Artist Spotlight: Constantine Foehl is Newton South’s Resident Magician

By Bhairavi Chandersekhar

Sophomore Constantine Foehl can often be seen during J-Block wandering the halls, sometimes with a crowd of impressed fans congregating around him as he performs his latest trick. He is Newton South’s resident magician, and chances are you’ll see him yourself very soon, if you haven’t already.

Foehl started learning magic about two years ago– he’s always had a liking for it, but didn’t spend much time learning tricks until he was inspired by some other students in his middle school.

“People at school started doing it, and I started finding some of my old magic stuff around the house,” Foehl said. “It was the middle of winter, I had nothing else to do, and I just picked up some trick decks of cards and trick coins and started doing stuff. And from there I got even more into it, and got a book on coin magic, and went to a magic store and got a book on card magic, and just kept learning more and more about it.”

Wanting to broaden his audience, Foehl makes a point of showing off his skills to anyone who seems interested. He has an impressive legion of tricks, including coin magic, card magic, and hypnosis up his sleeve.

Foehl credits his latest focus on hypnosis and mentalism to a love of psychology, which he says is a large part of magic. “Getting into people’s heads,” as he puts it, is exactly what he gets to do with mentalism. The trick he’s currently working on is one in which he asks his volunteer to think of a place and guesses it. The simplicity is what makes it amazing to watch, and at the same time, what makes it such a challenge. Fortunately, Foehl is not one to shy away from a difficult trick.

“Mentalism in general is really difficult, because it doesn’t work 100% of the time,” Foehl said, “and not all magic works 100% of the time, but it’s a lot riskier than, say, card magic, because you really don’t have control over what someone’s gonna think of… but that’s what makes it fun.”

Obviously a magician can’t reveal all his secrets, but when asked what the best resource for budding magicians would be, Foehl’s answer is very quick. He’s an old school guy, and insists that despite the vast world of technology, the best resource today for learning magic is definitely books.

“Online, a lot of the tricks can have a lot of misinformation, and if you learn a trick that’s online, then anyone who sees it can just look it up online and instantly know how it’s done,” Foehl said. “But no one reads books anymore, so if you read books, then you just have this wealth of knowledge of magic that no one else is going to have.”

After conducting this interview, I was privy to a first-hand demonstration of Foehl’s skills as he guessed first the star sign I was thinking of and then the number between 1 and 500, with only a couple of questions before getting the number right on his first real guess. Admittedly, I’m still a skeptic… but with tricks this good, who needs the real thing?

Be sure to look out for Foehl when he performs in Tertulia 2016, and catch a sneak preview of his skills here.