Do you believe in magic? Let Jason Bishop convince you

Jason Bishop made his dog disappear.

Gizmo the Yorkie came back after Bishop, a magician and illusionist, put him in a box before dismantling the box to prove Gizmo was no longer inside on “The Today Show,” but not before a few minutes went by and the three confused hosts demanded to know where the little dog had gone.

Bishop wouldn’t tell them, and he wouldn’t tell the Stowe Reporter, either; he won’t reveal his tricks, but he’s certainly excited to show them to Stowe crowds when he comes to Spruce Peak Performing Arts Center Oct. 6.

“I really like sharing cool things with the audience. That’s really my whole thing, this concept of, ‘Here’s a bunch of cool things that I found.’ It’s like when you have a little video on Facebook and you think, ‘Oh that’s really neat,’ and you show it to your friends, that’s kind of what I’m doing” onstage, Bishop said.

Bishop, 40, has been passionate about magic and illusions since early childhood. He grew up in the foster care system in Pennsylvania, and magic was a way for Bishop to focus on people like Harry Houdini, who’d grown up poor but made it big.

Bishop didn’t get into performing until he was a teenager.

“That was a lot of smaller stuff, in school and places like that. I think I just wanted to show as many people as possible what I was doing. That’s where the stage came into play. With close-up magic, you can only show 10 or 15 people” at a time, but he learned stage performance let him wow bigger crowds.

He met his long-term partner and stage assistant, Kim Hess, in high school. The pair shared a love of performing, and realized their talents worked well together.

They live together in Pennsylvania with Gizmo, and share the kind of tight bond a couple can forge only when one person raises the other 10 feet off the ground in front of hundreds of people on a regular basis.

“Kim and I can kind of give a look and a glance and a quick thing, and she knows the beats of the show and how things are supposed to be going. If something is off a little bit, she catches on very, very quickly and can act to fix the situation,” Bishop said.

Sometimes, snafus can occur with relatively new illusions. Since Bishop is driven by his desire to show audiences what he thinks is cool, that means his act is always evolving.

When he wants to introduce a new illusion to his show, he starts by identifying what it will contribute for the audience.

“And then you go down through your various methods of accomplishing that. How do I accomplish the seemingly impossible?” he said.

He works with builders and designers to craft the illusions he brings to the stage, and after they’re done, he practices for about two years until they’re “smooth.”

“We have a warehouse near where we live. It’s enormous, and so we rehearse or practice there. I try to get new things in the show early on. It’s important to break it in in front of an audience, to see how they’re responding,” Bishop said.

Bishop has been practicing mind-reading and expects to try it out on Stowe crowds.

In one of his mind-reading displays, Bishop chooses a destination ahead of time, then asks the crowd to come to a consensus on what he chose.

“There’s a huge screen, and a dial on the screen of different destinations, and the audience chooses a destination and goes through this little journey on the screen and hopefully they pick the same destination. That usually gets gasps from people, that they all pick the same place eventually,” Bishop said.

He thinks he might try a relatively new mind-reading trick for the Spruce Peak audience, which is “always a little scary, because sometimes it doesn’t work.”

When that happens, his best advice is to “move on as quick as you can. Hopefully there’s a joke that’s an out, or you can segue into something else. Some thing you can correct, but if you’re reading someone’s mind, and say they’re thinking of salt, and they say, ‘No, it’s pepper,’” Bishop just moves along with his show.

It doesn’t happen often, though, because Bishop is a stickler for practice.

“I don’t get stage fright very often anymore, and I think that’s because we’ve done a lot of the routines. We rehearse and we work that stuff out a lot, and we try to do a lot of shows. I’m pretty flexible on stage. I think preparation is the biggest thing. I want to make sure everything is correct and the props are correct. When all that happens, I’m pretty at ease,” he said.

He loves it when people are blown away by his illusions; after all, he performs them because he thinks they’re cool, too.

“I think my favorite part is hearing the reaction of the audience, and sensing their enjoyment of what we’re doing,” said Hess.

He says magic shows haven’t been as popular in recent years as they once were, but his is a little different.

“Even if you don’t like magic, a lot of people still enjoy our show. There’s something unique about it that sets it apart. We really take away most of the cheesiness that has been associated with magic. It’s a little more laid-back today. I think I take my responsibility to my audience seriously, but I certainly don’t take myself that seriously, and I think a lot of magicians have,” he said.

“I also don’t think that many people would expect a magician to be as funny as Jason is. I think that that sets us apart too, because he has a very interesting sense of humor that I think people tend to appreciate,” Hess said.

“I think people will be surprised,” Bishop said — that’s likely an understatement, given Gizmo the dog’s presence onstage.