On February 3, Dave Loosely won The Magic Circle’s Close-up Magician of the Year competition. He and five other magicians each performed a 10-minute act in front of a panel of judges, who ultimately crowned Loosely the winner.
“I am very humbled to have won this award, and have dreamt of this moment since joining The Magic Circle,” Loosely said in a statement. “I could not be more grateful for the opportunity and I am thankful for the support and guidance from my friends and family. I have never had so much drive to want to create and perform, and love magic more now than ever.”
Loosley, now 35, came up through The Circle’s Young Magicians Club before joining The Circle when he was 18. He came in third in the same competition in 2016, and said that Ali Bongo—a late president of The Magic Circle—Penn & Teller, and the late Peter McMahon were major influences on his act, explaining, “They all did things a little differently.”
The runner-up was Harry de Cruz, with Matthew Knight taking third. The other three finalists were Jake Allen, James Stubbs, and Rob James.
“The standard of all six finalists this year was excellent,” said Marvin Berglas, the president of The Magic Circle, in the same statement. “There was a diverse mix of styles of magic with plenty of originality and creativity. It’s quite an ordeal to stand up in front of your peers and perform under such close scrutiny in a competition like this, so I’d like to say a big thank you to all our competitors for doing so well and making the judges’ job particularly difficult. In fact, they deliberated for an hour before they came to their conclusion, which shows how tight it was. Dave was a popular and worthy winner.”
Images courtesy of Brendan Rodriguez Photography and Unsplash