Near the end of our recent interview, I ask David Casas a question that, I think, most people would want to ask a professional magician who spends much of his time making doves appear and disappear: "Has anything really awful ever happened during your act?"
He smiles and replies: "The only thing that's really happened was at one of my first shows. Every time I used to produce a bird, I would always hold them close to me. So I was doing that at one show, and people started laughing, but I didn't know what they were laughing at. So I just kept going with my act, and they kept laughing, and I think I went to grab a silk or something ... . And then I see this big line of bird poop running down my coat.
"And I was like, 'Oh-h-h-h ... now I get it,'" says Casas. "I just shook my head and said, 'That'll happen with birds,' and kept going, you know? And I learned that when I produce the bird, I need to hold it out."
As awful occurrences involving magicians and doves go, that one's pretty minor. (I mean, I've seen The Prestige.) But it certainly speaks well of Casas' talents that after 18 years of immersion in his stage art, 13 of them spent as a full-time professional, unanticipated dove poop is the bottom of the barrel.
As for Casas himself, the Davenport resident currently appears to be at the top of his game. Between April 30 and May 3 alone, the self-described "comedy magician" will appear in three Quad Cities engagements: April 30's "Dia!: Celebration of Children, Books, & Cultures" at the Moline Public Library; May 2's hour-long solo performance The Magic of David Casas at the Circa '21 Speakeasy; and May 3's Humility of Mary Shelter fundraiser "Helping with Humor" at The Establishment.
And the work schedule for this longtime practitioner of sleight-of-hand and closeup magic is only getting busier. "Right now," says Casas, "I'm teaching magic classes for the Rock Island Park District on Mondays. I've recent been approached by the Davenport and Bettendorf districts to teach classes in the fall. And my June, July, and August are, like, swamped. Almost 30 shows every month, traveling all over Iowa and Illinois.
"For the longest time, I said I wanted to be busy all the time," he adds. "And this year anyway, I finally got my wish."
A 35-year-old Muscatine native, Casas says that wish originated when he was a high-school junior and saw two gentlemen from Robert's Magic Shoppe in Davenport demonstrating closeup magic in a NorthPark Mall kiosk. "That caught my eye," he says, "and they had fliers that said they were teaching magic lessons. So I started taking classes.
"You know how there are illusionists who cut people in half or levitate women?" he continues. "That never really amazed me, because I always knew there was a trick to it - the assistant did all the work, or the box was a trick box. To me, that wasn't magic. Magic was when someone came out and just made things appear and disappear. That's what I wanted to learn. 'Man, that guy is just standing there in a tux, so where are all these birds coming from?!'"
As a nascent high-school magician, "I would practice eight to 10 hours a day," says Casas. "I never had a lot of friends in high school because they were all going to parties and stuff, and I would stay home and practice on weekends. I think that's how I got good so fast. I learned really quick, but I was just really disciplined and took it seriously and practiced a lot, and I started thinking, 'I can do this for a living maybe.'"
From the start, Casas was also practicing with live birds, which he admits "is unusual for a kid. There was a pet store in Bettendorf where I got my first two doves. Actually, they were a male and a female, which I didn't know at the time, and they would lay eggs and start breeding - so I wound up getting more and more and more.
"But it takes a lot of work, that's for sure," he says of dove training. "A lot of patience and repetition. You have to get them comfortable with you and get to know you. So I have a six-week training program. The first week, I just kind of gently toss them from hand to hand. I do that twice a day for like 20 minutes. Then you get them to try to fly to your finger. If the bird doesn't do it, I pick him up, pet him, give him a little rest, and we try it again. And each week, you move your hands a little further apart. A little further, then a little further, and by the fifth and sixth week you can kind of flip them out of your hand and they fly around and learn to return to you.
"But not every bird can do it," says Casas. "And if a bird can't do something, I just don't use him for that type of production." (This, of course, begs the question of how Casas can tell which dove is which. "Well, I know 'em because I've worked with them so much," he answers. "The common person wouldn't be able to tell them apart.")
Casas became so accomplished with his bird act and other sleight-of-hand feats that, after high-school graduation, he moved to Las Vegas to pursue a career as a professional magician, finding an immediate mentor in Vegas headliner Jason Byrne.
"He charged me the first time I worked with him," says Casas, "but after he saw how dead-serious I was and the potential I had, he was like, 'I'm gonna teach you now for free.' And for the whole year I lived there, he taught me three or four times a week, and I actually got to be his on-stage assistant."
But given his nervousness when assisting Byrne ("Every night my stomach just turned because I didn't want to set up a trick wrong and make him look bad") and the difficulty in finding full-time work ("There are literally hundreds of magicians out there"), Casas left Vegas and returned to the Quad Cities - where, perhaps ironically, he had a much easier time securing employment in his field. "In this area," he says, "I'm a big fish in a small pond, because there aren't very many people who do magic here."
Stating that it took "only a year or two" to become a full-time area magician, Casas says that upon his return to the Quad Cities, "The first thing I did was get a Web site. And then it was basically just marketing myself - marketing, marketing, marketing - which is a full-time job in itself. I started putting ads in the newspaper. I made fliers and hung 'em around town.
"But what really helped me was I got into restaurants," he continues. "I would just go into restaurants and say to the managers, 'Hi, I'm David Casas. I'm a professional magician. And I was wondering if you might be interested in having me come in maybe once a week, just for a couple hours, and entertain your guests while they wait for their food.'
"And about nine out of 10 times, I would get the job. I'd offer them a free night, and then I would go in and do my thing, and at the end they would approach me and be like, 'You're hired.'" (It should be noted that, this being restaurant employment, "my thing" refers to Casas' closeup magic more associated with card tricks than live birds.)
While appearing at such area establishments as Biaggi's, Carlos O'Kelly's, and Davenport's Elmore Avenue Applebee's - where Casas still performs a weekly "Kids' Night" show every Wednesday - the magician says, "I would hand out business cards, and people would start hiring me for, like, weddings and corporate events and banquets and after-proms and company picnics and that sort of thing.
"And then I started doing some comedy clubs," he continues, "which is how I met Patrick [Adamson] from ComedySportz. They used to have an open-mic night, and I would do my comedy magic, which stuck out because everybody else was doing stand-up.
"My favorite part of my show now, actually, is the interactive-comedy part. I love interacting with the spectators, because I do a lot of improv with them, and you don't know how they're gonna react. They might be a little shy, they might be a little overly rambunctious ... . It makes it a new experience for me, as well.
"But the birds will always be close to me," says Casas. "They're kind of my signature. I have 12 birds now that I keep at home in a big flight cage, and I take very good care of them. They're my co-workers and my pets. And they pay my bills."
David Casas will perform at the Moline Public Library (3210 41st Street, MolineLibrary.com) at 6:30 p.m. on April 30; the Circa '21 Speakeasy (1818 Third Avenue, Rock Island, Circa21.com) at 7 p.m. on May 2; and the Establishment (220 19th Street, Rock Island, EstablishmentQC.com) at 6 p.m. on May 3.
For more information on the area magician, visit DavidCasasMagic.com.
