Repertoire, Relation and Technique

Abstract

Modern magic performance is often associated with two core things: misdirection and exceptional technique. The successful magician utilizes ‘second nature’ to manipulate the cards, palm the ball, and conceal the hidden compartment, all while observing and controlling the audience’s own assumptions built from their perceptual experience. Magicians are simultaneously actors onstage and technicians offstage, the performance form requiring a careful negotiation, as in dance, between the hands, the body, the mind and the technologies of magic (from cards to cabinets). Magicians thus utilize habit as a creative force that draws from routinized action. The magician must also negotiate between strategic techniques and learned response to spectator habits, both of which are developed through repeated practice.

Modern magic’s performance habits provide ample fodder for mapping habit as a perceptual and physical strategy within performance practice. In ‘Repertoire, Relation, Technique: Mapping magic’s habits’, Aileen Robinson examines how routinized action and audience relationality comprises a generative performance repertoire. Robinson draws from key magic instruction manuals that cover the nineteenth century to the present, charting the strategies of practice and audience engagement that help establish both second-nature technique and improvisational skill.

Notes

1 I would like to thank Frank Camilleri, J-D Dewsbury, Jordana Cox, Elyan Hill, Samer Al-Saber and Julie Robinson for their insights and edits.

2 The literature on habit and philosophy is extensive in its recent treatment on Ravaisson (2009). The generative aspect of his approach aligns with the arguments coming from magicians.

3 Magic instruction texts from this period assume the reader to be male, which also reflects the wider performance culture of magic. For further reading on women in magic, see: Beckman (2003).

4 Maskelyne and Devant use the categories high art, normal art, and false art in their theoretical analysis of artistry and stage magic. They define false art as imitative whereas normal art copies from nature. Normal art is the ‘good’ artist, who builds their skill and utilizes what they can to create great works. Maskelyne and Devant reserve high art as a category of unplanned excellence that normal art can produce.