Rising Stars: Meet James Lopez

Today we’d like to introduce you to James Lopez. 

Hi James, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
I’ve always enjoyed magic as a hobby but didn’t start taking it seriously until after college when I saw a magician perform the very first trick, I had ever learned in a way that could only be described as magic. 

Since then, I have become enthralled with magic, performance, and magical theory spending hours pontificating something as subtle as making a coin disappear. 

From there I spent the last decade performing magic and have had the opportunity to perform across the nation including at the world-famous magic castle in 2019 before the pandemic. Most of the time though you can catch me performing in smaller intimate shows, cabaret variety acts, and full theatrical magic shows that I have produced with magical friends. 

in 2018, I started to get the theatrical itch again and started exploring immersive theater work taking the performance off of the stage and into the bubble of the audience. As I started doing shows with local theater companies, I started to realize that magic is one of the oldest immersive art forms and utilizes and excels at a lot of the tactics and techniques in immersive theater. This fueled my desire to start exploring deeper into the psychology of magic and how to use my experience and knowledge learned through card tricks on bigger platforms. 

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle-free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
The practice has been easy but the actual performance is extremely difficult. Finding opportunities to perform and keeping up the momentum is challenging. I do a lot of my work solo or with only a few collaborators so I have to have a lot of self-motivation. Not only that, I have to both perform and run the business, both of which are single endeavors on their own. 

Mostly though, this solitary experience is a struggle because, at the end of the day, my job is to keep secrets for my audiences. To withhold the information that could take away the magic and wonder of the world around them. I need to create stories or lead them down the path to make them believe that there is wonder and beauty out there in the world. The self-imposed pressure to have everything I create live up to this expectation is extremely frustrating and challenging. 

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
First and foremost, I am a magician and storyteller. I use magic and immersive theater as my mediums to help me tell engaging and engrossing stories. Through these two big umbrellas, I have been able to explore various tools and concepts to help me create emotional and transformative experiences for my audiences. 

My company, The Exposure Project, was created out of the pandemic and my personal love of exploring minimalistic immersive experiences. I am not a fan of spectacle and would rather make the audience feel that same feeling with nothing in my hands but a deck of cards and a twinkle in my eye. There is something truly profound and fascinating to me in Magic Realism, or blurring the lines between fantasy and reality and exploring that with audiences, making people never know when the performance begins or if it ever truly ends. 

Primarily you will catch me performing magic or producing one-man shows that put an emphasis on magic in the show. But also, my company has given me the freedom to explore everything from 3d projection mapping to binaural audio experiences and experimental theatrical performances. 

In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
Both magic and immersive theater are going to become commonplace entertainment experiences. With the likes of Shin Lim and Meow Wolf becoming household names I believe that we will see a desire from audiences for more engaging storytelling that lets them be part of the experience and engage on a deeper level. 

I think we will see many companies using the words immersive and magic and exploring what those words mean to them. I think the pandemic was good for artists because it forced them to explore what it truly means to connect with audiences and how can we do that when we don’t have our traditional access to them. As a result, I foresee performance utilizing all types of technology and combinations of art forms to create more engrossing experiences the likes we have never seen. 

My personal hope is that we see a renaissance in more intimate performances focused on communication and connection. I think audiences soon will be looking for ways to connect with each other and with stories on a more personal or emotional level. Shows with smaller audiences and compelling performances will become desirous. 

Contact Info:

• Email: theexposureproj@gmail.com
• Website: http://exposureproject.co/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.exposure.project/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JamesLopezMagic

Image Credits
Nicholas Caputo
Martha Wirth
Jeff Jones