The Contortionist by Michael Giles

Michael Giles - The Contortionist

Upgrade Card Warp effect, without props!

Demonstration effect : http://www.hanklee.org/quicktime_movies/contortionist.mov

The magician takes two cards from a regular deck, one of them being the queen. He proceeds by telling the audience about the circus and all the side shows, particularly about "The CONTORTIONIST."
With the queen representing the flexible little dynamo, he begins to fold the two cards and demonstrates. Placing the queen behind the other card and in a crisscross pattern, he zigzags the top half of the queen from the bottom. After the spectators put their tongues back in their mouths, he restores the queen back together again. The magician clearly shows this to be the case. He shows both sides of the cards to prove that only two cards are being used.
Having no mercy for his audience, the magician folds the two cards (the queen lengthwise and the odd card width-wise) so that only the backs of the cards are seen. The queen is nestled inside the fold of the odd card. He then pushes the folded queen through the odd card and the queen turns face-up, still folded (in a "Card-Warp" fashion).
Knowing that there may be magicians in the crowd, the magician opens the folded cards. Leaving them in an unfolded and crisscross pattern, he then proceeds to push the face-up queen under the face-down card, causing half of the face-up queen to turn face-down. Impossible? He proves this to be true by tearing the queen in half and showing half to be face-up and the other half to be facedown.

The best part is while the audience is bowing to the magician, he repeats this effect with only the torn halves!
Use your regular deck of cards with no added extra gimmicks to perform The CONTORTIONIST! Complete with DVD performance and instructional video plus DVD-ROM contents featuring the original manuscript by Michael Giles in PDF format.