‘‘It’s really great to see how I advance,” said Beckham, who wants to perform magic at birthday parties when he’s older because, ‘‘I love being with kids.”
Each morning, the aspiring-Copperfields gathered for three hours to learn about distraction, deception and disarming an audience- — all with their parents’ blessing.
‘‘Oh my God, look! A hippopotamus!” Sarah Schecker, 10, of Silver Spring said, pointing dramatically at the rafters to distract her practice partner as she subtly performed some sleight of hand.
‘‘It’s been a great program, very well received,” said her mother, Rene Schecker, director of education at BlackRock. ‘‘We have lots of young wizards.”
Instructor Brian Curry, a professional magician from Alexandria, was performing some hocus pocus of his own on the pupils. Though they thought they were just having fun, they were also learning how to be more self-assured and comfortable with public speaking, he said.
‘‘It’s great for their confidence,” said Curry, who performed magic for his peers to break through the language barrier as a shy kid growing up in France and Japan.
Curry said the magic workshop at BlackRock is different from others he has taught. The wizards-in-training create a DVD of what they’ve learned throughout the program instead of performing in a show at the end of the week. Shows often cause competition over who gets to perform what feats and that some tricks are hard to translate to the stage, Curry said.
‘‘A couple of these kids are really shy and in a show they clam up, but with a camera they can do it until they get it right,” Curry said shortly before pulling two decks of cards from his mouth. ‘‘...Parents want to see what their kids are doing, and I understand that, so this is a solution.”
Interest in magic comes and goes over the years, Curry said, but the popularity of Harry Potter and illusionists such as David Blaine and Criss Angel has recently raised the profile of the ancient art.
Schecker was one of several Potter fans in the group. Instead of using her wand to shoot jets of water or conjure flocks of birds, she made it spring out of her hand to scare her friends. Schecker and Tara Bhardvaj, 10, of Germantown said they loved learning tricks and wanted to add even more acts to their arsenals, such as perhaps cutting a person into two.
‘‘I want to do that to my brother,” Schecker said gleefully.
Bhardvaj agreed. ‘‘I hope I don’t hurt anybody. I hope they have good life insurance.”
