How would i expand the art?
An essay by Mikk P.
Magic has not changed for the good part of the last millennium. Hands are quicker than the eye principles have been used for 3 000-4 000 years, at that time, mostly street performers in Egypt doing quick cons by playing the 3 Shell game which in todays terms has grown to be the Cups&Balls act. Although this is a solid theory of the first steps mankind did to start the evolution of magic some study suggests we are looking at a much bigger history.It is suggested by many that magic was used 6 000 years ago, funny enough still in Egypt and Mesopotamia where priests(of different gods) did magic to show their connection with the gods and that they were the true holders of the godly powers. It was a sort of competition, the better the illusion, the more people joined the belief of that priests god. Also shamans, witches, warlocks etc. have been known to use sleight-of-hand magic in their schemes.
If we start thinking about the time scale now then men and women of different ages, races and education have helped advance the art of magic for the past 6 000 years. What can we learn from this? Why have we managed to evolve this much? Where are we today? What can a magician do to help this movement?
To start off there is one potential flaw in our understanding of magic in the modern world. That little thing that changes everything and not only in magic, but in a persons life in general, that thing is called
Faith.
Todays magician is not interested in crossing the line of being seen as a miracle worker. The pure idea of saying that you accomplish these feats by nothing more than your mind and superhuman powers is nauseating. We try to show people that we have fast hands, clever schemes and cool gadgets but still nobody cares for a magician who is waving his or her iPhone and showing people an effect that really has no real meaning or entertainment value. This happens because people don't understand the big history and actual tradition behind magic. Magic used to be a family tradition. You would get schematics of illusions from your dad and grandfather and passed them down to your sons, this made performing magic a tradition that was exclusive to only a few . Today you can buy magic from a regular supermarket and you don't even have to think about the fact that when you show a poorly practiced move to a group of friends and they catch the method you have basically lost nothing of big importance. 500 years ago you were banished from your family because of your selfish acts to get famous too quick. So belief, tradition and understanding will give you everything you need to be a powerful performer. Belief in what you are doing gives you credibility amongst your viewers. Although most of us are the only magicians in our families, believing in your magic is the first step to making a difference, we sometimes think that just showing effects is the way to go, it is not. We have to perform, we are practitioners of Theater so lets act that way too. An actor has a character to play and we should too and be it what it is, when you want to read minds you believe in that and never look back. Although we don't have to go as far as some did in 1484 when the pope Innocent the 8th gave the order of killing everyone who did magic(witches etc. were burned and tortured) and many of the practitioners at that time did not give up on magic and did not say that what they were doing was fake, they stood by their words and were killed knowing that what they did was real. Although in todays society that seems like suicide it actually shows, in a very brutal manner, that magic is an art form which needs to be firstly believed in by the practitioner himself and only then can people be willing enough to believe the stories we create for them. To give a healthy boost to magic in general we need to think differently and firstly believe that what we are doing is real. I mean who is here to say the opposite? When i say i'm going to read your mind, i'm going to do that but i have never said what means i'm going to use to get that information. To the spectator you are reading someones mind by using your mind, to the performer it seems that he is reading the persons mind using a center tear. Either way, you are showing the same skill only that people on either end perceive it differently, but as long as we truly believe that we are doing just, that people will take your confidence and really start to believe in YOU. When they believe in you, you can say or do anything and it will appear as real to them. So the first thing to do is to get every performer to think about their character, the way people see you and this gives you the ability to believe in your work. If we don’t believe in the feats we perform, who will?
To take the idea of tradition a bit further think about todays magicians. Most of them learn magic via DVDs. Which has its good and bad points but what it really does is that it darkens our idea of learning magic. This seems normal to us, learning from DVDs and Streaming content online but a few decades ago you had to have a teacher, a person that was successful in the field to teach you and to guide you. This was to me the next step in the evolution in magic. Magic needed to break loose from the constraints of family secrets due to it not evolving as fast and as fluently as it should have, making a teacher student type system to learn magic was the way to go. But that great tradition has now become a rare thing to spot. Although i love books i feel that you need a teacher to really get the points across. In todays IT-Society information is easy to find but hard to process since there just is so much information sitting around on every corner but finding the right corner is as hard as finding a boiled egg amongst freshly laid eggs. Every magician should have a teacher or a mentor to get advice from, this bond between two magicians does two things.
A) The teacher, a practitioner of magic and theater, was once taught by a practitioner of the same level. His teaching was what made this man the man he is today, so giving the advice is crucial if the tradition is to be maintained. But it should be noted that everything you learn might not be right so the master has to take the words his teacher once told him and modify them to make them complete. This crazy cycle will keep the information fresh and up to date and it will stay alive to live another day, crediting the person that once thought of it.
B) I already kind of touched it in the A side but the second crucial thing that happens thanks to this is obtaining knowledge that you cannot find anywhere else. Most magicians gather a big amount of little bits of knowledge they don’t share with anyone in any manner. These little snippets are the core foundation of magic, the experiences of ones life long journey. By having a teacher that has already gone through the steps you would re-take you are one step ahead of everyone. You can take it as a simple game that has levels. Lets say your teacher is on level 100 and you are on level 5, when he has taught you everything you need to know you will be on level 105 and when you are in the position to start teaching then you are on level 205 and your student will be on level 5 and after his trainings on level 210 and the circle start all over again.
Although the two points are very similar one is concerned with keeping a kind of style alive the other getting the student to be ready for any situation before it has ever happened.
The last thing i want to touch is self experimentation. When i was in Germany last year i met with a lawyer(i actually lived with him for 10days because of a student exchange program) who told me that you should always question authority. Although the system i’ve just explained is great it cannot work if the student does not go out and test out every single technique to be the best they can be. Taking leaps of faith and always being the bigger man is something that will pay you back in a few years.
I am going to close the box and put the bow on it now. There are three things we need to take into consideration when advancing the art. First faith in ourselves, our art and in CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT(these two words contain many aspects of performing: acting, character development, finding the right effects, good writing skills for your presentations and much more). Tradition and trying to get magicians teaching magicians. This crucial step put down in time by our ancestors has clearly worked to this date and is something we should all strive to have. Most importantly, self experimentation. Try everything, see everything, feel everything and most important of all you live only once and you wont see those people again(if you live in a city with 500+ thousand residents) GO.OUT.AND.PERFORM, you will never regret it! If we don’t perform we don’t evolve. I will leave you with the information above to think about the next bit of knowledge: “How can we advance the art, if we are not advancing ourselves.”
