Artist Christian Thee, host of Dark Cabaret
Photo by Forrest Clonts
Dark cabaret On an evening in late March, Christian Thee is hosting a dinner party in his dining room but outside his comfort zone: two poets and a writer are at his table, and the conversation tends toward the literary. No talk about art. No questions about trompe l’oeil, which has been his medium for more years than he will admit (fifty is a rough, though ungenerous guess, as Thee somehow looks to be barely older than that). No sleight of hand, other than the verbal kind — another anomaly: for all his credits as an artist (the walls of the Keenan Chapel at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral floors anyone who steps within that Columbia landmark, even those who already admire Thee’s work), Thee is an accomplished magician. Before the last spoonful of dessert is gone, he is ushering his guests down a narrow hallway into a small magic parlor, where the evening really begins. What even some of Thee’s friends don’t know is that as a teenager Thee performed in a magic act with Cynthia Gilliam, president of advertising and public-relations firm Semaphore Inc. He still does a number of magic shows every year, most of them for guests visiting his Forest Lake home. Now he is both broadening his audience and helping to start a tradition: once a month, Thee and two fellow magicians host the Dark Cabaret, an invitationonly evening that could become one of Columbia’s most coveted invites. To call the Dark Cabaret a magic show understates the precision with which Thee orchestrates the evening and
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the eeriness of its effect. Following a half hour of wine, dessert, and conversation in the sunroom overlooking Carey Lake, Thee begins with a few tricks from the magician’s repertoire: a little mind reading, a few wheredid-it-go and where-did-it-come-from routines. Then Joey Vasquez leads the guests down a dim hallway into Thee’s even dimmer magic theatre. The tenor of the tricks changes as well, into something that borders on disquieting. By the time everyone takes a seat in Thee’s studio-turned-theatre-for-the-night for Joseph Daniels’ performance, there is a sense of wanting to look over your shoulder, to check out the shadows in the corners. “I’ve been tinkering with this show for a long time,” says Daniels, who came up with the show’s concept. “When I was in college my mentor was a hypnotist and mentalist. Mentalists tend toward a form of magic that takes psychological cues. I do have a legitimate family history of hauntings, an actual paranormal past, if you will. I thought it would be a natural way to tell a story, to blend traditional magic with storytelling with psychologicallybased performance.” It’s parlor magic with a whole lot of Southern Gothic thrown in. Vasquez introduced Daniels to Thee, who found the idea intriguing. “Christian is the consummate host,” says Vasquez. “It allows him to shine in one of the things he’s great at – bringing people together and cultivating a bond.” Thee talks about Daniels as someone “who envisions magic as a part of theatre, which I do, too.” Though Thee describes the Dark Cabaret as a “collaboration,” the three men have very different styles. Thee excels at what Vasquez describes as the “parlor magic of the golden era.” Vasquez specializes in inches-fromyour face close-up magic. Daniels? He likes to twist reality. Daniels calls his style “intimate illusion” inspired by the parlor entertainment of the 1890s. Of the three, he is the one whose magic interweaves narrative. “I have witnessed things over the course of my life that I don’t understand, and that’s the feeling we try to create,” Daniels says. “Some of the stories were contributed by friends. But most of the stories were adopted from my family lore and are stories that we thought could be presented visually.” What they have is stories about things that go bump in the night, things that turn up where they shouldn’t, people who turn up where they shouldn’t. “Think of Dark Cabaret as a haunted house for adults – something more literate, more grown-up,” Daniels says. “It’s a form of theatre that we enjoy creating,” Thee adds. “It deals with the supernatural and unseen.” Which is what makes this particular cabaret a dark one. Would you want to spend a night alone in a deserted house with these men? Probably not. But if you’re interested in getting on the Dark Cabaret guest list, there is a Facebook page. // Susan Levi Wallach