While human communication involves rich, complex and expressive gestures, available corpora of captured motions used for the animation of virtual characters contain actions ranging from locomotion to everyday life motions. We aim at creating a novel corpus of expressive and meaningful gestures, and we focus on body movements and gestures involved in theatrical scenarios. In this paper we propose a methodology for building a corpus of full-body theatrical gestures based on a magician show enriched with affective content. We then validate the constructed corpus of theatrical gestures and sequences through several perceptual studies focusing on the complexity of the produced movements as well as the recognizability of the additional affective content.