Before we even opened 69 Atlantic, we made a wish list of magicians who we would personally love to see perform up-close in an intimate theatre in Brooklyn. Yann Frisch was the name at the top of the list. For the past two years, we’ve been trying our best to gently lure this mercurial French artist to New York City and finally—Mon Dieu—we’ve done it!
Yann Frisch is a defining figure in the global landscape of magie nouvelle (new magic)—a contemporary movement that transcends traditional constraints and recontextualizes sleight of hand as a rigorous, essential performing art. Rather than using deception to showcase power or cleverness, Frisch deploys it as a psychological framework to explore the instability of truth, identity, and human belief. In his youth, Frisch trained as a juggler and a clown. At 18, he was introduced to Compagnie 14:20, a Parisian theatrical group at the vanguard of magie nouvelle. This new approach ignited a deep passion in Yann to learn and grow. Just two years later, he created the short-form piece Baltass, a magic act which toured the world and with which he obtained the titles of French champion (2010), European champion (2011), and World champion (2012).
Those accomplishments alone would have made the young Yann Frisch a global sensation in the world of magic but over the past fifteen years he has continued to break new ground with his creative experiments. Yann established his own theatrical engine, Compagnie L'Absente, which serves as a laboratory for large-scale, multidisciplinary projects integrating sleight of hand with clowning, existential philosophy, and immersive set design. Yann and his team created the wildly brilliant semi-truck theater—the Camion-Théâtre—a road-legal vehicle that folds out, expands and transforms into a 100-seat black box theater that can be parked and constructed in any open field. He now tours the countryside of France, presenting dark, clownish, shockingly magical shows that blur the line between circus, conjuring and fantasy.
Produced and Edited by Hal Schulman Music by Thugfucker
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