What Is Magic?
If you want to be a magician or mentalist, or somewhere in between, then you have an important question to ask of yourself before you decide how your character makes magic happen.
What is magic in the first place? The definition is pretty simple.
If there is an explanation, it isn’t magic.
Magic is the completely inexplicable. If you’re doing cool, dexterous displays with cards (see “cardistry”, above) then from where the audience is sitting, you’re not doing magic, you’re “doing” dexterity. Any magic trick done thereafter is credited to your dexterity, not your “dark powers”. If you were to bend a coin, it would be credited to the strength of your fingertips. If you read someone’s mind, somehow the audience would credit your dexterity. It’s a ruinous, confusing premise for a magician who does anything but cardistry, or its attendant arts.
I’m not arguing against cardistry or anything like it, but in the end it’s a sort of juggling, not magic. Its source is overt, and it is clearly not supernatural. Doing something magical in concert with it implies the magic is accomplished by the same means as the cardistry, and it often is. Audiences think “same prop=same method”. This is related to the too perfect theory.
Think about it: if someone showed you a really cool function of their iPhone, and then did something else with the iPhone saying that was magic, would you believe them? It all comes down to the premise of your act. This is why people differentiate between jugglers, magicians, mentalists, and acrobats.
Of course, if card tricks are all you plan to do, then you may choose to let dexterity be your premise. If you don’t want to say your tricks are the result of magic, you could be a ‘card sharp’, or just a sort of card juggling performance artist. Either way though, no one will credit you with magic powers, and thus, you aren’t performing “magic” per se.
Were one to perform card tricks without any apparent dexterity or apparatus, then the only explanation is magic. Essentially, an idiot handling a deck of cards isn’t expected to perform a miracle, so when one happens, it’s magic. No explanation of premise is necessary when you avoid overt skill, because the default presumption is that you don’t have super-dexterity, so hiding the dexterity presents the audience with just the effect, not the method.
A friend of mine calls this “leaving them on the island”. There is nowhere for the mind to go. The result is awe. Isn’t that why people go to see magic?
The introduction of an implied cause sets a premise in stone. That premise locks the magician into clearly defined boundaries across which he or she can only cross at the peril of confusing the audience. That transgressor pulls the audience out of the enjoyment of the act and into “Hey, does that make sense? I thought he was a card cheat, not a psychic.” Are you Spider-Man, or Iron-Man? You’ve got to pick one, or create something new and clearly defined.
Of course, there is such a thing as a false explanation, a kind of premise introduced through the script, but usually they are either done in jest, or in such an over the top way as to be on the verge of unbelievable. Not all wizards are the same. Harry Potter isn’t a Voodoo sorcerer, nor is he a rough around the edges street performer, nor is he an eastern monk, nor is he a psychic. Derren Brown, at left, gives an explanation that, while it seems to tell how he did what he did, it doesn’t explain how he’d know it would work, or why. It’s as magical as if he’d said he’d sacrificed a chicken to do it.
Puzzles
If you do a magic trick using overt skill or dexterity, then refuse to say how it was done, you’re presenting a puzzle, not magic.
Everyone has that uncle who does terrible card tricks, as we all have that image of the magician in a top hat, and those usually aren’t useful archetypes to a performer. The idea that a magician is “just doing tricks” — presenting puzzles — is well worn, and poisonous. Realistic explanations set up the puzzle mindset. Puzzle solving is not what magic or mentalism should be about. Audiences have a word for a person who presents a puzzle without a solution.
“Asshole.”
When you present magic as its method (eg actually claiming to be using dexterity and then doing exactly as you said you would, etc.) you’re inviting the audience to figure out exactly how it was done, and that is the definition of a puzzle, making you the definition of... you get the idea.
If “magic” is what you want to go for, leave them on the island. Do the unexpected, and the inexplicable. Be uncanny.
