Magicians Without Borders will materialize in Warwick on March 29

WARWICK — Magicians Without Borders will bring their inspiring magic to the Warwick Valley Middle School for a community performance on Thursday, March 29.

Magicians Without Borders performs magic shows for children in refugee camps, orphanages and hospitals around the world -often in war torn places where love, laughter and magic are desperately needed. Tom Verner, founded Magicians Without Borders in 2001 while performing magic shows in the refugee camps of Kosovo and Macedonia.

“I like to think that the magic brings not only laughter and surprise, but on some deeper level perhaps, magic plants seeds of hope,” Verner said in the press release announcing the performance. “Hope that the impossible is possible. Hope that after years of waiting in a refugee camps, the waiting will end and the people will go home again.”

Since that first trip in 2001, Verner and his wife Janet, (a visual artist and teacher, performing as a mime and clown in the shows), have taken six trips a year. They have traveled to India, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Somalia, India, Bangladesh, Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia Croatia, Ukraine and Haiti. They performed for a month in Thailand and Burma after the Tsunami and traveled through Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.

The couple, along with other magicians and theater teachers, travel to El Salvador every three months where they perform for children in the countryside and are teaching magic and theater skills to a group of very poor teenagers. Magicians Without Borders sponsors a weeklong magic, theater and art camp for these children who live in grinding poverty surrounded by brutal gang violence.

These young magicians have already begun to perform in orphanages, hospitals and disaster areas in El Salvador.

Essential information Magicians Without Borders is a 501(c)3 non-profit, and is supported solely by individual donations.

For more information, visit their web site at www.magicianswithoutborders.org.

The show on Thursday, March 29, begins at 7 p.m. in the Warwick Valley Middle School. Admission is $5 for young and old and tickets may be purchased at the door.

For more information, call 845-258-5518.