He doesn’t do tricks. Be respectful, for goodness sake.
They’re not tricks. They are “performance pieces.”
“Ya know, something a little more grandiose than just ‘trick,’” begged Craig Karges, a Wheeling resident who has performed more than 5,500 mindbending shows worldwide and across the country. “And the pieces make up my routines.”
Routines?
“Routines.”
Karges has been amazing audiences since he was in grade school at St. Vincent’s. It’s how he paid for college, an education, as it turned out, he didn’t need. It is the only job he’s ever had.
“I thought I’d have to have a full-time job and that I would do this other stuff on the side,” he said with a chuckle. “But the show was really popular for a long time. In fact, until Covid hit, I was really, really busy. It’s only now really starting to come back.”
And that is why Karges has resumed developing new “performance pieces” for his “routine.” It’s been fun, he insisted, until, that is (he has to admit to himself) he doesn’t feel it.
“I have come up with new pieces in a lot of different ways. I’ve seen things in movies, or I’ve read about something somewhere, and I would think about how I could bring the impossible into the show,” Karges explained. “But what’s really difficult is practicing it because everything I do is very interactive and interactive with strangers. That means it’s really impossible for me to practice with my wife because she knows me too well, and it doesn’t work that well.
“So, what that means is that I have to put the piece into the show and see how it goes, and if it really doesn’t feel as if belongs, I either change it or get rid of it, but I have to see if it has legs. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t,” he said. “And then I have to do it at least a dozen times before I feel comfortable doing the new piece and to see what the response is. It’s really trial and error and that’s because it usually changes from show to show because it’s all live. And yeah, it has to feel right.”
Or When There’s Bloodshed
But is he a “mentalist,” an “extraordanist,” or an “illusionist”?
“In the beginning, people called me a magician, but I don’t do magic, so that’s not true,” Karges said smiling. “I don’t know. I guess I’m an entertainer who does cool stuff.”
And the Central Catholic alum has performed in 27 countries and all 50 states, and it truly is all fun and games.
Until Karges bleeds, that is.
“To be able to do the things I do on stage, there’s a skill set you have to learn, but another part of it is the art of it all. I may be doing the piece, but I dress it up so I can do what I have to do to make it all work. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to take place,” he explained. “Now, I do this one piece blindfolded where I have these cups, and one of them is covering a spike. I smash the cups while avoiding the spike, but I spiked my hand one day in front of the service personnel of Ohio County Schools.
“When that kind of stuff happens, and it does sometimes, I try to figure out why it happened,” Karges said. “Well, that day, I determined I was too focused on the new material in the show and not concentrating well enough on the material that had been in the show for a while.”
Most of the time, he’s able to play it off and act like nothing went wrong at all. If there is blood, though?
“That’s when it can be really embarrassing,” Karges said – this time with a straight face. “And yes, I do try my best to avoid it in the future.”
Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me … When I’m Sixty-Four
There was this one day in March 2020, when Karges’ show schedule was full.
And then the very next day his “routine sheet” was blank, and all residents in the tri-state area were told to go home and stay there. Something called Covid took over, and the virus grounded this extraordinaire to his Wheeling home with his wife, Charlotte.
“The worst part was that no one knew what the future looked like,” Karges remembered. “I did a lot of corporate shows, and those disappeared immediately and are only now starting to come back. Theatres shut down, too, and so did the schools, so we just hung out and ordered a lot of take-out.”
The college circuit was the first to recover, but the theatre industry and corporations have continued to exercise caution when planning employee events. The pandemic, though, caused a pause in an otherwise hectic travel and performance schedule.
“I had taken vacations and time off before, but never that long,” Karges said. “It made me think about how much I still love doing the show, and I did spend time developing new material while everyone waited for things to get back to normal. Now that it is, I’ve been trying to get it built back, but I do wonder sometimes how much it can be built back.
“Trust me, I’m not done and won’t be for a while,” the virtuoso added. “But it’s going to be interesting to see how the rest of the world cooperates.”
