David Blaine pushes magic to the extremes of endurance

In the 44 days and nights he spent dangling over London's River Thames in a plastic glass box with nothing to eat and only water to drink, David Blaine said his mind was never clearer.

In a society that's infatuated with food, Blaine existed on only the most natural of elements, and it changed his life. Though his body grew frail, his thoughts became sharp as a tack.

When he finally emerged from that box, 50 pounds lighter, there was no optical illusion revealed, no magic. Just a man who had been fasting for more than a month to prove it could be done.

Blaine will be in town Saturday to cap the season for the Richmond Forum with a talk called "Pushing the Limits of Human Endurance," in which he will show the audience, as he says, "all the good stuff."

Specifically, Blaine will provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the research, preparation and training he goes through to pull off some of the most physically demanding stunts attempted since the days of Harry Houdini.

Houdini is one of his inspirations. But so are other less likely sources, such as Holocaust victims and monks, people who endured physical hardships, whether forced or by choice, and survived.

"It's finding out there aren't limits to what we want to do, except for the ones we put on ourselves," he said from his New York studio recently.

Long gone are his teenage days of performing magic tricks on the streets of Brooklyn. Blaine has taken his love of magic and the unknown to new levels, coming up with ideas that push the human body to the brink of death and publicly breaking world records all along the way.

His feats, at a glance, include:

•Being buried alive for seven days and nights on Manhattan's West Side in 1999.

•Spending three days and nights encased in a six-ton block of ice in Times Square in 2000.

•Standing atop a 100-foot pillar in New York's Bryant Park without a net for 36 hours in 2002.

In 2006 at Lincoln Center in New York, Blaine was submerged in a glass sphere for seven days and nights, and at the end of the stunt, made his first attempt to beat the world record for holding his breath underwater (more than 8 minutes). After more than 7 minutes, he fell short. In 2008, however, he beat the record when he held his breath for more than 17 minutes on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

Although his stunts often defy death, he said he doesn't call himself a daredevil in the sense that he's just trying to cheat death. It's more about going through the experience of doing something that doctors and scientists say can't be done, "the ability to adapt and survive conditions that normally I feel would be completely impossible."

Forum Executive Director Bill Chapman said there's never been a Forum guest like Blaine. He said he thinks the audience will enjoy hearing about the research and development that goes into Blaine's stunts because they're often based in history or mythology.

"This is going to be a program that I think is going to surprise a lot of people," Chapman said. "There's a lot of substance behind the endurance stunts he does."

Blaine became a dad a few months ago and jokes that his biggest challenge right now is making some dough to support his family. But when pressed, he said he is in the midst of preparing for his next big stunt. The only detail he would share is that it involves water.

Though he's way past simple tricks, there's still a little piece of street magician in Blaine. During a telephone interview, this reporter was asked to think of any word and then focus on the last letter of that word but not reveal it. From there Blaine said to focus on a color or a state that begins with that letter. This line of questioning continued for a minute or so, until he took a guess at the letter in question.

It was the letter "I," and he got it right.

hprestidge@timesdispatch.com

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