What if I Get Caught?

“What do you do if you get caught?” The room got very quiet. The young questioner instantly felt it had been a mistake to ask this question, that the question was somehow inappropriate, somehow wrong. Before he asked, the questioner thought it was a good question. It was also one that he really wanted answered. The truth was that he had been “caught” while performing his...

Cultivating Our Imagination

How little in our culture do we cultivate our imagination! We treat the imagination as if it were a poor relative of the rational mind. A somewhat distracting side journey on the larger logical journey of life. And yet, when we look at it, we realize that through the centuries most of the important discoveries and innovations in art, religion, and even science, were generated not so much by...

Imagination, Solitude and Creativity

Selecting the topics for these [articles] hasn’t been an easy task. But I’ve been guided in the selection by some of the questions that typically are asked by the magicians who attend the seminars that I’ve conducted. I began doing small seminars in January of 1983. I suppose in large part because l had lost faith in the educational value of the traditional magic lecture format...

Looking Beyond the Trick

When I was a beginner in magic, one of the things which I firmly believed was that in a magic performance everything centers on the strength of the magic trick. Among beginners — and sometimes even among those who have been involved with magic for a long time –specific magic tricks are often referred to as “reputation makers” or “show stoppers” or even...

Ten Important Points to Consider

We’re going to talk about magic, not simply about how magic tricks work but rather about a question that is, I think, much more important: “What is the process by which we learn to perform magic effects?” A process hopefully that ends with a magical performance that is both deceptive and entertaining.” I suppose that there are almost as many views of this process of how...