William the Great

I was asked to assist a magician, thankfully in a way in which both halves of my body remained in tact. My aim was to use wordplay and creative direction to elevate the client’s act beyond a protracted string of card tricks, the banal fate of many performance industry magicians. Additionally, I provided him with consumer facing copy to use on and off the stage, having both professional and promotional uses. This included pitches of varying lengths, one sheet, biography, show description, scripting for his show with what we called ‘vignettes’ (see below), taglines, and imaginative pieces to develop a marketable universe surrounding his personal brand of magic.

Enjoy!

The setting of a stage. The burning of a candle. The flame held tight, fingertips ablaze.

 

Secrets were revealed in the Hidden Valley of Enchantment as William brought his act to the Cuyama Buckhorn, a boutique roadside inn located in CA’s High Desert. He needed a handful of promotional copy for the event, allowing me to write a mood striking show description, in addition to taglines and short pitches to use on socials.

Connecting with your audience begins with your story, and telling it well is what makes it last.

 

See below a few examples of taglines put to use on social platforms. “Bury your secrets at the door” became the tagline for William’s Cabaret of Secrets production. Don’t miss the full list of taglines at the bottom of the page for a truly mind-bending read…

No tricks here—just a complete campaign.

  • The question burns, pitching a fever in his mind—

    Are we in control?

    Control is a flicker in the darkness. In a moment it is gained—in the same moment, lost. Will Coile restlessly searches for these moments of undoing. And in the darkest hour, he finds them. Moments when past and future dissolve into present awareness.

    Alive. Awake. Curious at last.

    And now, through a novelty of theatrics and skill, he invites us to share in his gatherings—a marveling collection of curiosities; acts of control both lost and gained; the inescapable mysteries of life itself.

    He invites us to lean into chaos. He invites us to open our eyes. Wide.

  • Exhale your instincts.

    In the darkness, a door is opened.

    Magic, or madness?

    Curiosity burns.

    The universe, for an instant, is singular and knowable.

    A cinema of color.

    A gamut of shades.

    Immerse yourself in a cinema of color—refractions of shadow and light.

    A moment to behold.

    Moments of undoing.

    Leave your secrets at the door.

    Bury your secrets at the door.

    Bring your secrets.

    Unhide your secrets.

    There is nothing left to hide.

    The unseeable, seen.

    A fleck in the void.

    A propulsion of inertia.

    Explanations of coincidence split at the seams.

    Be mystified as your mind begins to soften.

    Moments of undoing.

    A collection of mental marvels.

    The coincidental rewritten into possibility.

    The coincidental versus the possible.

    Coincidence versus possibility.

    A glimpse of wonder.

    The coincidental is no longer the impossible.

    The seemingly unseeable.

    The question burns.

    A fever pitch of curiosity.

    A gamut of shadow and color.

    Perpetual motion.

    Mysteries abound.

    Mystery everlasting.

    Rational thought defied.

    Reason defied.

    When control is lost, everything is gained.

    The seemingly unseeable, the unusually coincidental, become acts of possibility.

  • #1 Darkness

    A moment in darkness. Darkness is heavy. It is known to conceal. It is known to disguise, to hide, to eclipse the truth. Danger happens in the dark.

    But what if I showed you a darkness…that reveals? A darkness that uncovers more than it obscures? A darkness that reveals the truth.

    You see, revelation happens in the dark.

    It’s where I found the parts of myself that I do not want the world to see. It’s where I let go of a tenuous sense of control—control that I think I have in my life. A projection to the world, how I should live, who I should be, where I should go. It’s letting go—again and again, and again. It’s interrupting the cycle. And through the discomfort I find those moments where I am more myself than ever. Not a version. Not a character. And there is magic in these moments of undoing.

    Magic happens in the dark.

    #2 Inheritance

    Life is chaos. Life is beauty. Life is infinite intersections of choices, of decisions—never just black and white. It’s the many shades in between—bending, refracting, one bleeding into the other, each wrestling for singularity, at last communing in a beautifully distorted way.

    But sometimes, black and white is all we have. Step with me back in time for a moment. The door is open—I ask for you to follow me through it.

    A man sits at a table in a dark room. A man more distant, yet more familiar than I have ever known. I can see that his life is balance. A careful vacillation between shadow and light—between doing what is expected, and a burning curiosity that lies deeper within.

    And so deeper, into the shadow, we follow.

    His hands conceal something, their movements concise, surgical. A doctor. There are more faces around this table, barely visible through the smoke and small pulses of candlelight. The contents of their hands are also hidden, but known to me instantly. Cards—in hands and on the table, laying in rows, glints of black, white, red. A game of poker is being played. Secret, illegal at this time. The stakes are high, the room is tense. Heavy silence.

    Outside, sirens cut the air. A name is called. The doctor’s name. My grandfather’s name. H.A. Thornton.

    We carry secrets, perhaps inherited, perhaps ones of our creation. My grandfather left me an inheritance that I cannot dispense, for it lives inside me. And through a simple deck of cards, we are able to know one another without ever having met.

    #3 Secrets

    In the darkness we hide our secrets. It’s the very nature of such things to live in isolated obscurity, in the shadows. When a secret is revealed, it dies. It’s namesake is betrayed, and the truth is revealed. Lifting a weight that has been gathering mass since its conception. But it’s never quite that easy, because in this world weight leaves impressions. The heavier the weight, the larger, the deeper the mark. Footprints. Witness marks. Scars. We see this everyday—scorned hearts, relationships bruised, innocence lost. (Beat)

    I said earlier that danger happens in the dark.

    And so we hide our secrets, perhaps in fear of the consequences, perhaps to protect someone or something. They lay motionless—nesting, burrowing, deeper and deeper, impressing their weight upon us.

    Tonight I asked you to bury your secrets at the door, to leave them undisturbed. Protected. It is your choice, and everything comes down to our choices.

    As I have said in the beginning, I’ve found a darkness that reveals—the same darkness that conceals our secrets, that feeds on fear, on danger. I have learned to see the truth at the dimmest hour, and I wish to share this with you tonight. Maybe another gift from my Grandfather, maybe something I’ve learned from many sleepless nights alone. But I ask those of you who are willing, who seek the truth above all else, to choose a secret to set free from its chains, knowing that it may be revealed in front of this audience tonight. If you so choose, write it down. Place it in the bowl.

  • Our lives are a gamut of shadow and color, darks and lights, endlessly fluid shades of being. Past, present, future—resolutely intertwined, the familiarity of which gives us a tenuous sense of control. Still, we cling. Perhaps to escape our past. Perhaps to dictate our futures.

    But do we ever really have control?

    Our stilted perspectives become the currency of our lives, often spent in retrograde; often spent in forward longing. It takes a propulsion of inertia, a centripetal force, to break the chain that anchors. It’s time to awaken. It’s time to let go of something that we never really had to begin with.

    A deep, violet sky hangs like fabric on tenterhooks. The darkness is heavy, draped and cascading quickly over waning twilight. A match is struck—phosphorous ignites, a flame produced. A tenuous, small point of focus. Pupils dialate slightly. The light is hardly enough to see. Flame is set to candle, only a silhouette is visible, an effigy of a man…Breath is interrupted, pulse quickens. A string is pulled from his mouth—his throat. There’s something tied to the string…but it can’t be? A needle…Pulse quickens. Four…five…six needles…The flame still flutters, lucid and licking the humid air. Controlled. Another needle…But like the ephemeral nature of the flame, such is our relationship with control. Control is found—it’s earned. But anything found can be lost. Do we ever really have it? Or is it an ever-changing flux of near misses and mishaps? An illusion of trust, to quiet our fragile minds. The wax melts, wick scorched, flame dies. It’s time to open our eyes. Wide.

 
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