For decades, illusionists and conjurers have performed variations of the “Sawing a Woman in Half” or “Cutting in Half” illusion. The illusion of a woman sawn in half is an old classic that you probably could understand yourself (you didn’t believe that she was sawn in half, did you?!). Most wizards push both sides of the box apart to show the audience that they think the wizard sawed off the woman.
Magicians do not cut people in half. They create the illusion of doing so. A subject is placed in a box and brings their legs up to their chest. The box is attached to another box with fake feet attached. The two boxes are separated, and the fake feet make it appear as though a bisection has occurred.
The moment the volunteer is placed and tied to the box, the sorceress notices her shoes and is filled with envy, and the last shot we see is of the wizard setting off a chainsaw, threatening to saw off the woman’s legs. Some assistants cover the cage with a black cloth, and the magician takes out a saw. The helper enters the box, and that’s when many wizards move their chest to get it out of the way.
How Magicians Prepare for the Trick
The magician then takes some tools and puts them in a box. In this trick, the assistant climbs into a box, which the magician cuts in half. As in the previous trick, in this trick the assistant is cut in half. Magic Circular Saw Trick This trick is similar to cutting the helper in half, only much more extreme.
When many wizards are ready, the huge buzz saw is knocked off and the helper is brutally cut in half. They perform sawing, as if sawing the body of an assistant. An assistant puts the bottom half of them into a hidden compartment before this buzz saw drops down, leaving a pair of fake legs in place. There really isn’t much to do with tricks; all the helper has to do is enter the box, with its head, arms, and legs protruding from various holes.
The assistant’s second body fills the bottom half of the box, while the Magician occupies the top half. The magician takes an assistant (usually a woman) and puts him in a box of some sort. The Remco game has players as stage wizards to play with their Pretty Assistant “Saw Woman in Half Illusion”, as well as stage wizards from “Disappearing Box” and “Levitating Assistant”. They have a giant buzz saw, a woman tied to a table, and a complete misunderstanding of how this deadly theatrical magic trick is supposed to work.
This Particular Trick Is Especially Famous
Almost as famous as the “Pull the rabbit out of the hat” trick, this magician’s deadly trick involves a beautiful woman (usually Lovely Assistant wizards), wizards being placed in a coffin-sized wooden box with a lid, with a hole for the neck at the top, and anklets at the bottom. Then, pulling out a large soft hand saw, the magician saws through a coffin-sized wooden box with a lid, the centerpiece of the woman, and the table on which the box rests.
The Wizard begins by proving that a huge industrial buzz saw is real by placing a thick piece of wood on an ordinary table. When the table is placed under a huge industrial circular saw, precisely and locked in place, the wizard climbs up and appears to be lying on the table, but in fact the wizard is inserting his lower half into the hollow base of the table.
In this third illusion, a huge industrial circular saw will be passed horizontally through the helper. The magician and another assistant are preparing to cut the space between two tables placed side by side. When the curtain falls, the magician and assistant switch places. This is a great looking trick in which the magician enters an opaque or otherwise hard to reach object and the assistant raises the curtain.
The Related “Floating Woman” Trick
The floating woman trick occurs when many wizards push different chairs away and it is shown that someone is still floating in the air. Some spectators may think they are suspended from cables, but many wizards prove they are not by stretching the circle around the assistant’s body.
It’s amazing how everyone seems to associate this illusion with the wizard, when in fact none of them have ever seen the wizard see someone halfway. The Selbit show was, according to magic experts, the first time the artist saw someone cut in half, a trick that has become an icon of magic, rivaled only by pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
British magician P. T. Selbit is often credited with first publicly depicting the illusion of sawing a woman in half in 1921, and it is now a staple of magic shows of all forms and variations around the world. “Seeing a Woman Half-Makeup” has been performed in one form or another since it was first performed before Pope Pius VII in 1809 by a magician named Torrini. It must be remembered that the wizard first sawed the man in half, but it wasn’t until a woman was placed in the spiral that the makeup became a sensation.
There’s always a sense that the wizard’s assistant is about to do something difficult, or there’s another person (the popular myth about “cutting the lady in half”).
