The Consequences of Magic by Doc Grimes

As I was still wrapped around my pillow, and outside the bedroom window, the night birds were giving way to the day warblers, it just dawned on me: before your magic can be consequential for your audience, it must first be of consequence to you. Before it can matter for your audience, it has to matter for you.

Okay, maybe it was an insight or just another eruption of indigestion.

Whatever, “magic matters”—before it was the title of Bob Neale’s book, it was first a title Max Maven had come up with for something of his own. It’s Mother Nature’s old principle of sympathy: “like” recognizes “like.” And it must be true, because as everybody knows, “You can’t fool Mother Nature!” And you can’t fool your audience, either.

“Our magic first has to matter for us before it is likely to matter for our audience.” That doesn’t necessarily mean that any particular routine has to be supersaturated with “meaning” to have value. But that’s just it: it has to have value for us for it to likely register any meaning that we would intend for our audience.

By “meaning,” I am referring to “consequential.” In past articles, I, Dal, and others have shared some of those rare and wonderful moments when a routine we have performed seems almost transformative and uplifting for members of our audience. The little autistic boy who, after a week of Dal’s magic lessons, jumped up at the Friday night talent show, grabbed the microphone, and took over the whole stage. Or, the young waitress in the restaurant who broke into tears of joy at the $100-bill switch: “Now I can get my hair done before my wedding!” They were responses we couldn’t have possibly anticipated, but they were performance pieces that certainly leant themselves to such possibilities.

I am sure, I can think of several factors, among others, that apply to “consequential” performances:

1) “Other Direction”
No matter the routine, our attitude has to be “other directed.” That means that the effect can’t be about us as the performer—about who we are and what we care about. We have to be sensitive to the others’ spaces we have intruded upon and perceptive of their receptivity of our interruption.

2) A Welcoming and Secure Context
We have to create a context to which the audience feels invited and safe to enter. That context is the stage on which we will perform and the arena in which that “stage” is erected. It may be the small space we establish standing in the aisle, dodging servers in the restaurant, for four or five minutes, max, or it may be the expansive platform across which we have to fill with an hour of entertainment for a 1,000-seat paying audience.

3) A Willingness to be Vulnerable
In tone, we have to accept our vulnerability as we make ourselves receptive to their interest—or lack of interest—in what we are offering in each performance piece. Have they wandered into our space, or we into theirs? Once welcomed, we need to reveal some sense of our agenda for the next few moments, and, at the same time, be willing to take the nearest exit at their first clue.

In a restaurant, a family sitting in the dining area may well have already witnessed what we are doing for patrons at an adjacent table and will welcome our performance or communicate their preference for privacy. On the other hand, in the 1,000-seat auditorium, the paying attendees have the program in front of them and have settled into the rhythm of the show that we have established.

4) Communicating Our Meanings
We may have to express the meaning(s) of our pieces if the purpose of the routine is various or ambiguous. Often, that can be expressed in a brief narrative that we weave throughout the performance, a question we ask at the beginning, or a claim we make at the end that interprets our own meaning for our audience. Either option invites our spectators to make their own connections with the elements of our performance.

5) Pacing and Spacing Our Program
Over the length of a show, we have to organize our performance pieces so that those routines that we anticipate might elicit a “consequential response” fall in the schedule at times that will be receptive to our audiences’ engagement. A potential “consequential” routine is likely to fall flat in a string of high energy pieces or in a stream of scripts of light banter and nonsense.

6) Anticipating “Alternative” Consequences
Finally, just as Eugene Burger reminds us, “Not all laughter is good laughter,” and so it is that not all consequences of our magic may be positive and uplifting. We have to be open and ready with “emotional outs.”

After performing the “Anniversary Waltz” at the invitation of one restaurant patron as a gift to his wife who had returned to the table for the remainder of their anniversary dinner, he and I both were shocked by his wife’s response when she accused him of making her perform witchcraft for the first time in their 37 years of marriage.

A Nigerian student, standing behind me in a long line during college registration, fled in horror when I performed “This One/That One,” confessing that she was a “born-again person” who “didn’t do magic.”

Barry Richardson once noted, after performing closeup magic impromptu, how he was forced to flee an Asian village when he was warned that word was out that he was a dark shaman.

Not everyone may be ready to receive our gifts, but if we are willing to master our routines, be sensitive to contexts and the needs of our patrons, and are willing to make ourselves vulnerable to the interests of our audiences rather than our own performance egos, our magic can become consequential in often powerful, transformative ways.

Just sayin’ . . .

Doc Grimes