Ryan Michael in action at a show

Image Credit: Ryan Michael Magic

Kelowna has its own international award-winning illusionist and he's the only mentalist to have a residency in the Okanagan.

Ryan Michael, a Jasper native, has lived in the Okanagan for 16 years and is a regular at the Crown & Thieves winery in Kelowna where he showcases his mentalist and magic skills in entertaining, immersive shows.

“Overall I'm an entertainer, my number one goal when I'm at any event is to entertain a crowd and give people a whole experience,” Michael says. “My shows are about an hour long where I do all different kinds of stuff.

"In my show right now... I bring about ten people up on stage, I have them think of words from books, or people's names and try to guess them, and there's a lot more but I don't want to spoil it.”

Michael calls himself a mentalist and an illusionist rather than a magician. His shows consist of a lot of live mind-reading and up-close magic, and he makes what seems impossible possible.

Doing this comes from years and hours of practice and developing skills such as dexterity, but also communication.

“Mentalism is like the magic of the mind, it's like real-time mind-reading, suggestion influence and picking up on people's thoughts based on their body language and all that different kind of stuff, so I qualify myself more as a mentalist but magic is my roots and I still do a lot of it too,” Michael says.

“Magic, especially for mentalism, is about learning about people it's about learning how to communicate, how to read body language, how to tell when someone is more reserved or more expressive and use that to your advantage and, of course, that depends on what area of magic you want to specialize in. There's close-up illusion as I do myself where you practice four or five hours a day with a deck of cards and dexterity and learning how to do finger practice and stuff like that."

Ryan Michael Magic from Ryan Michael on Vimeo.

Michael developed his interest in magic at a very young age and immediately loved it. He first developed an interest after seeing a Just For Laughs magic show and reproduced The Amazing Jonathan’s trick of putting a pen up his nose and taking it out his mouth.

Learning how to become a magician, on the other hand, is not an easy task. It took years of practice and meeting different people to bring Michael where he is today.

“Growing up in Jasper is really no way to learn magic. There are no magic shops there, even the libraries didn't have any magic books, there is no way to pursue it and it’s when I was around 15 that I met my friend Wyatt and he showed me a couple of real tricks beyond what your uncle might show you and I was hooked.

He returned to magic in his early 20s, started learning tricks and performing in a local bar.

“I really fell in love with it and dove in head first and dedicated pretty much all my time to learning magic. I would play with the deck of cards and practice about four or five hours every day just trying to learn as much as I could, reading books watching other magicians and then I found a couple other magicians that I liked: Tommy Wonder, Scott Alexander, Daniel Ortiz, Shawn Farquhar and all these other guys that no one's really heard of and I learned a lot from them.”

Michael went to the 2017 Pacific Coast Association of Magicians convention and won two gold medals and the People’s Choice Award. It was then he knew he had no other choice but to make entertainment a career. He later went back to the convention in 2022 and won two more gold medals, making him a five-time international award-winning magician.

He was working as a winery tour guide and had an opportunity to do a show at the Crown & Thieves winery and it sold out.

"So then, they wanted to have me back and so we did a second show and the second show sold out and then the third one and the fourth one and my last show at Crown & Thieves this year will be on Dec. 21 and that will be show number 50 that we've done there and we've had 50 sold out shows.”

Being a magician has been Michael’s full-time job since 2021, and while he loves not having to work the traditional nine-to-five office job, it does come with its own challenges.

“I didn't realize how much behind-the-scenes work there was: email correspondence, follow-ups, cold calls, website designs there's so much in the background that you don't really realize until you decide to do this full time and then it's like ‘Whoa there's a lot of work,’" he said.

The work is all worth it for Michael who is truly passionate about entertaining people.

"What I do to try to get people to come to my shows is, at my core, I try to be the best entertainer that I can. It doesn't matter what I do on stage as long as people are laughing and having fun in the crowd and taking them out of their daily lives for a little bit is what I love," he said. "I love turning adults into kids through card tricks, I think it is the coolest thing ever.”

In January, he will be performing a brand-new show at Crown & Thieves.

More about Ryan Michael can be found on Instagram or on his website Ryan Michael Magic here. 

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