Sometimes I set myself challenges. Occasionally personal, occasionally universal.
Personal ones include:
- How to perform a borrowed ring routine without a borrowed ring?
- How to perform a matrix on stage?
- How to perform a show using nothing but paper?
The universal ones are things like:
Often, usually in fact, I dont solve them. I wouldn’t be so arrogant as to assume that no one else has ever encountered the same problems as me, particularly the universal ones, and thus my inability to fix them doesnt trouble me too much. After all, some magicians spend their whole lives trying to solve just one such universal problem in a new way, let alone two or three…
This post contains enormous spoilers for Derek DelGaudio’s show In And Of Itself.
I never got a chance to see it live but it has now been made available to stream on Disney+ so no one with an interest in magic has any excuse. One month of Disney+ costs way less than a ticket to the show, plus you can invite all your friends around and watch Thor Ragnarok after.
So do that, then come back to read me talking about how clever it was.
I don’t know how he came up with it. Maybe one day Derek DelGaudio will write about it. But I like to imagine that it started with a single idea. The idea of forcing an audience member in a way that seems natural and not contrived.
I force an audience member sometimes, and the method I use is asking everyone to name a number in sequence and using a thumb writer to write it on the card I’m holding when I reach the person I want, as if I picked them because they got it right.
I’ll be honest, it’s a pain. It’s my chosen method and I have used it twice. Neither time was really for a strong enough effect to counter all the problems¹ inherent in it.
If only it was as simple as forcing a card.
At the start of In And Of Itself, before they enter the theatre, every audience member chooses a card off a wall. There are far more than are needed and they are all different. As the audience members enter the theatre, this card is torn down a perforated line by an usher, who puts all the stubs into a big thick stack on the table for the show, and every time Derek wants an audience member, he grabs a random one from this stack.
If this is news to you, what the hell is wrong with you? Didn’t you read what I said? Piss off and watch the show, then come back.
Honestly, some people².
Thus far this probably sounds like contrived nonsense, and if the cards were playing cards or name cards, or numbers, it would seem incredibly contrived. But to make this natural the cards actually display one word identities. Doctor, Writer, Dreamer, Loser, Optician, Joker, Genius, probably about a thousand of them. So when you pick a card you are doing so with a thematic function. In a way the second you take a card, you’re part of the show, and you just picked your role.
But this one quirky idea has now solved so many other challenges. Audience members can be easily chosen and referred to by their roles, so you cut out all that awkward stuff where you ask for volunteers and get their names.
The show also suddenly has a theme, the theme of identity. This framing allows all the tricks to be what I once referred to as introductory tricks, where the performer is focussed on telling the audience about themselves, but in a rare twist it doesn’t feel egotistical or fake, because he is also frequently referring to the audience’s identities too, and using it to interrogate the concept of identity itself.
The framing of the ID cards also leads into the big finale, which is essentially like the tossed out deck taken to it’s most extreme level, as every single audience member has ALREADY chosen a card.
For a single idea to spin out into so many novel applications in this way is a rare and beautiful thing. But it’s also so distinctive that were another magician to try anything similar, they would surely be considered a plagiarist of the worst kind. It would be impossible to apply this framing without it being immediately being recognized as a clear copy of Derek’s show.
That’s why the big questions, the universal challenges are still there, taunting magicians everywhere. Even if you solve one, you only ever really solve it for yourself.
Moving away from the topic of this post, and into pure review territory, the other thing I really like about Derek’s show is that it only really has six tricks in it. Thing in bottle, gambling demonstration, brick vanish, the letter routine, naming everyone’s card, and of course the final twist.
Adding up to an hour long, this means the show has about one piece of magic every 10 minutes, and some of them last for only a few seconds. This means an extraordinary amount of time is just Derek talking. He tells stories with different degrees of truth, whimsy and personal significance, all of which fill so much time that they’re practically the point of the show, and the magic tricks are just there to fulfill some contractual obligation to the audience who turned up in good faith to see a magic show.
I recognize that might sound like a criticism, and indeed when I got my parents to watch they made the same observation in a negative light, but personally this is exactly the type of performance I aspire to. Repositioning magicians as the modern philosophers³, making people think about what’s real, what’s fake, and getting people to consider what they see more conceptually.
People might not all like that, or even want it, but frankly I think it’s what we all need.
¹ If the person you want names a number someone has already said, you need to either hope no one notices or ask them to name another. If you plan the correction technique, you also have to correct re-use of incorrect guesses from the wrong people, meaning you need to remember every choice until you reach the person you want. This means the further from the front your desired audience member is, the more these problems arise. It’s a fucking nightmare.
² I do enjoy these little asides when I admonish a specific reader, in the hope that one day I will have a reader.
³ This is of course a role we as performers will have to raise our games to meet. I don’t think we can expect to become the philosphers of our times with silk fountains, linking rings and a story about wishing for snow in the house of a dead grandparent. I don’t think it’s particularly revolutionary to suggest that some people learn magic in order to have a chance to speak without actually considering what it is they have to say.