WATCH: Young Maltese Magician Takes An Ordinary Toy And Does Something Incredible
We’ve all attempted the confusing Rubik’s Cube at least once in our lives, and while some people have managed to bring solving the toy puzzle to a couple of moves, others have made an actual art out of it.
Gwilym Bugeja, a 21-year-old Maltese magician, uploaded a video of him taking on the Cube at Ta’ Qali’s National Park, and in between Kendrick Bugeja‘s panning and his back-to-back tricks, the whole thing is impressive AF.
The two-minute video sees Bugeja perform two tricks, with the first one involving an ordinary-looking brown bag. The young magician places a normal, unsolved Rubik’s Cube in the bag, and a couple seconds (and a magic phrase or two) later, he takes it out completely solved. We had to watch the whole thing a couple of times to even believe it.
For good measure, Bugeja finishes off with a fast blind solving of the Cube, a technique which some might recognise from international record-breaking Rubik’s Cube events. Between his attire and his previous trick, however, Bugeja makes this look less like muscle memory and more like actual magic.
Gwilym has been practising magic for the last nine years and performing for six years now. “I still remember watching my first ever magic trick,” he told Lovin Malta. “It was Vanni Pule’ doing a routine which involved changing five Maltese Liri to 10. At that point I realised that this would be something very useful to learn, but unfortunately I still haven’t found out how this could be done. I’ll keep trying to figure it out! I was just so amazed that I had to find a way to create that same feeling, so my dad he taught me my first ever card trick, which I kept showing off until I was 12.”
“A couple of years later, I was browsing on YouTube, and I found a link of a guy teaching three or four basic magic effects,” Bugeja said. “I learned these and I started to perform immediately for my family.” Eventually, in 2014, Bugeja joined one of the biggest societies of magic, the International Brotherhood of Magicians. The brotherhood boasts over 13,000 members from all around the world, and is approaching its 100 year anniversary. Bugeja’s style is Comedy Magic, which he describes as a combination of stand up and magic.
The young magicians regularly uploads short videos showing off his skills on his Facebook page. In a very short five second video he uploaded last month, for example, he quickly transforms a red Starbust sweet into a green one… just by putting his right hand on it for half a second, because he “didn’t feel like the red one.”
“My goal in magic is to at the end of the day give my audience a fun experience and show them something different from the typical magic show with big boxes and doves,” Gwilym said. “I try to create this fun experience by using things you would not expect a magician to use… the Rubik’s Cube being one of them.”
Tag a friend who’s been known to dabble in magic tricks.
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