Hu Linglong

It all began with an almost naive conviction: magic should not be merely a display of skill about ‘disappearance’.

When they decided to bring Hamlet to the magic stage, they committed themselves to an exceptionally long and lonely road. They refused ready-made, production-line props, insisting that the joys and sorrows of a prince and princess should speak for the cold technique. From an idea in the mind to lines on paper, to costumes sewn stitch by stitch and props fitted to the millimetre, the two of them stubbornly took on everything. In the soul of every act there had first to be a living person, and only then an astonishing craft.

This road of pure handwork was painfully slow. He excelled at building grand illusions on stage; she concentrated on the delicate flight of cards at the fingertips; his thoughts ranged freely, her hands worked with precision. The years others spent touring for hire they poured entirely into the rehearsal room, only to polish ‘dazzling’ into ’making sense’. The applause they longed for most was not the audience gasping ‘where did the coin go’, but asking through tears ’what became of that person’.

The turning point came at a programme recording. It was a moment when the stage looked up at the audience, and the young met a legend. In the judge’s seat sat the National Class-A Performer who had taken China’s card-throwing art to the world stage: Ruxianguli. To young people she was a mountain almost beyond reach; but Ruxianguli looked past the brilliant lights and saw clearly the script these two had written by hand, their clumsy but heartfelt props, and their purest reverence for magic. It was a resonance of souls between creators and master, with no need for words.

‘In 2014 our wish finally came true, and we became your disciples.’— Hu Linglong and An Na, letter of thanks to their master

Forest Fantasy was their breakthrough, the first time they poured a grand theme onto the stage.

The story’s core is pure and moving: deep in a dark forest, a hunter tracks a wounded bird. But the bird does not fall into a cold trap; it falls into the gentle palm of the forest’s guardian spirit. Facing the hunter’s gun, the deity does not choose to overpower him, but awakens compassion through the miracle of magic. When the cold rifle drops to the ground, a hunt to the death becomes a shared path, and the two become guardians of this green world together. ‘Love peace, revere nature’: grand words like these are pale preaching when printed only on a programme; but attached to a pair of beating white wings, they gain a force that strikes straight at the heart. The audience sees, and understands at once.

The real difficulty of this work lay in making the flesh and blood of magic grow naturally within the veins of the story. Producing doves, changing costume, teleporting: these century-old techniques are nothing rare in themselves; what is rare is the moment at which they arrive. The dove on stage is never there to ‘blow up the room’ for a gasp; it appears because, in that instant, the deity chose forgiveness. As the vice-president of the China Acrobats Association wrote in his notes on that year’s showcase: ’Grand in scale and fresh in form, the plot full of human care. Moved by the wounded white-dove goddess, the hunter lays down his gun, and amid tender music…‘ What stayed engraved in the memory of this veteran who had seen countless daring feats was not an incredible technique, but that gentle act of laying down the weapon.

But the life of Forest Fantasy did not stop there. In the years that followed the piece was broken apart, rebuilt and broken again, almost cruelly. Three full years, more than a thousand sleepless experiments and rejections, until it was reborn under another, better-known name.

Looking back, this act was never a finished endpoint but a great beginning: the first time they proved to the world, with complete conviction, that magic really can ‘speak’.

In Tian Chan at OCT East in Shenzhen he stood for the first time inside a truly large production. It was a symphonic sound-and-image drama that had won a THEA Award from the Themed Entertainment Association, with more than two hundred performers on stage, telling the thousand-year bond between tea and Zen. He was the lead magician, yet he quickly understood that on a stage like this, magic should not be the one stealing the scene; it had to seep like water through the cracks of the story, so that the audience realised only a moment later what had just happened. In two years of residency, the first thing he learned was to step his own technique back a pace and let the whole play move forward.

The real test was Macao. Journey to the West, the large-scale China show created by Beijing’s Huayan Group with Sands Macao, had to bring a story every household can recite onto a stage facing audiences from all over the world. He and An Na served as magicians and act designers: not designing a few routines, but finding a way for every ‘supernatural power’ in the play to hold up on stage. How the spider web of the Silken Cave opens in mid-air, how the cave’s mechanisms open and close before everyone’s eyes, how demon and human swap places in an instant: none of this could be explained by subtitles; the audience had to see it with their own eyes. Magic here became a language, letting an ancient story speak to people of different tongues.

Once the show was made, it had to travel. Huayan Group launched a national tour of Journey to the West, and the two of them went from magicians on stage to lead magician and magic director responsible for everything before and behind the curtain. Three years, one show on the road: in every unfamiliar theatre the mechanisms had to be recalibrated, the timing re-synchronised, dozens of invisible steps landing in the same second. The magic director’s job is to make everything unseen appear on time. What they would later call, in Magic & Voice, ‘being the tuner of human hearts’ — its first lessons were learned on the road in those three years.

Secret Realm was the exquisite transformation distilled from Forest Fantasy after countless cycles of breaking down and rebuilding.

On stage were still the same well-matched partners and the same lively birds, but the core of the work had made a profound leap from ‘protection’ to ’coexistence’. It no longer tells of humans condescending to ‘spare’ nature; it says gently that humans belong to nature in the first place. The soul of the work is rooted in the mudflats of Shenzhen’s mangroves, home to migratory birds that return every year on schedule, where the bustle of the city and the wetlands of nature are separated by a single embankment. In Secret Realm the birds are no longer props to be manipulated, but stage partners with equal souls, breathing with the magician and completing each other.

Three years, more than a thousand trials and errors. Traditional dove magic is often obsessed with the visual bombardment of ‘faster doves, more doves’; they chose to swim against the current and bravely slow the pace. From structure to the finest technical detail they broke in order to build, drawing on the marrow of traditional magic while refusing to copy its skin. The sentence the China Acrobats Association wrote in its award citation is the most precise footnote to the piece: ’In the magic act Secret Realm, birds take wing, presenting a beautiful picture of harmony between people and animals.‘ There is not one line of dialogue in the whole performance, but the moment the birds lightly beat their wings, the entire audience holds its breath and sinks into a stillness full of awe.

This was a labour of love submitted by the Shenzhen Acrobats Association, and a milestone: the first time since the founding of the Longhua District Acrobats Association that a member had gone into battle at a national competition. On the day they lifted the trophy, the two said with feeling that this weighty medal ‘is also a gift from all of us to mark the founding of the Longhua District Acrobats Association’.

This act, grown stubbornly out of Shenzhen’s muddy tidal flats, in the end brought the highest professional crown of Chinese acrobatics proudly home to Shenzhen, like a flock of birds returning to the nest.

A masterwork that blazed under the spotlight. In the days of concentrated creation, the image of the Terracotta Warriors struck him like lightning: no longer cold clay figures in a display case, but a host of living, hot-blooded lives. They too had once been young; they too, on some windy morning, had resolutely taken up arms and armour and left their homeland. A stirring idea was carried back to the rehearsal hall, and after countless rounds of self-rejection and digging deeper, it became the thousand horses and ten thousand soldiers on the stage.

The curtain rises, and the story is told by a solitary restorer of antiquities. Bent over a quiet workbench, he pieces together shattered pottery fragment by fragment. In that breath-held moment of repair, magic quietly tears open the barrier of time: flashing blades, beacon fires and wolf-smoke, the heroic years when the ancestors resisted invasion surge out of the crack in time, treacherous and shifting. He does not travel through time to play the hero; he is yanked into the torrent of history by the object in his hands that has just come back to life. In this play magic becomes an exquisite instrument for tampering with ‘time’: an umbrella opens dazzlingly from nowhere, a red horse gallops out of rolling smoke, banners snap up from the ground and crash down again in the afterglow of history. When he withdraws from the clash of arms on the ancient battlefield and returns to the silent bench, the audience suddenly understands: what he repaired was never merely a broken vessel, but an awakened memory of home and country, an unbowed echo running in the bloodstream of a people.

An Illusion · Realm of this scale was no longer the product of two people fighting alone behind closed doors. Produced with the full weight of the China National Acrobatic Troupe, the troupe’s director personally led the choice and development of the subject, the chief engineer safeguarded the technology, and the country’s top young directors, lighting designers, composers and multimedia artists took their places and gave everything. And he was not only the lead performer commanding the whole stage, but the magic director and prop designer of this great production. A seemingly impossible idea, carried by the strength of a top national team, grew at last into a towering tree.

On this stage watered by the devotion of so many, Illusion · Realm blazed. It not only brought the China National Acrobatic Troupe its tenth Golden Chrysanthemum Award, the highest honour in the profession, but formally crowned this pair, who had cut their way through every thorn, as legendary magicians who had twice won the Golden Chrysanthemum.

Growing a work from a single ‘act’ into a whole ’production’ is a complete remaking of a magician’s command of the stage. On the national tour of Magic & Voice, magic and vocal mimicry collided across genres, and he and An Na carried the show, taking it through Poly theatres across more than half of China. As the stage grew wider, the real test changed with it: a dazzling five-minute moment can be held on a single breath; but to command an entire evening, one must learn to be the ‘tuner’ of human hearts. When the audience should roar with laughter, when they should hold their breath, at which point they should be gently ’let go’: they were no longer performers with heads bowed over their technique, but guides steering the rise and fall of the whole room’s emotions.

If the tour was an expansion of territory, then Dreammaker: Secret Realm, which premiered on New Year’s Eve, was a dive into the depths of the soul. As magic director and lead performer, he grew that award-winning five-minute act of the same name into an avant-garde stage play on the loneliness and freedom of today’s young people. He became ‘Hu Linglong’, a game designer who imprisons himself in a virtual world; and the ’Beijing swift’ of the play, a bird that can barely take off from the ground in its whole life and can only soar by borrowing the wind as it falls, became a metaphor for yearning toward the sky. Here magic shed the garment of mere entertainment entirely and became a dramatic expression of great tension. In an illusory realm built with their own hands, they completed the profound crossing from ‘craftsman’ to ’artist’.

When what lies within is deep enough, the boundaries of the stage are pushed endlessly outward. From the magician who travelled three European countries with the ‘Cultures of China, Festival of Spring’ tour for overseas Chinese, to the cultural envoy who doubled as host on the ’Chinese Kinship’ Oceania tour and performed Gucai Xifa with ease, to the special guest standing shoulder to shoulder with FISM world champions at Shanghai International Magic Week: along this road, a craft that once scrambled through the rough fields of Wuqiao and the mudflats of Shenzhen’s mangroves finally grew full wings. Stop after stop, with the purity of their fingertips and the depth of their drama, they carried the joys, sorrows and pride of Chinese magicians without obstacle into one unfamiliar language after another, and astonished a wider world.