Card Flourish
Card flourish, which nowadays is also called Cardistry, is not card magic nor is it sleight of hand of card magic. It is a fanciful manipulation of a deck of playing cards.
From the past until around somewhere in 1990s, card flourishes are not that fanciful. They could be easily seen on some television shows during gambling scenes. In particular, in the 1950’s to 1960’s, Japanese movies will showcase the actors performing some card flourishes in addition to just shuffling the cards while they were gambling. The card flourishes they performed were mainly the Card Fan, Ribbon Spread and Card Spring. In the 1980’s, Hong Kong produced television shows and movies that began showcasing many fanciful card flourishes beyond those mentioned above. These card flourishes were usually performed by one and the same person behind the scene in many different shows. Sometimes, gimmicks were even used where the cards were stuck together at the edges, which sometime appeared very overtly that it was a fake deck of playing cards.
Card flourish used to be so limited and manageable if you put in some effort into learning them, so much so that when a magician Chris Kenner published his Sybil Cut in 1992, some deemed him to be a master of card flourish. With internet and YouTube where instructions can be taught visually, more and more people have mastered to a great degree of difficulty in card flourish and have brought card flourish to a new level.
In the mid 2000’s, a Vietnamese named Bone designed a whole new range of card flourishes and inspired a generation of youngsters to follow in his footsteps. One of these youngsters was a Singapore teenager named Huron Low and he began learning and executing card flourishes. He and his friends today formed the group known as the Virtuoso. Virtuoso now organises events for youngsters to participate in card flourish events. In America, two brothers, Daniel and David Buck commonly known as Dan and Dave in short, are 2 masters of card flourishes. Their card magic tricks are performed in a mixture of many difficult card flourish moves. You just cannot perform their card magic without having mastered their card flourishes.
Some card flourishes are as listed below:
- Any kind of card fan
- Any kind of one-hand cut
- Ribbon Spread
- Card Spring
- One Hand Shuffle
- Waterfall
- Anaconda
- Angel
- Benwade
- Werm
- Stairmaster
- FlickerTornado Deck Split