Like many of us, bleary eyed from last nights Session, Thom appeared from under the closeup table, producing a bottle of indigestion tonic from his shoe, before heading into his set.

That I love about Thoms lectures is that he’s always entertaining, and always produces magic with simple things. His first effect, borrowing a ring from an audience member, for it to vanish and re-appear inside a Kinda Chocolate Egg, is a great example of this.

He then moved onto spoon bending, firstly with a physical spoon, before repeating the effect with a drawn spoon on a notepad, signed by himself and a spectator.

Thom’s creativity lends itself to the most mundane looking objects, turning them into minor miracles. A great effect using a novelty ‘Fortune Telling Fish’ leading into a prediction with an audience member on a card matching the fishes behavior.

Thom finished with a strong effect in which a spectator selected a card, lost it in the deck, and then selected it out of a spread out deck themselves using a simple and straight forward method.

The great thing for us in the UK is that Thom not only has a great wide range of lecture material, that he uses in his day to day act, but that Thom is now based in the UK, and  available for lectures..

A great start to the sunday schedule.

One thing I love about The Session is the mix of events, and the organisers always manage to balance the lectures with just enough tricks and chat.

As with last years event Runes World was one of the discussions with a performer of note.

Rune Klan, for those who dont know is a household name in Denmark, exploding onto the close up scene and then almost changing direction completely into what he does now, a strong mix of comedy based magic.

Joshua Jay talked with Rune about how he got to this position and his experience getting there.

Rune is one of the few performers now a days to be able to say that they have had a successful TV series incorporating mainly magic, and during the chat a number of clips of Rune performing were shown.

Runes increadabily likeable personallity and humor came across in the talk, and it was an extremely interesting an enjoyable chat with a very talented and entertaining performer.

Brett Bishop is a new name to us, and this was his first lecture.

He opened with a nice effect involving turning water into ‘cool-aid’, vanishing the cool-aid powder, and turning the water in a bottle into rich red cool-aid.

He followed with a simple chosen card transposition using a regular red, and jumbo blue deck, both effects proving that you don’t need complex slights to create great effects

Brett continued his session with some clever and tight card effects, a lovely ring and coin transposition utilising the much under used Garrett Thomas’s ‘ring thing’ move.

A signed card to card box and a very nice marketable effect based around the plot of a ‘bomb-deck’.

It’s always extremely nice to see new names and promising performers coming from the sidelines. Andi and team made a great choice bringing over Brett for the convention.

Andi Gladwin hosted The Session On Creativity which followed on well Danny Garcia’s lecture.

Its often hard for us, as magicians to understand how to create and invent new magic and effects

The session started with Mark Elsden talking through how he creates and thinks of effects. The most important aspect being, to keep a note book.

He also talked at length about non magic books that have helped him work on ideas.

the ability to create is in all of us, but its down to time and desire, the second part of his session concentrted on looking at effects and the creative process behind them, and how he looked at turning non magic items into magic ones, for example his rubix cube effect.

Next up was again Danny Garcia, possibly one of the most creative minds there is, he talked about how he believed that in magic, nobody has set any rules, and how we should think outside the box when creating.

He then worked though various ideas from the audience on objects, expanding out possible ideas, stating that there is no such thing as a bad idea

The session finished with a panel session made up of noel qualter, danny garcia, mark elsdon, and Andi Gladwin talking and taking questions from the audience on how to create and build new ideas

It was a excellent and thought provoking hour and a half, with many ideas sparking, and hopefully the start of some new magic effects

Andi Gladwin introduced Danny Garcia as holding the future of our magic, a performer whos creativity in magic means we have a bright future in front of us.

Its always fantastic to watch Danny perform, and even more to watch him lecture. His style of magic is not only relaxed and funny, but also mind blowingly creative and strong.

He opened with Greed, his very visual and fast bill change routine, £5 to £10 to £20 to 50p

Moving onto cards, Danny performed William Tell, a card thrown ninja style into the deck, transforms into the chosen card.

I always love seeing his static cards were cards visibility seem to attract an repeal each other before capturing a chosen card between them.

Rubber bands, signed card vanishing from box to appear at selected card, finger ring on and off rubber bands, before an impromptu version of mislead using a borrowed note and drinking straw.

An extremely strong start to the convention, and a pleasure to see Danny Garcia having fun and performing.

Registration for The Session was as always nice and painless.

Each registrant who registered early got a limited edition copy of Magic from The Session booklet with effects from those appearing this weekend.

With a full line up the schedule, which could of course change is:

Saturday

11.30am onwards Registration opens
1.30pm – 2.45pm Intro and Danny Garcia lecture
3.30pm – 5pm The Session on Creativity
6.30pm – 7.30pm Brett Bishop lecture
9pm – 10.30pm Rune’s World
11.30pm – Late The Session uncut (unofficial event – more info on the day!)

Sunday

10.30am – 11.30am Thom Peterson lecture
1.30pm – 1.50pm Chris Mayhew flash talk
1.50pm – 2.45pm Your Strongest Card Tricks
3.30pm – 5pm Joshua Jay lecture
7pm – 7.45pm Bar magic show
8pm – 9.30pm The Session gala show