sim sala bim
By William Pack | Magician, Historian, and Educator, https://libraryprogramming.com/
By State Library of Victoria Collections - Flickr: Harry August Jansen, known as Dante, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19361412Dante
(Harry August Jansen, né August Harry Jensen)
B. October 3, 1883 – D. June 15, 1955
At the age of six, Harry’s family moved from Copenhagen, Denmark to St. Paul, Minnesota. Like many young boys of this era, his inspiration to become a magician started after seeing performances by Harry Kellar, Anna Eva Fay, and Hellmann (a not-so-great imitator of Alexander Herrmann).
As a schoolboy, Jansen astonished his classmates by making a button disappear; he practiced sleight of hand and became adept with billiard balls, cards, and coins.
At fifteen, he signed up for three months of performances by the Slayton Lyceum Bureau. By 1901, he played in thirty-two states and traveled 22,000 miles. He worked a Mexican circus for six months. He then began playing mostly in small theatres.
In 1905, he met Miss Edna Herr, who was conducting an orchestra at an amusement park. Miss Herr quickly became Mrs. Jansen, and Harry had his own musical director. He changed the name of the act to the Herr-Jansen Company, calling himself Herr Jansen like a German professor of magic. When the marriage started producing children, the family moved to Chicago. To limit his traveling, he founded the Halton and Jansen magic store with Charles Halton. Harry Jansen turned out to be one of the great mechanics and builders in magic.
An offer too good to refuse, a tour of Australia and Asia, came four years later. The show returned to San Francisco on New Year’s Day 1915. Jansen then played vaudeville with his own illusion show until 1921, when he jumped on the “Sawing a Woman in Two” craze by heading one of Horace Goldin’s road companies. Jansen’s technical abilities helped perfect the sawing illusion, making it superior to other versions of the trick.
His work on the sawing led the top magician of the era, Howard Thurston, to hire Jansen to tour Thurston’s number two show. Thurston gave Harry a new stage name, Dante. He would find his greatest fame as Dante and would use that name until his death.
Thurston gave Harry a new stage name,
Dante.
He would find his greatest fame as Dante
and would use that name until his death.
With his new name, Dante, and under Thurston’s banner presenting “Thurston-Kellar Mysteries,” he gradually became the success in America that he dreamed about. It was in the fourth season under Thurston’s banner that he became a threat to Thurston. So, Thurston sent Dante out of the country on a world tour.
Dante never looked back. He soon dropped the “Thurston-Kellar” and built his own reputation. The tour started in Puerto Rico, then to Trinidad, and in quick succession, he played British Guiana, Dutch Guiana, the British West Indies, Peru, Uruguay, and Argentina. Dante performed over 100 shows in Buenos Aires alone. The troupe boarded a ship to Europe, where he performed in Berlin and Breslau. The Dante company was the first all-American show ever to play in Soviet Russia. The opening performance in Moscow was overwhelming. Dante took fifteen curtain calls, and the audience still shouted for more. Dante declared it was the greatest ovation in his entire career.
He went to Leningrad for four weeks before leaving Russia. Then it was on to Madrid, Barcelona, Marseilles, Paris, Antwerp, Brussels, The Hague, Amsterdam, Bonn, Essen, Aachen, and finally the city of his birth, Copenhagen. He toured all the Scandinavian countries. In Sweden, time was taken out to star in a movie with the great Swedish actress Elizabeth Frisk. The movie was called “Dante’s Mysteries.” It was Dante’s first motion picture, but not his last.
By 1930, Dante titled his show, the “Sim Sala Bim Magical Review.” Sim Sala Bim is a vital part of Dante’s story. There is an old children’s song in Northern Europe with the jingle, “Sim Sala Dim. Sala Du, Sala Dim.” He learned it at his mother’s knee. It stuck with him, and he would absentmindedly sing it backstage or in quiet moments. Around 1927, he began to use the words on stage as a magical incantation instead of “Hocus Pocus” or “Abracadabra.”
While touring Australia, Dante signed up a beautiful young woman named Loretta Miller to be an assistant. Her name was soon changed to a more exotic, Moi-Yo Miller. She stayed with him for the rest of his performing career. She very quickly became his main assistant and an integral part of his show Sim Sala Bim. She was often billed as "Australia's Most Beautiful Woman". She once estimated that she had been sawed in half around 11,800 times during her career. Miller became highly regarded among professional magic performers and is widely cited as one of the all-time great magic assistants. She was featured in the 2008 documentary, “Women in Boxes,” which explores the vital role of assistants in magic.
In 1936, Dante learned that his old boss, Howard Thurston, had died, but Dante was making so much money in Europe that he stayed put rather than try to conquer America. Harry Blackstone Sr. became America’s most prominent magician.
Dante was in Berlin when he heard Hitler was invading Poland. Dante had six hours to cross the border before it was closed. Dante and his troupe made it to Sweden, where they disbanded. He left forty pieces of luggage behind. With his family and Moi-Yo Miller, he sailed to America. The ship arrived five days late as it zigzagged across the Atlantic, dodging German U-boats.
He settled in California’s San Fernando Valley. Within a year, he reassembled a show and opened at the Morosco Theater in New York. The critics loved it. Magicians were astonished at some of the great illusions that Dante had developed on his world tours. Even old familiar tricks were given the Dante imprint, so they appeared new and original. It was one of the greatest shows ever mounted in America.
In 1942, Dante was tapped for another movie, Laurel and Hardy’s “A-Haunting We Will Go.” In 1950, he had a part in the movie “Bunco Squad.” He also was a frequent guest on television’s “You Asked for It.”
Dante continued to tour both America and Europe until the end of the 1940s. The era of great magical entertainment was winding to a close. There were fewer and fewer theaters in America where a big magic show could be performed. Movies, for a time, killed the big show.
Even old familiar tricks
were given the Dante imprint,
so they appeared new and original.
Dante’s last public appearance came when he delivered a brief speech to rousing applause at the combined convention of the Society of American Magicians and the Pacific Coast Association of Magicians in Santa Barbara, California.
Few were surprised to hear that Dante was dead on June 16, 1955. However, many grieved the passing of the greatest magician they had seen in their lifetime.
