Italy this year will see the introduction of two new potential award categories: online magic and street magic. The impetus behind testing these new awards—they are not official categories yet, though they will likely become so if they take place at the following FISM as well—is to have the convention recognize and attract those who perform in spaces increasingly popular with lay audiences.
In an interview with Genii, FISM Italy organizer Walter Rolfo explained that the convention needed to be accessible and of interest to younger generations of performers. “We are like the T-Rex,” he said. “If we don’t change something, we are going to extinguish ourselves.”
The answer, according to Rolfo, is to get new blood into FISM, and the new online magic category, which he developed with Xavier Mortimer and Chris Ramsay, is one of his attempts to do just that. To that end, on February 1, FISM began accepting submissions for the new online magic category, with a close date of April 1. A panel of judges, which includes Ramsay, Steven Frayne (formerly known as Dynamo), Ekaterina, Jeki Yoo, Patrick Kun, Tom Elderfield, and Xavier Mortimer, will then select the 19 best entries, with the hope that the contest will make millions of people aware there is a World Championship of Magic. There will also be an additional finalist determined by a public vote, making for a total of 20 videos heading to Italy. “Hopefully, 10 million or maybe 50 million people will know about FISM, and that magic is not just 15-second reels on YouTube,” Rolfo said.
The criteria for submissions include no video edits, though misdirection is allowed, so long as it is performed in front of the camera, with no camera cuts or edits. The entries cannot be more than one minute and 30 seconds long. Those 20 finalists will be invited to compete in Turin, Italy, during FISM this July. There, the category will have its own established session where finalists will “perform”—in this case, have their videos played in a room at a certain time—where a different panel of judges helmed by Joshua Jay will assess the entries, using the same criteria juries use for established awards. Like other categories, general FISM attendees can also watch the competition.
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