At the 28th FISM World Championships of Magic in Quebec City, Anca & Lucca received the 1st prize in the category of Mental Magic for their performance of "The Mind-Reading Revolution".
"We are very happy to have won first place at the world championships after winning the European title in 2017. We have now won 3 silver and 2 gold medals in five appearances at world and European championships. This confirms our path of "mental magic unplugged ", i.e. the demonstrations without any technical or personal help from third parties.
But this time it was not only the decision that was exciting, but also the feedback from the jurors and the audience. We're only now understanding why we won this time and what we intuitively did right in preparation.
The first big difference from previous years was our appearance as an ethnic clairvoyant couple. Anca is actually born and raised in Transylvania. The use of an open fire, in which we sent viewers' wishes to the universe, and the other props created an atmosphere that felt authentic and caused goosebumps for some of the spectators.
On the other hand, we kept making fun of so-called clairvoyants and thus our own performance during the show. When Anca obviously wrongly guesses a man's name as "Esmeralda" at first, only to then correct: "Yes, but that was his name, in a previous life!", we convey with a wink to the audience that it's still all nothing but a show.
In a conversation with an icon of magic, he told me something that I wasn't so aware of in 25 years as a mental magician: "If you, as a spectator, don't have any explanation for mental magic, it stimulates emotional resistance against the performers. You think to yourself, what if such skills fell into the wrong hands." So far I thought it would be enough to admit before and after a show that it is just that. But now I understand that it is important to set this disclaimer during the performance as well. That's exactly what we achieved with our humorous interludes and was definitely a very important factor in the win.
But the incredible effects that we showed were certainly just as important. For the first time, Anca was able to guess a complete credit card number and to copy any hand movement of a participant. It was only during the World Championships and through the experience of practicing with other magicians that we discovered a further improvement of one of our methods that allows Anca not only to imitate a few hundred different ones, but more than 50,000 different ones, in other words, almost anything imaginable. This is an absolute world first and, to our knowledge, no one has ever done it before us.
This example shows that we are not at the end of a development with the first World Cup title, but rather at the beginning of one.
The resulting international inquiries will make it easier for us to work even harder on our acts in the future. About this fact we're at least as happy as we are about the trophy."
