Giuseppe Penone, Alberi libro (Book Trees), 2017

Veteran Italian artist Giuseppe Penone (currently showing at Serpentine in London) reflects in this video on how his work, at this historical moment (the 20th and 21st century), sits loosely within ‘art’, and can be therefore understood to function as a kind of ‘sculpture’. He doesn’t say what else his work might be, merely that there are other possibilities for understanding or qualifying what he does: might he think of it as a kind of ritual? A communing with natural entities? A solo-folkloric endeavour? He certainly speaks of his desire, through the work, to keep trying to look for astonishment, even as this dwindles with age.
It's the gentle but astute observation about how his work passes as and for art that struck me. Leaving aside for a moment that 'art' is also the actual material, financial, social field that enable his work to happen in the first place, I am drawn to the idea that ‘art’ and ‘sculpture’ are merely imprecise, loose or compromised labels or categories: that his work passes for art, but, in a sense, that art isn’t really the point.
 
I can try and make a parallel with ‘performance’ (or even ‘theatre’, though I’m genuinely less at ease in that label, it has always felt less capacious than performance, and simply not what I studied). I’d say one of the things I’m chasing, through the label of performance, is something like a ‘non-human event’. It’s that sense of the world being alive, in ways that exceed and confound our rational ego, which feeds off of control and all-too-human agency. ‘Performance’, especially when I started the choreographic/conceptual work in the mid-late 2000s (way before I resumed magic) was all about finding a non-hierarchical mode of watching and performing: what if objects were viewed on a par with human performers? Guided by composer John Cage’s 4’33’’, in which any sound or event might be considered music or musical ,and therefore worthy of attention, I asked myself: how can the theatre become a space not to focus on people (let alone characters or fictional stories), but to practice a kind of ecological perception, tuned to events, however small or invisible, that demand we recognise the multiplicity of lives, forms of matters, temporalities and scales that are always already at play, anywhere, at any time? It’s at times an impossible endeavour, or a failure, but that’s unimportant, really. The point is to find why one is doing this. Performance isn’t the point, it’s merely a container or label.
In other words, the work is not about performance (even with all the meta stuff that I love), and it’s certainly not about making performances for the sake of it: it’s about carving out space for a way of watching and being, making space for a mode of, let’s say, ecological perception (and imagination, and poetic, and ethics). Following Penone, I'd say that performance is simply an excuse, or a tool, but it’s not the point.

10 posts for 10 years of Vincent Gambini

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‘The Chore of Enchantment’

This was the show that came about from that god-awful sense that things were beginning to implode, courtesy of Brexit, Trump, and the growing awareness of global ecological collapse. Between 2016-2020 I developed The Chore of Enchantment: a show-within-a-show-within-a-dream kind of performance.

Aside from political ill feelings (and massive second album syndrome), there was much joy in assembling this magic show about a magician in crisis: ‘isn’t there enough deception going on in the world?’ I admonished the audience, in a mock Stewart Lee way: ‘Surely you don’t need me to provide you with more? So now my job is entirely redundant…’

The show script turned blank, untied shoe laces tied themselves as I played with what was and wasn’t part of the show, magician canes kept appearing, and I recounted the ghost of Paul Daniels appearing in a dream, advising me on how to distract the audience with magic, thus allowing me to secretly indulge my newfound doom-scrolling habit. There was a reveal at the centre of the piece: that the floating Yodas you see in Trafalgar Square are all magicians who have given up on their craft: they sit there all day, sleeping on their suspended platforms...
Various work in prog showings around the UK led to a 3-week run in Edinburgh, all produced by Sally Rose, and then a 2020 tour produced by Steve Goatman.

The show largely consisted of me describing the struggle to make the show (oh a familiar trope), including the various titles I went through: The Ills of Illusion, The Woes of Wonder, The Dismay of Deception, The Trials of Trickery, The Misery of Magic, The Wistfulness of Wizards…

With thanks to the performance’s supporters, especially Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Shoreditch Town hall, Cambrige Junction, ARK Stockton, and University of Sussex.

Precious dramaturgical input by Deborah Pearson and Greg Wohead.
Top photo by Rosie Powell, bottom photo by Hugo Glendinning.
 

10 posts for 10 years of Vincent Gambini


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'This is not a magic show'

I love it when works come about through chance invitations: when someone outside of you intuits a potential you don’t (or not yet), and invites you to pursue it.

I have to thank again artists associated with Rhubaba Gallery, Edinburgh, back in 2014, whose invitation to spend a month there enabled me, very quickly, to develop and assemble the main planks of the first Gambini performance, ‘This is not a magic show’.
We produced a lovely interview booklet with the gallery’s inhouse printers (deets below), had a great public conversation with Glasgow’s Prof. Carl Lavery about enchantment, and generally revelled (prank-adjacently) in there being two artists in residency, Augusto and Vincent.

For some reason the part that people remember the most from the show is the card illusion I call ‘Neuromagic’, with the absurd premise of a science lab gathering insights by asking people to vocalise their reactions to a card trick, producing a text which I read out whilst performing said card trick. A kind of odd mirror held up to the audience in the show.

With Arts Council England funding, and in the capable hands of uber-producer Sally Rose. ‘This is not a magic show’ has been presented in multiple UK theatres, fetivals, community halls, art galleries, on a canal boat, a library, a bookshop. And Daniel Kitson liked it.

As of 2024 I still occasionally perform the work, it’s become a second skin. I thought it would age badly, a piece made before Brexit, Trump, Covid, the culture wars. But it’s oddly refreshing to revisit this show about a magician who doesn’t quite know how to start, and where different layers of fiction are played with and peeled back.


The booklet and interview are available for free at http://www.vincentgambini.com/bookshop.html
 

10 posts for 10 years of Vincent Gambini

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Before Gambini was a chance invitation, in 2013, to contribute to a 5-day event in Berlin, exploring magic and performance art (info & links below).
At this point in time I knew that magic and performance art didn’t go together, or so I adamantly thought: 13 years prior I had gotten rid of all my magic props, and told myself I was done with tricks.
I travelled to Berlin anyway, and developed something like a performance-lecture about misdirection. To my great surprise, magic COULD work within a performance art context. I was also amazed at how much my body remembered the sleight-of-hand movements that I’d spent my teens practicing endlessly: I later reflected on this type of body memory in the essay ‘Autobiography of hands’.

The event ‘Hermetic Garden’ was curated by Joern J. Burmester and Florian Feigl, at Sophinesaele, Berlin.

11 mins video recording of the performance at https://tinyurl.com/w2a4b2hj

Download the essay 'Autobiography of hands' at http://www.vincentgambini.com/bookshop.html

Amazing, to me, that what started as a gambit, a 'what if', 10 years ago in Edinburgh, has now become a substantial part of what I do, research and think about. The gambit was: 'what if I return to my teen passion of card tricks, and try and combine them with performance ideas I've been developing in art contexts?'
I still feel as wide-eyed, searching impossibly, nowhere near to finding a solution.

To mark 10 years of Vincent Gambini - the name under which I’ve been hybridizing magic and performance art - I’ll be doing 10 posts in the next few days, each one spotlighting a magic performance I made in this time, including as part of other artists’ projects.
I will also make available the 2021 film The Disappearing of Vincent Gambini, made with Hugo Glendinning during lockdown.

In the meantime, here's a still from the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny, in which Joe Pesci plays, who other, than Vincent Gambini. In this sequence, he executes a rather fetching sleight-of-hand trick.

I love seeing magic tricks in film – the way magic can ‘be’ something a bit different, depending on the context of the story, thematics, aesthetics etc.
Thien An Pham’s Inside the yellow cocoon shell (2023) is among other things a film about the invisible and the unseen. Early on there is a striking scene in which the protagonist is standing in a city street in Saigon, paying for Bánh mì sandwiches and speaking on his phone. He casually advances slowly towards the static camera, until his red t-shirt fills the entire frame. He lowers himself to the ground for no apparent reason, disappearing from view, only to stand up again, holding a small chick in his hand (see stills above).
The screen becomes itself a kind of theatrical red curtain, and the appearance of the small bird a magic feat in itself. The action of him moving close and disappearing from the camera is ‘explained’ through the appearance of the bird.
 
The protagonist also performs some card magic to entertain his nephew – magic as familiar social activity, a way of offering delight and comfort, but it’s a later scene that stood out to me. In a bedroom at night, the nephew asks to see more magic. We hear the faint sound of a bell: the protagonist shows his empty hand, then turns the hand around and magically causes a small bell to appear (and I must confess I rewatched the scene and can’t work out how this was achieved). The kid asks for more magic, so his uncle indicates a glass vase on the bedside table. He waves his hand, and magically the vase is now full of water. He waves his hand again, and now two little goldfish are swimming in the vase.
They switch the lights out to go to sleep. In the darkness, he lights a lighter to inspect the alarm clock, and as he does so, we notice that the fish have now disappeared from the vase, leaving only the clear water.

In a context of a film about death and the search for religious faith, set in Christian communities in Vietnam, these small moments of magic do a lot. The magical appearance of the water and fish, as well as being biblical in tone, alludes to the very real possibility of the otherworldly, the supernatural at hand. The water and fish ‘tricks’ (if that’s the right word for them) are human reproductions of larger and more mysterious forces: as below, so above (or the other way round). Though we understand that these magic tricks are just that – small dexterous feats performed by a doting uncle – the context of the film about the search for religious faith and bigger ‘meaning’ frame the magic in a particular way. I think, and this is what I'm most currently drawn to, that we see these illusions as small but highly significant moments to rehearse an experience of awe and mystery. In other words, the tricks have (a) meaning. What is more, they just might be actually magical: the appearance of water and fish is not your average pick a card trick, and so could be a moment of quasi-divine intervention, or at least the film alludes to that possibility.
This isn’t to say that magic tricks normally don’t intrinsic meaning – see the work of Juan Tamariz, in The Magic Rainbow book, about how a simple cut and restored rope connects, in an unconscious way, to archetypes of healing, repair and rebirth. Perhaps all magic performance connects to something ‘larger’. I’m grateful to Thien An Pham’s Inside the yellow cocoon shell for making me experience that.

 
Last week I happened to hang out and work with some great magicians, and it got me thinking about a couple of things, based on conversations we had.
But first: I realized, or rather I remembered, that I’m not a magician. Or rather, that my relationship to magic (in the sense of the magic 'scene') is, quite happily, that of outsider. There are, after all reasons, valid reasons why I left magic back in 2000. This was motivated at first by a desire to rethink what magic could be, and eventually I simply let go of magic and embraced performance art and contemporary theatre. The initial desire to leave magic was a lack of satisfaction with the scene, and chiefly the artform itself. Now that I only occasionally ‘visit’ magic, I notice it clearly: there is a sense of restricted view that pervades magic, which is a feeling I don’t get when hanging out with dance artists, theatre artists, musicians, visual artists etc. With magicians, it’s as though the spotlight of attention is smaller. For an artform purportedly dedicated to mystery, to the limits of knowledge, perception and consciousness, magic can feel incredibly inward looking and in need of oxygen.
The magicians that I'm lucky to spend time with know this problem, and suffer from this sense of ‘smallness’. To varying degrees, they all have a love-hate relationship with magic, and they manage this in different ways. And so one of the topics of conversation is invariably how to make magic better, or how to make better magic. There is frustration at how to improve magic as a form of performance, how to have it better recognized by audiences as more than just wedding or corporate entertainment, and how to improve the ‘scene’ so that magic conventions and festivals, for example, might be vital, dynamic, cultural events that go beyond sharing new secrets and buying new tricks.
On the subject of improving magic performance, it seems many magicians think in terms of ‘adding meaning’: a story, an emotional hook, a life lesson etc. are parachuted onto an existing card trick, to make the experience more meaningful. This is not necessarily a terrible strategy (and to some extent it's what I’m busy doing with my own magic performances). But it struck me that ‘adding’ meaning to magic might not be desirable.
I explain.

Firstly, what the hell is magic anyway?
Magic is a strange form of performance. It is close to theatre and ‘drama’, since it features simulation, speech, it often happens in a theatre; but unlike fictional drama, in a magic show the action has to appear wholly real, for the effect of magic to work: a real spectator is asked to shuffle a real deck of cards, and these cards then seem to turn white etc. Trickery aside, none of that is simulated or fictional.
Magic is also close to jokes, bets and scams, because of the deceptive or 'tricking' element, yet it is also close to shamanic ceremony and ritual (which indeed can feature ‘tricks’), but stripped of any claims to the supernatural: everything in a magic show is more or less secular, nothing ‘transcendental’ taking place here. The dead won't rise, and the future remains unknown.
Which leaves magic in a weird place, somewhere between simulation and reality, between bogus entertainment and important ceremony. It’s a kind of impossible contradiction.
So perhaps some of the best performances of magic are those that really capture this sense of impossible contradiction, distilling this paradox down to its purest form. The two examples that come to mind do NOT use the formula: magic trick + story and meaning. They are in fact extremely stripped back, featuring virtually no dialogue, no ‘patter’ or speech or story. They feature a very direct action, simply framed.

The first example is David Blaine’s last sequence from his TV show ‘Real or Magic’. Sitting in a restaurant with UK comedian Ricky Gervais, Blaine simply skewers his own arm, saying ‘…but it looks real, right?’. Those 5 words are enough. This piece, whether it’s to everyone’s liking or not (I’m not a fan of gore), goes to the heart of magic’s impossible contradiction. What Blaine’s performance is able to conjure is that internal flickering thought that distinguishes magic from most other artforms: “it’s real, but it can’t be… but it IS real!”. He doesn't need to narrate a meaningful story on top of the action, since all the meaning we could want is happening already, thanks to  the paired back speech.

The second example is Penn & Teller’s floating red ball. Teller poetically and silently causes a ball to move about the stage unexplainably. But what frames the act, and brings it close to this ‘essence’ of magic, is that at the start the normally garrulous Penn just says one line: ‘This trick is done with just a piece of thread”, then walks into the wings. At the end of the act, Penn returns, grasps the ball by the thread and cuts it, then kicks the ball off in disdain. Again, we have an act in which this question of real/unreal, happening/not happening, is placed centre stage, beautifully, so that this oscillating paradox can resonate inside spectators.

These two pieces, somewhat similar to each other in this regard, cleanly and simply strip away all patter, and arrive at something almost “pure”, yet oh so impure and impossible to pin down: the presentation of magic. That they do this with just a few words – no added meaning or story – makes the case for magic performances that are paired back, clear and minimalist.

(Photo Credit: Maria Mochnacz / Press)

Preface

One thing is for sure: when it comes to performance, I’m drawn to a performer who questions, challenges, or simply struggles with performance itself. As though there’s something a bit off about performance and performing, and the performer is trying to work it out, to get out from under it, to hold it up to the light (in the way that PJ Harvey, pictured, seems to be gently questioning the portrait photograph).
Performance is not a settled affair, this relation with the audience, this idea of watching, of being watched: entertainment, spectacle, yuk. It all needs to be reconsidered, deconstructed, and what better time to do this than, well, during the performance itself.
In a nutshell, I think this premise has underlined much of my work in theatre and performance, especially in my pre-Gambini phase.
End of preface, now onto the blog entry.
 
 
I write this in early Sept 2022, returning from doing shows in Aarhus, Denmark, where I have been working on new material for a magic show, my third in this Gambini guise. It surprises me, and at times confuses me, how my relation to magic changes over time, and that's what I want to chart here.
 
After a hiatus of roughly 14 years (I had stopped magic around 2000, to focus entirely on theatre and dance work), in August 2014 I spent a month at a set of art studios in Edinburgh, exploring how I could return to magic, approaching it in a more theatrical manner. It was in 2014 that, in collaboration with two lovely artists associated with Edinburgh’s Rhubaba Gallery, I developed the idea of ‘Vincent Gambini’, and it was there that I developed and performed a first version of This is not a magic show. That show is one I still occasionally present, 8 years later.
Following that 2014 work (premiered in 2015 after some try outs), I developed The Chore of Enchantment (premiere 2018), which was more of a stage magic show.
There were other magic-related projects along the way, but these two shows were the main ways I worked on and figured out my relation to magic and performance.
 
They were two very different performances. In the first show, I worked without any pressure to ‘deliver the goods’: I was genuinely seeing if it was possible for me to return to card and coin magic, but paying much more attention to the theatrical framing. I brought the audience’s attention on the construct of the situation: I fictionalized a magician’s preparations in the dressing room (practicing how to greet the audience, shuffling the cards), I then began the show by admitting I didn’t quite know how to begin the show (purportedly due to the host venue or festival asking me to start not with my usual card trick), and overall Gambini emerged as a dedicated sleight of hand magician, but rather self-effacing, somewhat hesitant and not domineering (many reviews said ‘low key’).
This was very satisfying to make and perform, and the show toured well and got some great reviews.
 
The second show, however, was a much more conscious attempt to build on the relative success of the first, and to go slightly larger: whereas This is not a magic show took place around a table, The Chore of Enchantment saw me walking up and down a stage, at a microphone, working with music and prerecorded spoken tracks. I worked with a producer, a sound designer, and the official backing of venues and the Arts Council. I battled second album syndrome a lot. The show assembled various ideas – a magician in freefall about the state of the world (it was made in the wake of Brexit and Trump’s election), increasingly desperate about the irrelevance of magic, all the while building a kind of dream narrative: the whole show, it is suggested, is just a memory, being remembered by Gambini, over and over again, as a way of trying to get through a kind of breakdown he experienced, where he collapsed live on stage (the memory being recounted is also the very show happening on that night, in that specific theatre).
Unlike the first show, which seemed to get made almost effortlessly, the second show took a lot of work and time, and never came together in the way that was wholly satisfying: this was partly because its various parts were tried and tested independently, and then assembled, but some of the joins were near impossible to smooth out. The premise was a little lost on audiences. In hindsight I could have worked more with other artists (writer, director), instead of trying to do it all alone with only occasional input from others (apparently I suffer from one-man-band syndrome).
 
Bringing us to today.
For the third performance, I’m going back to basics: no pressure to make it, no official backing from venues or Arts Council, for now just playing with possibilities, and returning to a more intimate setting of about 15-20 people sitting around a table.
It’s early days, but in the piece it seems I have a different relation to magic: instead of the innocence of the first show, or the ironic cynicism of the second, I am working with a slightly more abstract relation between speech and action. I am playing with retelling a day in the life of someone who could be you, or another spectator, or perhaps myself (or all 3). I use the ‘you’ a lot, and as I describe everyday encounters, I perform some gentle coin magic. Then there are more story-based pieces using cards. So far, these see me returning to some familiar ideas: the slippery relation between past and present, fiction and reality (the trick I am recounting is the one taking place here and now); and a kind of quizzical attitude towards magic and its relevance: I ask the audience, more or less explicitly, whether it’s not already magical to simply be in a room, together, and to breathe, and to feel time passing: perhaps we don’t need deception and trickery to experience enchantment? Well, yes and no. Because Gambini doesn’t really know how to access the wonder of the moment – he’s not a shaman or a mystic, he’s not a ‘real magician’ – all he has are his deceptive card tricks, so those are going to have to do for the time being.

More to come.
 
(below, setting up to perform in gorgeous little studio at Dokk 1, Aarhus)

There was something so uniquely disarming about the street magic act by Polish magician Diobo, who recently passed away. I remember asking myself: how is he managing to capture the crowd so effectively, here in the busy centre of London, despite seemingly not trying to capture a crowd at all? Why are 100 people stopping to watch a guy who appears not to want any attention (no entertainer smiles, no waving, no concerted applause, and barely any eye contact)? And how on earth did he make that white mouse disappear from between his cupped hands?

I never met Diobo, and therefore I cannot pay tribute to his person. I do however want to briefly describe his act, and try to understand a thing or two about what made it so exceptional, in my eyes.
His act was a sequence of stunning magical episodes, marked by a distinctive tone and visual poetry. Much like a Variety entertainer, Diobo honed this one act over a long stretch of time (or so I gather, from watching online videos captured over several years), and distilled it to a kind of elegant core.
Like thousands of other people, I stumbled upon his act by chance, one day in Leicester Square in London, around 2015. I still cannot work out (despite returning to see him a few times) how graciously, and seemingly without any effort, the magician managed to form and retain the crowd: in silence, without making eye contact with passers-bye, Diobo stood with his head down, slowly waving his hands around a cigarette that was levitating in front of him. He kept his focus entirely on the lit cigarette, making it pass through his hooped hands, as though unaware of the crowd that was slowly but surely forming around him. And then, in a sequence that beautifully marked the start of the show, the cigarette slowly floated upwards, eventually reaching the magician’s lips: for the first time we could see his face in full. Diobo cast his eyes furtively around the crowd, inviting applause by gently placing his palms together. This sequence alone is a good example of the extreme simplicity, care and sophistication with which his act used arresting visual magic, an enticing and withdrawn stage persona, and extremely effective management of people, attention and street space.
 
A short digression:
About 20 years ago, after a few half-hearted attempts, I gave up trying to do any street magic. I thought I lacked the required ‘loudness’: I thought you needed big gestures, a loud voice, a cartoon-like amount of energy, and lots of audience interaction. Diobo’s act proved me wrong, and for the first time I realised a street magic act could possess qualities of reserve: a gentle quietness, as though the performer were privately making  objects appear, change and vanish, occasionally looking up and realising an audience seems to have gathered.

The act itself can be summarised very briefly through the objects he used. First a cigarette levitates, and is discarded on the pavement or street. Looking down at the ground, Diobo finds a coin, which he briefly covers with his otherwise empty hands, to then reveal a living white mouse. He holds the mouse in between his hands, walks towards the audience (a first moment of minimal interaction), asks a spectator to blow on his hands, and reveals the mouse has disappeared (here Diobo might point towards the spectator’s rucksack or bag, suggesting they look inside to find the mouse, only to then dismiss such a suggestion as a joke).
Next he would find a white paper napkin, sometimes lying on the ground, at other times from his own bag. He would tear out a piece, fold it up and transform into a banknote, with which he would gently lure a spectator to join him (this was an effective bit of audience management: he’d extend the note to the spectator, who would reach out to take it. But Diobo quickly took the outreached hand, and pulled the spectator to the centre of the performing area). He would then place a newly lit cigarette inside a makeshift hole he’d made inside the spectator’s shirt or t-shirt, only to reveal the clothing to be intact, and the cigarette to have vanished. Last but not least, he would take a piece of the white paper napkin, wet it, and squeeze it into a ball, which he’d place inside a large wine glass; slowly shacking the glass, the small ball would grow into a perfectly formed egg. He would take the egg out, then place the glass stem side up onto the spectator’s extended palm: breaking the egg in two, the white mouse would crawl out and rest on top of the glass, beautifully framing the surprised face of the spectator, and bringing the act to an end.
 
I was struck by the simple colour palette: the white objects (white cigarette, white mouse, white napkin, white egg), which stood out so well against his mainly dark clothes; Diobo typically wore an odd black waistcoat with a hood, which gave him a 'sorcerer' look, but with a distinctly urban style: he often wore jeans and simple black plimsolls.
More than anything, I was struck by the ‘journey’ of the act: even without a story, each trick was linked, through a kind of inner poetic logic, with the mouse featuring as the main punch line. Its structure could read as:
Opener: A cigarette floats.
First movement: a coin transforms into a mouse, and then the mouse disappears.
Second movement: A piece of paper turns into a banknote, then a cigarette disappears inside an item of the spectator’s clothing.
Third movement: A piece of paper slowly turns into an egg, from which the white mouse finally emerges.
 
In its elegant logic, it reminds me of the stage act by Dutch magician Tommy Wonder (also featuring an egg, and a mechanical bird emerging from it). A comparable grace: an unhurried, sparse yet meticulous sequence of visual events, each folding into the next. And audience members charmed, entranced, allowed to access our childlike wonder, as though it were as simple as closing our eyes to dream.
Thank you Diobo for the hard work in creating something so beautiful and touching.

PS A video recording of the act is available to view here.

The only live performance I did over Zoom, in 2020, was at the very end, in December, as part of a larger event organised by the RoseHill, Brighton.
You can watch a video below.

I did notice a curious thing: performing from home does give you, as in sports' games, 'home advantage'. So here, despite not having performed in months, and finding Zoom less than ideal, I am using sleights and techniques that I likely wouldn't use at the start of a regular face-to-face performance. What I mean is that, by performing at home, I had much more control over the cards, the table surface, and of course the viewing angle. Whilst I know the angle gets exploited a lot (it always has), what is new is that relatively comfortable feeling of performing at my kitchen table, very much in 'my zone'. Compare this to touring, when often, inside theatres and similar spaces, because of the humidity or temperature, the pack of cards will tend to 'buckle' (card magicians know what I mean). This means your instrument is not especially well tuned, let's say. But this problem doesn't happen with home performances.

Other than that, Zoom shows aren't quite my thing, even when (or especially when) the artist is really exploring what Zoom can offer etc. I'd rather make a fire, pick up a good book, spend hours strolling through Twitter mindlessly, and wait until we can all return to being with eachother in a room.

I recently had a short chat with theatre maker Tim Crouch, who was advocating the possibility of a magic performance that would fully reveal the mechanics behind it, giving up the mystique of virtuosity (which Crouch distrusts) in favour of an approach where spectators and magician are genuinely on the same page.
Where is magic at, in the ongoing discussion around ‘revelation’? Are magicians forever bound to jealously guard their precious secrets, like deluded Gollums scuttling off behind a rock to play with the latest store-bought gimmick, or are there interesting, innovative and generous ways of opening magic up to spectators? Is revelation always a case of ‘breaking’ magic, or are there in fact ways of sharing the method that enable better appreciation, sophisticated and nuanced understandings?

Enter Tim Bromage’s frankly stunning video piece ‘The Lord of Misrule’, a single-take of magician and children’s entertainer Quentin Reynolds executing a Punch and Judy sketch without any puppets or ‘set’. Standing on Penarth peer, facing the camera, Reynolds lifts his hand in the air, performing the requisite movements and the stunning voices of the characters, honed to perfection after countless performances. The voice of Punch, in particular, stands out for its ethereal ‘buzz’, as though it were coming through a kazoo.

.Here we really do see a whole Punch and Judy act, despite the absence of the puppets and set. And we see’ the show, I think, for 3 reasons: because the hands are puppets in their own right; because the dexterous voices and impeccably timed dialogue effectively create the show in our minds; and because, to a greater or lesser extent, viewers come to this already knowing what a Punch and Judy act is.
It is a startling example of how a ‘bare’ or stripped back presentation can work beautifully, relying on the imagined presence of objects and characters that we already know.

Are we here watching an ‘exposed’ view of the show - the backstage mechanics if you will? Perhaps. Though it also strikes me that once the ‘front’ is removed (the small theatre, the puppets, and, crucially, a participating live audience), what we’re watching is something like the labour that allows the show to exist. Think of it as watching the ‘muscle’, expanding and contracting, the singer’s larynx. In other words, we get to see the effort that goes into the production of effortlessness, and this a generous offering from both Bromage and Reynolds.

What is also striking about the piece is the camera (by Roger Graham), and the commitment to a frontal presentation, which mimics a theatrical ‘static’ front: other than the camera cutting to a closer shot 1 minute in, there are no changes or edits. This refusal to move the camera or provide alternative angles (as you’d expect a work like this to do, showing different sides, zooming on the face, cutting to focus on the reaction of passersby, etc) is partly what allows the performance to be so compelling: the framing insists on showing the work for what it really is, as though saying: here it is, here is all there is, the contortions that register as grace, the hard graft that produces the easy-going spectacle.

To return to the discussion of magic and secrets. Magicians like to the believe that surprise, laughter and comments such as ‘how did you do that? That’s impossible!’ are a clear indication that reason and logic have been defied, leading spectators to a pure childlike state of blissful wonder. I don’t want to deny for a second the sense of enchantment, of course. But the idea that audience members are entirely unaware of the mechanics of the show is, to put it mildly, questionable.
What if spectators were in fact a lot more privy to what is actually going on in magic tricks, than magicians tend to believe? And, following from that, what if enchantment could actually be enhanced, or approached differently - through revelation and disclosure, sharing the secret, the mechanism, displaying the effort of effortless illusion?
This is what ‘The Lord of Misrule’ is able to capture so well: the enchantment of seeing the mechanism, the mysterious appeal of dexterity and virtuosity. As though revelation itself were, in fact, simply another mystery.


The video work, which was commissioned by G39 Gallery, is currently available to view here: https://vimeo.com/354190163

The kind of artworks (be they cinema, music, visual art, theatre, comedy, magic, etc.) that I’m most drawn to are those that present not just ideas or 'content', but rather those that conduct a serious reflection on the medium itself. I am drawn to art that questions art.
I am drawn to the self-reflexive turn that allows audience and artists to engage with, and to question, the very encounter between audience and artist.
At its best, this kind of ‘meta’ work can provide something like an epiphany, a surprising realignment of mind and reality, like pressing reset on how we think of art and, by extension, the world. It is an intervention into thought itself.
It seems to me that, when art really engages the self-reflexive mode (think Robert Morris’ Box with the sound of its own making), what happens is this: the ‘content’ of the piece (what the piece is about) and the ‘form’ of the piece (the material or images on display) begin to merge into one ineffable experience, close to the limit of language or sense. The relation between reality and fiction, which most of the time is always kept in check, is turned upside down. And this capsizing, when executed well (by both the artist and the audience), brings deep philosophical child-like wonder: it challenges ingrained habits, causes us to rethink how we approach not just art but pretty much anything in life.
 
Fiuuu.
 
I write this after seeing The Amazing Jonathan Documentary (2019) by Ben Berman. It is a difficult and oh-so-rewarding journey of one ‘documentarian’ (Berman), whose attempts at documenting US magician the Amazing Jonathan’s final comeback tour are thwarted by, among other things, another documentary being made at the same time. In the jostling for filming that ensues, what starts to happen is that the documentary starts to chart the story of its own possible undoing: will it ever get made? Who is best positioned to tell this story? How can the documentary-maker maintain the momentum to carry on with the project?
I’m a fan of artworks that tell the story of their own making: Roland Barthes’ most famous book, Camera Lucida, is written as an essay in search of its subject (the elusive essence of photography), incorporating wrong turns, blind spots and hesitant revelations. And this documentary does exactly this: it is a search for itself.


 
 
Like panning back from two mirrors placed facing each other, jumping from a frame, to within another frame, to within another frame, etc. this film doesn’t shy away from plunging you into the genuinely uneasy ethical confusion over the medium itself: about two thirds of the way in, one might feel a little seasick at the conundrum faced by the documentarian, but we follow through with him, to an ending that so beautifully captures the melding of fiction and reality that it alone is worth the whole documentary.

The Amazing Jonathan Documentary is not really a story about its titular subject (the US magician); rather, it is a story about how stories are told, and the price to pay in doing so. Of course, since the Amazing Jonathan is a magician, the film does occasionally delve into magic clichés, of the ‘what can you really believe…is it all an illusion?’ variety. But luckily it doesn’t dwell there too long. Amazing Jonathan’s magical profession is not the concern here: what matters most is his personality, as a Vegas entertainer who is keen to use whatever opportunities come his way, including having competing crews filming a documentary at the same time.

I adore what Ben Berman has pulled off here, and part of the satisfaction of the film is simply seeing him slowly realise what he’s up against, and stumbling, making mistakes, yet daring (fearfully) to go further, to embrace the weirdness, and to open up to what chance is providing, both in his life and in his documentary.

I'm grappling here with an old chestnut, please bare with me...

I'm busy preparing a presentation for the Wellcome Collection in London.
It's not going to be an 'expose' of how magic tricks work, but more a look at how magicians practice, what kind of things magicians spend their time doing, behind the scenes, etc.
And it occurred to me that in fact 'explaining' how magic tricks work is close to impossible. Of course some broadly speaking 'mechanical' or technical aspect can be explained. Let's take for example a classic card trick, in which a spectator randomly selects a card and signs it: the magician then tears the card up very clearly, and then the card is found, all whole, in some other location e.g. the magician's pocket. 
A purely 'mechanical' explanation might mention things like: having a duplicate card, switching one for the other, or using a 'clone' signature. But these things don't really explain much. They don't explain how spectators are convinced (and rightly so) that is the same signed card that is being torn (it is), and the same signed card that is later shown to be whole again (it is). They don't explain how it's possible that such a feat be interesting to watch, and why; they don't explain psychological, emotional connotations at play in the feat; they don't explain, in short, why such a feat really works on the audience, and why.
Another way of putting it could be this: magicians spend a life time trying to understand magical feats in relation to their audience: to understand, for example, on which beat to execute a particular move, or which words to precisely use, or how to use the gaze, etc. And it is the interaction of bodily and perceptual decisions, actions, pauses, gestures, and words, together with the spectator's own interpretation and elaboration of the whole situation, that constitutes the 'real' method: it is this larger and subtle interactive choreography (let's call it) that truly allow spectators to fool themselves.
At the risk of sounding pedantic (I know I am!), even a simple magic trick can't really be explained, at least not in the way we typically understand that idea. One could try and describe all the subtleties and principles at work. But that would take a huge amount of work: a life work, in fact, learning, refining, questioning, and changing approaches. And that is what magicians do.

PS
Simply as a bonus, a short classical act by P&T, in which their Cups and Balls trick is 'explained', though not at all.

I was recently interview by Dr Matt Pritchard a.k.a. the Science Magician, for his ongoing project Words on Wonder.
Find it here:
https://wordsonwonder.com/2019/06/15/vincent-gambini-theatre-artist-68/

The camera shakes a few times, and you'll need to adjust the audio, but nevertheless here is a postshow discussion filmed after presenting 'The Chore of Enchantment' in Norwich, May 2019.
Some really interesting questions and thoughts emerge, around the status of magic today (is it really having a renaissance?), why magic seems to have such little cultural cachet, and how to combine magic with theatre.
Thanks to all who were present. The show was sold out (180 seats), and despite some technical issues, it was a great one. I'm especially happy as the show seems to be finding its feet, after slightly lost its way during Edinburgh 2018...

A short essay of mine has just been published in the academic journal Platform (Royal Holloway University).
It's a first attempt at verbalising how magic is a form of theatre, and how magic's role is to perhaps question theatre itself. In the back of my mind I had Penn & Teller, as examples of magicians whose acts are constantly asking audiences to perform serious intellectual work. But perhaps the same goes for most magic acts...

You can access the article here, for free.
The full journal is accessible here.

Last summer in Edinburgh, deception psychologist (is that right?) Richard Wiseman told me of an academic position that has opened up at Carleton University, in Ottowa, Canada: very likely the 1st of its kind, this is a Chair in Conjuring. It is made possible by a $2-million donation by a philanthropist. The full title is the “Allan Slaight Chair for the Study of the Conjuring Arts”. As of yet, the post remains vacant.

I thought this was an interesting development, given pockets of academic interest in conjuring and magic are beginning to emerge (see my blog post on this here). Magic needs to be studied and analysed more, especially outside of the insular world of magicians and magic conventions.
There is also the issue of a fundamental disparity between the public’s perception of conjuring (trivial trickery), and what is actually a very intricate, old and specialised activity. There is an incredible wealth of magic literature (though mainly by and for magicians), and the ways in which magicians learn and develop sleights and psychological misdirection - sometimes over decades of study and practice - deserves serious study.

Searching the web about the Carleton post, however, I quickly came across a scathing dismissal of the scheme. In a short piece called ‘Get serious, Carleton’, a senior fellow at the University criticises the post, largely on the basis of allowing wealthy philanthropists to dictate the direction of universities (this is a fair point, a problem the UK is perhaps going to see more of, sadly). In the context of cuts to humanities subjects (classics, English, literature, etc), the author sees the Chair in Conjuring as a way of further trivialising serious university study. He writes:
‘Those of us who believe that universities need to […] promote higher learning and research in a broad range of sciences, engineering, arts and the humanities, should make sure they remain focused on serious pursuits. Let’s forget the magic tricks.’
And thus the article ends.

It got me thinking of something I often mull over: that the presumed triviality of magic, as frustrating as it might be to hear about for many ‘serious’ magicians, might in fact be a strange kind of asset.
Let me try to qualify this.
Of course for those serious magicians out there, triviality is a badge of shame, something to fight against daily. We all want recognition for the hard work, as well as public appreciation. And the possibility of earning a livelihood wouldn’t go amiss.
Also, I’m not suggesting magicians should be happy with the public’s misperception of the form. In fact, the only reason I’m currently back into magic, after over a decade of pursuing other performance activities, is because I’m curious about how magic can meet and dialogue with other performing art forms (contemporary theatre, performance art, alternative comedy, etc). In other words, magic ‘seriously’ needs to up the game and challenge itself, to not remain anachronistic and trivial.
However, part of the appeal of magic, to me, is its cultural invisibility, its perception as mere trivial trickery.
Here’s why I think triviality is an asset to embrace and work with:
1. Triviality offers a perfect disguise of sorts for magic. How better to conceal its depth, than by having people believe it’s ‘just a trick’? What better misdirection could we ask for?
2. Triviality offers a great angle from which to play with the audience’s expectations. Rational people will always dismiss the unusual or the impossible (and this dismissal is probably also why magic is on the bottom rung: it’s just guys pretending to do impossible things, isn’t it?). Therefore, we have an ideal situation for maximising on the build up, from the trivial all the way to a sense of genuine mystery and awe. Whereas a visitor at an art gallery might (might) come with a pre-established taste for paintings, rarely do audiences come to magic (when they do) with a pre-established taste for card tricks. What a perfect starting point for taking the audience on a journey (it's harder for painters to do this, as so much is already known, analysed, studied, etc)
3. This is a weird idea, but hear me out: I think it’s currently quite ‘easy’, or at least possible, to do something artistically interesting with magic, simply because from the audience’s viewpoint magic is just tricks. Magic’s awkward clichés (top hat, rabbits) are in fact extremely easy to brush off nowadays. So how else can magic be presented? When a Penn & Teller perform their signature cups and balls trick, where they effectively disclose the method, yet where the performed explanation is so well and quickly executed that it ends up being baffling nevertheless, for an audience something genuinely exciting and new is happening (and they are right: no one did this before Penn & Teller). Magic’s triviality means it’s actually ripe for experimentation, for trying out new approaches, for carving out an original artistic path.
 
In other words:
Magicians! Let’s embrace the perception of triviality, and let’s get on with creating new contexts for developing the presentation of magic for new audiences; let’s challenge magic by experimenting with new forms; let’s write books that expand upon our understandings of magic, and that dialogue with other fields, ideas and histories.
Only then might a university post on conjuring not strike other academics as an aberration.

The recent passing of Ricky Jay (see previous blog post) has led me to re-watch David Mamet's House of Games (1987), a rather delightful film, if at times troubling (see the Post Scriptum at the bottom).

Jay plays a small role, as part of a gang of suave confidence tricksters, or con men. He first appears, and this really is his scene, sitting at a poker table, engaged in a fraught high-stakes game. He ends up winning the last round, but things turn nasty when it transpires the game's main loser doesn't have the requisite cash. However, just as Jay's character pulls out a gun out and places it menacingly on the table, the film's protagonist, a psychologist, who has been observing the game all along, offers to step in to cover the missing money. The psychologist signs a cheque, but just before handing it over, spots a few drops of water seeping out of the gun, prompting her to refuse handing over the money; instead, she makes a comment about the nonthreatening water pistol is. In response, Jay's character and the other card players suddenly stop their act: it transpires that the whole game was merely a set up, a con, to trick the psychologist out of her money. She initially fell for it, and so did we, as film viewers.

What's memorable about House of Games is the way this scene, which occurs towards the beginning, establishes much of the the premise of this film about cons (and about cons within cons).
Without  spoiling the plot if you haven't see it, I can say that it's a film that gives the viewer the key for unlocking the film from the very beginning. This is quite different from magic-themed films such as The Prestige or The Illusionist, which use a Sixth Sense-like approach of fooling the viewer right up until the final twist: in these films there is always the "ooo" moment at the end, where you realise it was all staged to to make you believe in a very different reality than the one you've been following all along. It's a kind of 'who dunnit' structure, operating at the level of the whole narrative: and so it turns out, for instance, that there were really two identical twin magicians all along, or that the main character's love interest had only pretended to die, etc.
In House of Games, after the Ricky Jay scene, we are invited on a similarly deceptive narrative journey, except that here we have been clearly told that this will be the case, and shown exactly the mechanics at play (unlike in The Prestige and The Illusionist). The initial Poker-playing scene is there to tell us: "See, this is how a con is done. These people are pretending, they are 'acting' as though there is a gun, a threat, real money. You have been warned..."
The film treats us, its audience, with respect. It grants us the intelligence to be able to see through the illusion, and to then appreciate it as such. It doesn't just fool us. It first tells us, and shows us, exactly how it's going to fool us; and then it does it.
And this is such a valuable model for magic and magicians. For thinking about a magician's relation to the audience: do you merely show them something amazing and unexplainable? Or do you let them in on the dynamic of illusion and magic (without spoilers), and then proceed to do illusion and magic?

PS The 'note' I mentioned at the top has to do with the gender dynamics in the narrative, which are a little let's say "dated" (read: chauvinistic male fantasy). There is a theme of 'loving your captor' underlying much of it, and the captive is a woman. That said, there is much appreciate here that doesn't rely on regressive gender politics.

PSS On an unrelated note, I love this sentence that the protagonist writes on a bar napkin, after she returns to the dingy bar: 'The necessity of dark places to transact a dark business'.

The magic community - which broadly includes professional and amateur magicians, as well as ‘friends’ of magic (theatre people, artists, producers, etc) - has responded with heartfelt sadness at the passing of one of those defining ‘legends’: the historian, scholar and performer extraordinaire Ricky Jay.
Much is written on him, including great profiles in magazines, and I won’t add anything here.
I came across and read a profile by the New Yorker, from way back in 1993. At the time Jay was preparing his defining show, Ricky Jay and his 52 assistants.
The article goes into some depth as to how much of a book collector he was, portraying the man as a true bibliophile, and recounting the dismay that surrounded illusionist David Copperfield’s acquisition of a large collection of rare books on magic and various other curiosities (a collection which Jay had carefully catalogued and expanded upon, under the patronage of a banker, until said banker went bankrupt).
Reading the profile, then returning to Twitter, I couldn’t help but be amazed at the galling idiocy of Copperfield, who today was advertising a bag he’s designed (from his latest show), or of the magic company Vanishing Inc, advertising a magic product to buy. On a day in which there might be pause to reflect on what matters, the unashamed promotion and business-as-usual is especially jarring. And not just promotion of, say, a work (a show, a book, an event), but merely promotion of products, whose formula for success is always the same, whether you’re selling beauty cream or the latest trick pack of cards: “hey you, are you dissatisfied? Well if you buy this product, your life will change…” It is a fabulous deceit (no pun intended), whose direct consequence is constantly lowering the bar, reducing magic to a transaction, to a product that can be bought and sold. Inevitably the buyer gets bored, and so new products must fill the void, the frustration, the difficulty of maintaining an ongoing relation with the art form. Again the formula: “hey don’t worry about studying and learning things and trying, and failing, and trying again. Just click here to purchase this item. All has been taken care for you, because we value you…”
 
For those who don’t know, the so called magic scene, in the last 20 or more years, has increasingly turned into a toy shop for addicted adult-children with short attention spans. Addicted to the latest props-that-do-magic, addicted to the aura that you’re supposedly buying when you purchase the product of a famous star (“As seen on Penn and Teller’s Fool Us!”), addicted to the cheap immediate pleasure that comes with compulsive buying.
Ricky Jay (who was most likely an imperfect person, from what I gather) carved a path that was unique, merely because he cultivated his interests, and fashioned them into his performing persona. A brilliant magician, but also a model to emulate (artists do exactly this: follow their path, work hard at it). Ricky Jay’s model is a reminder to cut the crap out. Call out a demeaning culture of greed for what it is. No art form, no scholarship, no interesting events can develop in such a market of short-lived gizmos and toys. To all sellers of magic products: find your income elsewhere. Don’t believe in the inevitability of capitalist relations. There are alternatives. Your amazing latest ‘discoveries’ are distractions, and you know it. You’re not contributing anything, you’re taking time away from people who might just be able, with enough concentration and dedication, to develop interesting ideas, thoughts and performances.
 
In short (and this is more for magicians). Magic isn’t “broken”. It has been taken over by greedy ‘dealers’ and magic shops and magicians who are all too eager to exploit and capitalise people’s dissatisfaction. Yes, doing and studying magic is hard, otherwise it wouldn’t be worth it. We don’t need another product, another surge of dopamine, followed by a low, followed by another product, etc. We need to cut off this ridiculous addiction and develop slower forms of study, practice, rehearsal and exchange that can re-define the field. There are some great magicians already, and always, doing this, but they are always a small minority. This needn’t be the case. Where to start? We ought not let avid and destructive commercial interests define what is and isn’t possible in an art form.
 
 

A strange title, granted: ‘the limits of magic’ is a paradox, since by definition magic is something that  exceeds or at least challenges the idea of limits: magic expands what’s possible, real, thinkable, etc. However illusory, it undoes expectations around laws of nature, matter, space, time etc (or at least, it is expected to do so, and in very precise, reasoned ways).
And this is the crunch: one of the harshest things about magic, as a form of entertainment/art, is precisely how bound it is to preconceived definitions and notions of itself. In other words, what a magic show has to look like, how much magic must be in it (and what kind) in order to qualify as magic, etc.
I will get to this via a small detour into comedy.

Re-watching some of UK comedian Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, particularly episodes 4 and 5 (series 4), what I find utterly compelling is a sense of Lee doing comedy by pretty much undoing the form itself: going to amazing extremes, falling totally short of any 'story' or narrative, and descending into odd experiments with language. Of course certain conventions remain in place: there is still a performer on stage, speaking, and an audience attending, laughing, reacting. So it's tempting to say: “it’s still comedy, all the time”, etc.
However, Lee plays with the form in genuinely unparalleled and risky ways, and the laughter derives precisely from how much he is clearly messing with our understanding of comedy itself.  The ‘humour’ (or most of it anyway) lies in just how far he goes with tripping up comedy itself. In this respect, he borrows from much of the avant-garde, performance art, and experimental art traditions.
I wonder whether magic can similarly do such a turn on itself (though I'm aware this is entirely what motivates my interest in it: to take it apart, and it still be magic in that taking apart).
Perhaps this is an interesting time for theatre-magic: there are chinks of light here and there, attempts at rethinking what live magic might be and look like, both accepting and contesting conventional norms. But as I prepare for Edinburgh Fringe 2018, I also know there will a dialogue to be had around what 'passes' for magic (the current show features even less than the previous one, which was already criticised for 'not having enough'!).

A magic show in which the magic element lies precisely in the fact that no magic happens? The magic has disappeared...
Something to mull

Upon receiving a request, I've made a tutorial video for learning how to do the coin roll. This is when a coin appears to walk across your fingers, as made popular (I am told) by Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean.

A word of warning: it takes time to learn this smoothly. If it gets frustrating, just have a break, then return to it later. Insist without insistence...
Once you learn the mechanics of it, it is fairly simple, although it will require a couple of months of daily practice.

This is a follow up from a previous blog entry, back in 2016.
For those interested in how magic is being written about and studied by academic scholars - across cultural-historical studies mainly - some brilliant books have come out over the last decade or two.
Here are some of the titles I have read, or simply spotted, ordered by date:

- James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in The Age of Barnum (2001)
- Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (2004)
- Philipp Butterworth,  Magic on the Early English Stage (2005)
- Michael Mangan, Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring (2007)
- Coppa, Hass & Peck eds, Performing Magic on The Western Stage: From The Eighteenth Century to The Present (2008)
-Chris Goto-Jones, Conjuring Asia: Magic, Orientalism and The Making of the Modern World (2016)
 
On the relation between magic and cinema, see:

- Karen Beckman, Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism (2003)
- Matthew Solomon, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and The New Magic of The Twentieth Century (2010)
- Colin Williamson, Hidden In Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and The Cinema (2015)

There are also brilliant free articles in the University of Huddersfield's Journal of Performance Magic.
 
And lastly, though not an academic study, I want to flag the recent book by A.Bandit, the name for the collaboration between conceptual artist Glenn Kaino and current Broadway magic star Derek Delguadio. It features great artworks and interesting interviews with John Baldessarri, Ricky Jay, Marina Abramovic,  Teller (my fave), and others.
- Glenn Kaino and Derek Delgaudio, A Secret Has Two Faces: The Collaborative Work of Glenn Kaino and Derek Delgaudio (2017)

Enjoy the academic study of magic
V