear.

Although violence is inevitable, normal life continues as it would anywhere. Loud music pumps out of the concrete shacks, corrugated iron structures that serve loosely as shops sell sweets, acai, beer and biscuits and hundreds of kites flitter on the skyline. The Brazilians have a real thing for kites – when you’re in the favela, everywhere you look there are different coloured flags skipping in the sky. It’s really beautiful. There’s some incredible graffiti, really intricately painted murals that cover almost every available inch of wall. Telephone cable and wires hang everywhere. I don’t know what happens if your electricity goes off because I don’t know how they’d ever unravel that mess of wire. Everywhere you look you see random things like some guy carrying a fridge, chickens in cages and washing hanging up anywhere a bit of sun can get through to dry the clothes.

People are all around, talking, laughing, gossiping and hanging out. It felt like such a stark contrast to the estates I had grown up in. In Delph Hill, everyone is hidden away and no one really talks to each other. There’s a lot of fear and, after dark, people hide away in their homes to avoid any drama that might be happening on the streets. Any community spirit that did exist seems to have long gone. In contrast, the favelas of Rio are always alive. You get Sky TV up there, so people are gathered around televisions, watching the football. The kids are out playing; people are sat out on their steps, talking, arguing, laughing while the TV blares in the background. Groups of friends sit around tables eating food and drinking ‘cerveja’
(beer). They have these huge parties – Baile Funks – where they basically rave all night to the loudest, bassiest music you’ve ever heard.

Every step leads you to another magical site. Could Rio be the home of magic? I think it could be!

The thing that warmed my heart most was how the children followed me everywhere. I was like the Pied Piper of the favela! It was quite tough going, physically, because the favelas are carved into the mountainside. To get up into Mangueira, you find a path near the beach and then you have the choice of taking a narrow winding road up via motorbike (my choice!); an elevator-like contraption that drags you upwards; or there’s a steep staircase that cuts right up through the middle of the favela. If you consider the elevator is 64 metres high (the equivalent of a twenty-three-storey building) then you won’t blame me for avoiding the stairs. Even with that steep hill, the kids would run after me on the motorbike taxi, laughing and asking for more magic. They followed me everywhere.

In the favela, I used whatever I could find for my magic. The paths were littered with random, weird objects, old junk and discarded toys. Also, as the locals speak very little English, I had to break the language barrier visually. At one point, I found a piece of old wire on the floor. I asked this woman her name and she said, ‘Juliana’. In the blink of an eye, I bent the wire into her name. She couldn’t believe it.

What I loved most was the sense of the unexpected. Once, we were filming late at night. I was performing some magic that involved a bingo game. The game was taking place down a dark alleyway, so it all looked quite sinister. There was an eerie orange glow from the street lamps and shadows lurking everywhere. Suddenly, one of the shutters opened up on one of the shacks to the left of us. This very pale face poked out, and then another, and then another. It turned out to be a young woman from Reading whose mum and dad were there to visit her. We spoke briefly to the woman who told us she had come to Rio to teach favela kids English and had ended up moving in.

It was so bizarre and the last thing you’d ever expect to see. You build up a picture of a place, but those images are always inaccurate. It’s like being in Jamaica; you don’t hear reggae coming over the hills, you hear Michael Bolton and Celine Dion! It’s really funny – how you expect things to be and how things actually are can be very different. The element of surprise is sacred to me. I love that life is full of those moments.

I WAS IN
Rio for eleven days and on my final day, I decided to visit Christ the Redeemer. I’d always wanted to do a levitation at a world-renowned landmark. I’d levitated Lindsay Lohan in Singapore, I’d levitated Matt Lucas at the Emirates Stadium, so now I wanted to levitate myself at Christ the Redeemer.

To get to the top you take a tram that drags you up the steep hillside. Then you walk up a lot of stairs. Finally, you go up some more stairs! It’s so high that it takes about an hour to reach the peak. On the way up, a thick mist started to roll in. I had no idea if I’d even be able to see the city when I levitated. Would the weather be against me, or would the mist disperse and make the levitation as magical as I anticipated it would be?

I’d imagined the Redeemer to be a place of still, silent tranquility. The revered statue is so tremendous and so isolated that I assumed it would be like visiting a church.

I was wrong. As I reached the peak, the mist finally lifting, I was greeted by both incredible views and the sight of hundreds of tourists taking pictures of the statue.

I asked a woman if she’d take a picture of me in front of the Redeemer. She agreed and I climbed the stairs, coming to a stop near the top. I took a deep breath and then slowly, with my arms outstretched, I started to rise. My frame echoing the almighty sculpture behind me.

Before long, I was hovering above the crowd as they all looked up at me in amazement. The noise that had greeted me when I first got there dissipated and the crowd stood in silence as I rose before Christ.

I got goosebumps all over my skin as I looked down at the people watching and the panoramic view behind. It was utterly awe-inspiring. There was the ocean spreading out as far as the
eye could see, surrounded by white sandy beaches and the city, fizzing and sparkling below. People had come to take pictures of the statue, but as well as the iconic 365-tonne sculpture, they found me, floating in the sky. It was a risky thing to portray something with a religious connotation – similar to the River Thames walk – but that’s not intentional. And it wasn’t intended to offend people. These types of things appear in the Bible because they are miracles. They shouldn’t happen. And my drive comes from trying to make the impossible possible.

That moment in time created an everlasting image in my mind of this amazing city. It’s something I’ll take away and cherish for the rest of my life.

Like I said earlier, though, it’s not about the scale – it’s all about the element of surprise and amazement. Whether it’s a huge death-defying stunt, a prediction or close-up magic on the street, the philosophies and the principles are the same. It doesn’t matter if I’m levitating above Christ the Redeemer or doing something crazy with a deck of cards in the favelas, I always want to elicit the same response from my magic.

Putting a phone inside a bottle, to me, is as impressive as levitating myself in front of Christ the Redeemer in Brazil. That’s how I see it, anyway.

Although I’ve told you about the different categories of magic, I really break it down into just two types: physical and mental. The physical can range from something small, like bending my finger in weird ways, to walking across the Thames. They’re both still physical pieces of magic. The mental magic that I do can consist of anything from a prediction in front of a live audience to something like reading Snoop’s mind over Twitter.

Walking across the River Thames is as big and as magical as bringing butterflies to life in a hotel. But you can make the scale
of smaller magic ‘bigger’ by changing how and where you do it. I can do card magic to a celebrity and it’s bigger because it’s a celebrity. I could walk across a swimming pool, but it’s bigger when it’s the River Thames. I could change a picture, but because it’s Tinie Tempah’s album cover rather than my nan’s crossword puzzle, the scale seems bigger. And because the scale is bigger, the perception of what I’ve done is therefore bigger. But they’re all the same to me and I like to think that all my magic causes the same powerful reaction in the spectator too. It’s just the bigger things seem to stick in people’s memories longer.

As the years have gone by, my determination to push the boundaries of what I do has grown. Every idea I come up with now, I start with something small and then my ambition kicks in. No matter what the thing is, I want to make it as big as it can possibly be. It’s like I have some kind of switch in me because there’s nothing I won’t attempt, no matter how scary.

Sometimes, with magic, it can come down to luck and coincidence. But then, luck is often misconstrued because, to me, luck is when the preparation meets the opportunity. I could find heaps of great opportunities all the time, but if I haven’t worked on my skills and I don’t know how to handle that opportunity, then it’s going to be wasted.

For a long time I used to perform something and not remember it afterwards. It was a blur, because adrenalin took over. The River Thames walk is where I finally started to become more conscious of what was going on. I began to feel the adrenalin and almost learn how to control it. I don’t remember the first few steps of walking across the Thames. But as I got further out, I began to feel my surroundings, I started to hear the people. Before that day I wouldn’t really notice – I was in the zone.