The Jocker

In the art of shuffling and giving back, the magician is an actor, an entrepreneur and a scientist who proves that there are no impossibilities, he is an altruist, who abdicates the secrets of magic in order to give it to others and provoke their admiration. The conviction belongs to Rúben Clara, magician from Vialonga, also known as The Jocker.

  At the age of 27, Rúben lives only from magic and in recent years he has had to talk to shows that have had a growing audience. One of the last took place precisely in Vialonga, in February last year, at the Olga Campos Art Gallery, where he showed some of its effects to the community. Then the pandemic threw him back home where his shows turn out to be online.

  His professional name derives from the letter of the same name, which means working for both sides. “As I like and perform various activities, it's as if in magic there were different people practicing different arts, hence the name The Jocker”, tells O MIRANTE.

  He likes living in Vialonga, a land that claims to be friendly and where many people know him since he was young. Many magicians start training the art from an early age, but Reuben started late, just seven years ago and at his own risk. He fell in love when he saw the effects of other magicians and one day in the theater program of the town hall where he was inserted, Aprendizes do Fingir, he asked his friends to chain him up with one of the props that were there. It always got loose, to everyone's astonishment.

“There was one who called me an exorcist,” he recalls with a smile. Self-taught, he learned everything himself through trial and error reading books on the subject and watching magic programs. “Magic isn't just discovering the letter, it's much more than that, it's connecting with the public. I don't like to use the word trick but effect because the trick implies that what we are doing is not real but that is not true. Everything we do is very real but from a different perspective”, he assures.

  The secrets of your work remain well hidden. But he guarantees that the essential has to do with creativity; empathy with spectators and knowledge of different arts and areas, such as Mathematics and Physics.

  Chaining and letting go is for him one of the easiest effects to accomplish. “I improved and was always improving. In the world of magic it is one of the most difficult effects but it depends on the way it is done”, he guarantees. Seventy percent of your magic is done with cards. “It was the first tool I started using. There were no tissues, sponges or balls. With cards I can do a lot of things”, he explains.

Rúben says that due to the pandemic, the stop was important for magicians to improve their knowledge and train new tricks. “I learned more last year than in my entire life as a magician,” he says.

  To highlight the importance of the audience, he tells an episode. “One day I was on the bus and some people from Vialonga who knew me challenged me to do some effects, even there. I agreed and there was an enthusiastic reaction from the audience to the point that he fled in fear. This is our greatest magic. The story of magicians is almost like a fairy tale and I would like people to know that”, he says in one of his favorite stories. Among his favorite magicians are some names like René Lavand, Dai Vernon, Richard Tunner, Peter turner David Copperfield, Tommy Wonder, Bill Malone or Leonard Green.

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"The choice of a card has a lot to do with the person who chooses it, thus giving the chance to evaluate it, more specifically every detail of his person and his state of mind, of his thinking, magic is not what I do, it's the that people feel when they see it, that's why magic exists"