Maybe this blog post will be committing a grave breach of trust to the magic profession, but I never took any official magician's code swearing to keep secrecy. Besides what I'm going to reveal is something that was obvious to whatever audience member was looking at it--that is if anyone actually saw it. However this is not so much a story about a great magician's performance of a specific trick as it is an allegory.
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| Tarot card from the Rider-Waite tarot deck, also known as the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Masters of Deception and Misdirection
Years ago I went to see a stage production of a famous magician who was on tour with his wife and a sizable cast of performers and stage crew. Prior to seeing the show a magician friend of mine told me to watch one particular aspect of an illusion which would blatantly expose how the trick was done right in plain sight of the audience. The trick featured the vanishing of a large cage with a large duck in it. When the time came for the vanishing duck routine, I carefully watched as I had been instructed.
A farm setting appeared on stage complete with bales of hay and farm implements. The magician and his wife introduced the duck and put it in an ornate cage. All around were dancers dressed in straw hats and overalls circling and leaping about in a frenzied choreographed routine as lively hoedown music was played by a live orchestra. As the dancers pranced and whirled about, the magician placed the duck cage into another box. Suddenly one of the dancers stage left took a spectacular fall throwing the other dancers into a confused panic. The magician and his wife displayed alarm as they moved to see if the dancer was okay. Fortunately, the dancer leaped back up dusting himself off and signaled in a comic way that all was okay. The audience breathed a collective sigh of relief. Without too much of a break in the action, the magician quickly collapsed the box surrounding the cage, but the cage with the duck had vanished!
Though it was difficult for me not to be distracted by the dancer's spill and the confusion that ensued, I instead kept my eyes on the box covering the duck cage. Simultaneous with the dancer's fall, I saw the duck cage yanked off stage right by a rope that had been attached to it. The cage slid quickly across the stage into the wings. Right there for all to see. But so much was happening on the stage that it would be unlikely that anyone would notice unless they were specifically looking like I was doing.
Performance magic is about confusion and distraction. It can also be about subtle misdirection. There are magicians all around us in our everyday lives. They are on television or they are people we encounter in the course of the day. Sometimes there is so much going on that we miss little details in life. Those details usually can explain everything, but they can be so mundane. It's so much more entertaining to watch the spectacle of all that is going on and to believe that the magic is real. Or if not magic, then conspiracies or some other fanciful explanation to all that goes on.
What mystifies you most about the world? How do you feel when you've been fooled and don't know how the trick was done? Is magic more apt to evoke a smile from you or a pouty scowl?
