Magic Isn’t Tricks!
My inner monologue every time someone says “nice trick” to me.
A lot of people write off magic as “tricks”. This is really selling it short. Magic is about tricks in the same sense as playing a power chord on a guitar is a trick, or a pirouette is a trick. Very few people have an uncle who whips out a guitar for his nephews and shows them power chords, or puts on his ballet shoes at the Christmas party and does a pirouette.
Saying magic is “tricks” is the result of a total misapprehension of what magic is in the first place. Magic is performance art, like acting, dance, or covering yourself with peanut butter and lighting yourself on fire. It needs to be understood that way.
No one would walk up to Jay Z after a show and say “Nice word you used there. I know how you did that,” because that is just so obviously asinine, so why do people do it with magicians?
Laymen (read: people who are not magicians) tend to think of magic as “tricks” for two reasons. First, the “trick” is the bit that no one but magicians understand, so it’s the bit lay people tend to find most interesting, especially when the magic itself is terrible, which it often is, sadly. Secondly, it’s what a lot of magicians tend to focus on, which takes the emphasis off the performance and puts it on the trick.
This second reason is owed to how magic is learned.
Full disclosure: outside of studying film and magic, I went to art school. First, I went to The Art Students League where I took classes on human anatomy, and then I went to a four year art school where I studied everything from printmaking to oil painting to sculpture to photography to illustration to watercolors, you name it.
No good artist learns to paint from a lecture. No good director learns to shoot a movie from a book. No musician ever learned their craft from a bunch of YouTube videos. Yet many magicians really only learn their craft from some books, some half-remembered videos, and maybe a lecture or two. I can name only one formal magic school in the world, and it’s in Las Vegas. I can name about twelve acting schools in New York City alone. This is because it is generally understood in acting that you need a teacher to hone your craft, and it is a craft in the first place.
Because of the “trick” problem, people think if you learn the “trick” then you are a magician, thus perpetuating bad magic and this terrible attitude to the craft.
What we have is a craft staffed to the tune of about 40% by people who have never taken formal lessons, had a mentor, or studied a consistent curriculum. A lot of magicians simply learned a couple “tricks” and were satisfied with that, like an actor learning a couple monologues and stopping his or her studies forever, but pulling out those old chestnuts at every family get together.
This isn’t to say that there are not some brilliant magician autodidacts, as there are, but they are the exception to the rule. I was an okay magician when everything I learned was from books and videos, many years ago. Once I started spending time with mentors, and other young magicians who had mentors, I started getting the advice that transformed my tricks into acts. Without that bit of direction, you’re relegated to doing tricks, and tricks will never be great.
