Sunday, March 21, 2010

Project 365 Backlog (79/365): The Rubberband Escape

.:79/365: The Rubberband Escape:.

If you ever bought Dixie Dooley’s video series, you’d have heard of this one, and it’s one of the nicest escape acts you can do to encourage a bit of audience participation.

Essentially, you hand out a box of rubber bands to go around your entire audience, and you ask them to put the rubber band around their pinky and their thumb, the band running behind of their other fingers. The challenge to them is that without using their other hand or holding the rubber bands against a surface, they should be able to liberate themselves from the rubber band using only one hand.

As they struggle to do that, you demonstrate to them how easy it is, and then move promptly on to the rest of your show.

It’s simple, it’s fast, and because you extended the challenge to everybody else, you’ve made it very clear that you’re a very skilled performer and not everyone can just go out there and do what you do. As an opener or as a breather after a particularly scary act, I think this suits your needs very well, and could take you places, to say the least.

Considering a box of rubber bands isn’t terribly expensive at all, this is a pretty good routine to add to your show if you need a bit of a time-filler that requires some audience participation. It’s also one of the easiest ways to get people interested in escapology, as it’s a basic building block for the skillset they will eventually need if they got very serious with this particular aspect of the art: dexterity and a cool head under pressure. If you did this experiment on an audience, you will notice for sure that a lot of them get frustrated over the fact that they can’t seem to escape from the loop no matter how hard they try.

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