One Yellow Rabbit’s 38th annual High Performance Rodeo is shaping up to be a blink-or-you ‘ll-miss-it experience, literally.

The festival, which runs for a scant three weeks, is being headlined by some of the top acts and best well-known actors in Canada and North America’s theatre and entertainment scene.

Those performers run the gamut from solo shows by two Kids in the Hall legends, Scott Thompson and Bruce McCulloch, to one of magic’s current top performers and Calgary native Carisa Hendrix, and even shows featuring goblins, musical theatre about hippos, and just about anything possible in between.

“We’re really proud of this year, and we’re proud of the spectrum that we’re able to offer. We know that when you pack 25 shows into three weeks, and somebody looks at that schedule, it can seem a little overwhelming sometimes. Especially for folks that haven’t been coming back to theatre in a few years,” said Oliver Armstrong, producer of the High Performance Rodeo.

“Our goal is if you pick one thing, and you get a couple of tickets, you bring a friend, and once you get here and you experience the festival buzz and you chat with some fellow patrons at intermission, or in between shows and our pop up bar—the Lake Craft Lounge—people will entice you to come to something else.

“It’s only three weeks, and if you blink, you’ll miss it.”

Among those shows, said Armstrong, was the hometown return of Hendrix who has brought her two-time The Magic Castle Stage Performer of the Year award-winning performances to the place where her love of magic began: One Yellow Rabbit.

“That really makes our rabbit hearts glow,” he said.

Lauded magic lands on Calgary stage

Hendrix’s show Indulgence stars her now internationally renowned character Lucy Darling, whom she based on the femme phenoms Mae West and Eartha Kitt.

In addition to being described by David Copperfield as a true original and an exceptional new talent, he’s even provided dresses for Hendrix’s shows as Darling from his museum.

“David Copperfield is a huge fan and super supporter, and anything like old dresses for Lucy, he collects in his museum now. I think it’s hard for it to feel real because you tend to dismiss your own success, which is part of what’s so great about being here for the festival is that now I’m kind of confronting it all at once,” Hendrix said.

In Indulgence, she said, the magic is not about tricking the audience, but rather seducing them into Lucy’s world.

“I’m trying to like do some world-building, but that world-building is collaborative with the audience. They make some choices about what that world’s going to look like, I set the stage, the tone, and then together we make a collection of characters that come back throughout the show. The hope is that the first half of the show you spend falling in love with Lucy and becoming her friend and meeting the other characters we’re going to use throughout the show,” Hendrix said.

“Then, as the show progresses, all those things that we’ve learned and we’ve made, all that rich universe we’ve built then pays off. So then you get to experience something that’s a little bit more sweet, or a little bit more metaphorical or lovely, because we’ve already built that foundation.”

She said that her magic show is part of the new wave of magic acts, like those of Rob Zabrecky, that eschews the more combative tone of the comedy club era of magic.

“If you see like the history of magic, the golden age of magic comes as we’re not—I’m gonna bum you out by saying this but like—it comes in this economic depression… we’re participating in magic in this new economic depression, where young people are never going to be able to buy a house, and people feel like they’re going to be in credit card debt their whole life. Everyone is interpreting that and playing off that differently,” Hendrix said.

“Part of the reason the show is called Indulgence is because what I realized is that all indulgence is enjoying something, minus the guilt. That’s it. It’s not enjoying more, it’s just enjoying the whole experience. So, if you look through the show, every single piece has that energy… and everything was a bit indulgent.”

An elemental form of magic

Another thing that Indulgence is avoiding, unless audiences decide to take in the after-party with Lucy Darling, is the kind of close-up magic that has become incredibly popular on social media.

“I’m really driven towards stuff that’s liquid and sand and dirt and smoke and metal. There’s no card tricks unless you’re coming to the after-show. There’s no card tricks in the main show,” she said.

“It is organic materials, it’s paper, and I love the idea of these elemental things. I think magic has its own physical vocabulary of objects: Coins and cards and rabbits and hats. I didn’t really want to participate in that, I didn’t want to conjure the visuals, or the aesthetic, or the experts.”

Instead she conjures the imagery of a cabaret or lounge from a different era.

“I bring out a martini shaker, I bring out a glass, or something that smokes or there’s water that does something impossible,” she said.

“But also things that like are more associated with wizardry, like that almost a cult style of magic because that has its own vocabulary. I think that’s more universal, this idea that we’re in your mind, where you’re imagining magic, or when you have a dream and somebody’s magical in your dream.”

In terms of audience expectations, Hendrix said that audiences shouldn’t expect anything that they’ve seen before.

“It’s not like a play where it’s actors doing the same story every night, you get to enjoy that. I could do the show 100 times, and the next show would still not know what’s gonna happen,” she said.

Already over half sold out, Armstrong urged people wanting to see any of the High Performance Rodeo shows to snap up tickets soon.

“Definitely get your tickets today. Go on the website today. Buy them today. Buy them tomorrow. We are three weeks long, but we know what happens, especially you know, what happens to January,” he said.

“The answer is you will have missed the High Performance Rodeo.”

For more details, and to purchase tickets, see www.oyr.org/hprodeo.