Magic in Motion: Goupil and Kosmao Brings Wonder to the Children’s Festival

Etienne Saglio’s career in magic began with a lucky break, though it probably didn’t feel so lucky at the time.

Saglio, then a juggler, broke a finger shortly before graduating from circus school. He still had to do his graduation showcase, and his go-to skill was suddenly out of the question.

So he turned to magic to “juggle” in a new way.

“I made a show where I was [teaching] my [juggling] balls, with wings, to fly,” he recalls. “It was something just to have my graduation without juggling. It was an accident at the beginning.”

Now that accident is an anchor of Saglio’s artistic life. He’s an acclaimed magician whose work has delighted audiences all over France. And soon, St. Albert too: His show Goupil et Kosmao is one of the featured ticketed acts at this year’s International Children’s Festival of the Arts. It’ll run alongside the many acclaimed shows and activities the festival offers for children and families of all ages.

Goupil et Kosmao casts Saglio as a famous cabaret magician looking to perform a routine with the help of Goupil, an apprentice whose former lives as a fox, a scarf, and more, throw Kosmao’s well-laid plans into mischievous chaos.

The show is an homage to the works of Pixar and Tex Avery, mixing magic and puppetry to create delight and wonder—Sagilo compares Goupil to Scrat, the show-stealing rodent from the Ice Age movies. The whole show is Saglio’s way of trying to bring film magic to a live experience.

“For me it was a new way to make a live show that was like an animation, like a movie,” he says. “You have never seen, in real life, this kind of show.”

It’s also his first show specifically made for a younger audience, and the natural reactions of children—not always appropriate in other types of shows—are welcome to him.

“When we perform in France with students, we have to say to the teachers, please don't say ‘shh’ to the children because they will talk—okay, let them talk!” he laughs. “We're searching to make kind of [a] big mess, like in cabaret—in cabaret sometimes people participate.”

The kind of magic Saglio is exploring is known as “new magic”—which tries to make the rich and imaginative inner lives of its characters actually play out on stage.

“At the beginning, magic is a feeling,” he says. “The sun is going down and you say, ‘oh, it's magic’—At the beginning it's a feeling and we try to come back to this. 

“We are searching to use this kind of emotion, feeling, magic,” Saglio continues. “That's [the] kind thing we can do with nouveau magique, to go inside the mind of a character.  … We know that in cinema, but on stage, never. That's new.”

The show has never played in North America before, and Saglio is excited to bring Goupil’s particular brand of wonder to a brand-new audience.

“It's the first time we crossed the Atlantic with this show,” he says. “It'll be beautiful.”

The International Children’s Festival of the Arts runs from May 29th to June 1st. More information about Goupil et Kosmao, and all of Festival’s performances, can be found at https://stalbert.ca/exp/childfest/

Article written by Paul Blinov

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