For one hour last Saturday, illusionist Bradley Fields held the rapt attention of 60 youths and their parents at the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission (NJMC) headquarters in Lyndhurst.
Children from the 14 communities in the Meadowlands District, including Secaucus and North Bergen, are invited to attend the ongoing free programs.
The magic show was the third in a new series of cultural and educational events at the center.
Previous events in the cultural and educational series included a playwriting workshop for children, one on science and dance, and another on snakes, spiders, and scorpions. Later this spring, there will be a “bug zoo” exhibition for kids.
“We are attracting people from a huge geographic area, certainly including people from Secaucus,” said Jane Stein, director of the NJMC’s cultural and educational programs. She said she hopes audiences start to grow via word of mouth.
“As word spreads, and the cultural/educational program catches on, I’m just hoping we see more and more people here,” she said.
Fields’ show, which he calls MatheMagic, is one of several Stein thinks will help bridge the gap between the arts and “the hard sciences.”
Making math fun
After revealing the secret of how magicians seemingly make “holes” appear and disappear on a two-sided flat board using round pieces of magnetic felt, Fields then got on with the business of math.
“If each of these four circles represents 10, then what would our total be?” Fields asked. “Forty!” the kids shouted.
“And if each of these circles represented 100?”
“Four hundred!”
“An what if each of these represented 13?” Fields queried, asking a trick question the children were not quite prepared for.
Following a brief silence one youngster finally shouted, “52!”
“Yes! You must play cards,” Fields quipped.
“I came in November to create a new arts initiative,” said Stein in a later interview. “It will give people an opportunity to come here who may not have been pulled in by our other programs. Not everybody has the environment uppermost in their minds, so they might not be motivated to come here. But if they have a program where they can bring their families, once they get here they can see what we are about.”
“People connect with magic,” Fields said last week. “But kids especially connect with magic because it puts them in a learning state where possibilities are open to any kind of miracle.”
Fields, who began training as a magician as a child before becoming a stage performer in New York City, said he discovered that illusion could be used as a teaching tool when he began working in the education system.
“I started doing local shows in schools – I was just doing magic. And everybody said, ‘Can you do something with the curriculum?’ There were people doing shows about everything but math. There were shows about literature, history, Black History Month. So I came up with MatheMagic as a challenge. I wanted to figure out, how do you make numbers theatrical?”
His show at the NJMC incorporated all the usual trappings of a typical magic show. There were coins pulled from behind kids’ ears, items – specifically rice and water – that magically appeared and disappeared, and assistants plucked from the audience.
Fields’ spin on these old magicians’ stand-bys was that he used them as a jumping off point to impart a little information about math.
After performing some tricks with a magic rope, Field explained to the kids how the ancient Egyptians were able to measure perfect right angles, which were necessary to build the base of the Great Pyramid at Giza.
“It was really cool. I didn’t know that,” said Melissa Spinelli, 13, of Lyndhurst. “We’re learning about Egypt and the pyramids in school now. I’m going to use that [information] in a paper I have to write for my class. I don’t really like math much, but this was fun.”
For information on future shows at the NJMC’s Environment Center, call (201) 460-4644.