Latest News from Sideshow Illusions
Dr Phantasma and more for Showzam 2012 (Jan 2012)
We are busy preparing to take two of our favourite sideshows to present at the Showzam 2012 Festival at the Winter Gardens, Blackpool. The Headless Lady is making a return visit to her spiritual home, for it was in Blackpool’s Luna Park in the 1930s that she made her debut. Thrill seekers will be able to brave a visit into Dr Zomb’s laboratory in our 1950s sci-fi, horror sideshow - The Monster Show, if they dare! The shows will be open for ten days, every day, 11am to 1pm, 1.45pm to 2.45pm and 3.30pm to 6pm (last admission 5.45pm) from Friday 10th February to Sunday 19th February. Bring the kids for a superb half-term treat and good news, admission is absolutely FREE!
Dr Phantasma’s Ten in One Show is completely new and will be premiered at Showzam 2012. The show is based on the North American style of sideshow where ten unusual and bizarre acts and illusions were presented for the price of one admission. The performers would parade on a Bally stage performing their Ballyhoo routines to titillate the spectator’s curiosity. To help pull the audience into the show tent a line of colourful, lurid, painted banners promising every wonder in the universe would flutter in front. Dr Phantasma’s show has been inspired by the visit to Showzam 2011 by Canadian, Al Stencell, circus and show proprietor, author and authority on sideshows and his stunning exhibition of American Sideshow Banners that he brought to Blackpool. Al has been of enormous assistance in framing the show.
Dr Phantasma’s Ten in One will have a forty foot long banner line newly designed and painted by Mark Copeland of the Insect Circus and you are promised some great attractions, alive inside, including the Great Bendini, Princess Arachnia, Dr Diablo, Miss Elastina, The Great Inferno, A Man Eating Fish and Myrtle, the Girl with the Invisible Middle! And it won’t cost £5, not even £1, and you can put your 50p’s away, today, for ten days only, Dr Phantasma’s show is FREE. And there’s loads more happening for all the family.
Booking now open for the Roundhouse (Jan 2012)
April 2012 is going to be amazing – six of our Sideshow Illusions will be featured as the attractions in Professor Vanessa’s Wondershow as part of the Circus Fest at London’s famed Roundhouse venue in April. Tickets can be booked now. In this joint commission from the National Fairground Achive and the Roundhouse, Sideshow Illusions have joined forces with a brilliant creative team including Producer, Professor Vanessa Toulmin, incredible acts from the Insect Circus, artistic collaborators, writer and researcher Ann Featherstone, lighting designer Tim Lutkin and talented performers Marawa Wamp, Amy Saunders all working towards presenting the Wondershow, the like of which has not been seen in London for many years.
We promise to bring back the spectacle and astonishment that family audiences experienced at venues the like of the Vauxhall Gardens, the Royal Aquarium or a trip to the mysteries of Maskelyne and Devant at the Egyptian Hall and St George’s Hall in the 1900s.
Monday 23rd April to Sunday 29th April, 7.30pm nightly, 2.30pm and 7.30pm Sat 28th April & Sun 29th April.
Tim in Ripleys (Dec 2011)
Sideshow Illusions collaborator and performer Tim Cockerill has the great honour of appearing in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Annual 2012.
His fire eating act and incredible eating molten lead stunt is featured. It was Jon Gresham’s fire eating act that inspired Tim to re-create Jons’s act and then to develop his own performance as The Great Inferno.
Tim will be appearing in Dr Phantasma’s Ten in One Show in Showzam, Blackpool Feb 2012
