The magician: Master of the Mystic Arts, or simple con artist? Like clowns, people seem to fall into two camps -- although for different reasons. You like magic and magicians, or you don't.
The folks who don't like magic have a point. We know that the magician is fooling us (i.e., making us look or feel foolish). What they seem to be doing is impossible, we know, so there's got to be a trick to it, yet the magician appears to be taking themselves and what they're doing seriously -- insisting that our seeing should be believing.
The pictures below show two different approaches to the performance of magic. In the photo on the left it is clear that I am receiving the accolades of the crowd. I've done something amazing, and the audience is showing me that appreciate my skill. And that certainly is one way to approach not only magic, but any kind of performance -- it's about the performer. Yes, certainly, an entertainer wants their audience to be entertained. Ultimately, though, it's about the performance itself. For the magician, that means it's all about the magic.
In the 80s, I was lucky enough to meet a man named Bill Carpenter (who, at the time, went by his clown name, Gusto). His Midway Caravan introduced me to a new way of thinking about my performances. He turned the dynamic of performance on its head. As I wrote in a blog post shortly after I heard of his death, Gusto's approach,
... didn’t create a dynamic of a passive audience staring up at the impossible feats of the performer and saying, “Wow! Look what you can do!” Instead, the audience looked at the performers, who just moments before had been the audience, and said, “Look what we can do together.” The performance was actually something of a ruse; the real act was the creation of community.
While working with Gusto I began to use my own role as magician/juggler/fire-eater/clown as a tool to take the spotlight that would be thrown on me and turn it back on the assembled crowd, the "congregation" that had gathered, the community-in-the-making. (Even before I was an ordained minister, working in a parish setting, I understood my performance as a form of ministry, and the people who gathered, who congregated, in the hall or on the street corner where I was performing as "a congregation.")
This is what the photograph on the right captures -- the girl is the focus of people's attention, not me. My job is simply to facilitate this opportunity for her to shine and, through her, for everyone to feel good about themselves. Here the magic is not the end in itself, simply the means to the end. This is why I would announce before each show that I was about to do a number of tricks, the secret of which wasn't really the important thing. I would invite anyone who wanted to to come up after the show and tell me how they thought I'd done a particular trick. If they were right, I would always tell them so. If they were wrong, I'd give them hints to help them think it through again.
Yet if fooling people wasn't my aim as a magician, what was? The experience of wonder. I would tell people that I hoped at some point during the performance everyone would have at least one experience of seeing something impossible happen in front of their eyes. In that moment -- that split second before their rational mind kicked in to try and explain the mystery away, to find its secret -- that's where "magic" happened. The feeling they had was magic, the trick was simply the means by which I could remind them of what awe and wonder felt like.
That, it seems to me, is a lesson worth learning ... and remembering. That sudden in-breath of wonder; that widening of the eyes in awe; that quickening of our pulse when we come face to face with the utterly impossible happening right in front of us nonetheless for its impossibility -- all of these feelings are real. They matter. They're important to pay attention to. Albert Einstein is credited with saying:
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. [The one] to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead -- [their] eyes are closed.
Pax tecum,
RevWik
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| photos taken of one of my performances of the Ithaca Commons, Ithaca New York, in 1986 |
