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Appearance, Reality and Truth in Magic: A personal memoirAladin

Online Publication Date: 01 December 2008

To cite this Article Aladin(2008)'Appearance, Reality and Truth in Magic: A personal memoir',Performance Research,13:4,75 — 81

To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13528160902875655

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528160902875655

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I have an uncertain relationship with the term ‘magician’, its typology and its connotations in the popular imagination. My own practice as magician and/or interdisciplinary artist (the terms for me are interchangeable) is however much influenced by early exposure to itinerant conjurers across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

In what we know as the Asian subcontinent, nomadic and tinker (here in the sense of ‘make-shift’, ‘prone to improvising’) subcultures or castes of entertainers are likely to have originated as early as Indus, Dravidian and related civilisations of approximately 3–4,000 BC. In childhood I recall being cognizant of the perpetual journeying that marked magicians apart from those who plied other trades – and it was unspoken that there have always been magicians. Incidentally, in my early days magicians were always approved for encounters in yards, gardens, on the pavement – but never allowed in the home.

Although I am not all that clear about being a magician, I have had my share of magical epiphanies.

In my earliest years, perhaps when I was close to two, my father from time to time quite spontaneously (and in hindsight quite opportunistically) devised feats of magic which to me seemed suited to, if not arising from, immediate circumstances. In fact my earliest memory of magic per se dates back to when we were living in Geneva, watching with growing astonishment as my father, unhurriedly and

without preparation, invisibly ‘transported’ some quite unwieldy toys of mine into a light fixture suspended from the ceiling at a distance from us. I heard each toy land on the other as he slowly and systematically ‘flung’ every one into ‘storage’.

Then one night, in the most impossible of conditions and at the risk of his life, my father extemporised the complete disappearance of our family and all our personal effects from our home in Baghdad – only for us to reappear in London. This was at a crucial stage of the Bangladesh independence war and the extraordinary illusion allowed my father to go on to play his part in that country’s history. Fittingly, years later, this epic of misdirection featured in a National Geographic television documentary.

Appearance, Reality and Truth in MagicA personal memoir

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When we were living in Paris I was once struck by how my father and a fellow Sufi looked into rather than at each other – it seemed unconscious.

Another time, in Karachi, I saw a street-boy of about eleven dig up a coin from every pit in the ground that had been created by my repeatedly flinging a stone as far as I was able to.

In Geneva I saw a clown besieged and befuddled by a disc of light which in turn pursued him and was pursued by him.

We were an itinerant family. I learned to entertain myself, for we moved so frequently from country to country; in the course of which I became self-taught and self-sufficient in the arts of prestidigitation. I wasn’t yet ten when I gave my first performance on a proscenium – in Kolkata (Calcutta); having trained in classical Indian music, on some of those occasions I would appear as a singer alongside billing as a magician.

My cultural heritage encompasses the three Asian countries mentioned above; my mother was from Dhubri, Assam in the East of India and my father was primarily from Kishoreganj, East Bengal (which became East Pakistan and then Bangladesh) but also had Syrian ancestry. The traditional – classical, folkloric and popular – live arts were engaged with matter-of-factly; most families regardless of class, caste or circumstances were at a minimum informal makers of culture – as amateur artists, wordsmiths, musicians or actors etc. with their families and friends as audiences at the very least.

My early experience of entertainment and live arts was thus of seeing them sited in the community and being generated and sustained by real relationships. Of course, this profoundly coloured my awareness and practice of the arts. In adult life too my schooling has continued: I have had almost 20 years’ parallel experience of strategy consultancy alongside carrying out street-work with vulnerable people. The latter went hand-in-hand with continuous professional training in psychotherapy, counselling, group work and brief intervention skills applied to itinerant, public contexts. I recognise how this sustained engagement with youth and community development has an influence over the choices I make as an artist, both in terms of subject matter/content but more particularly in terms of choice of means.

I have my own theories about magic.Conjuring or magicianship appears to invoke

an agency to instrumentalise matter and processes such that their characteristics conflict with scientific norms.

In practice, the instrumentalisation is effected through literal if disguised means, entailing devices or dexterousness – or some combination thereof. I hardly need add that some quarters posit that actual agency is also involved, as opposed to mere dissembling.

As a practitioner of magic, I am myself reliant in the first instance on purely prestidigitatory means to anchor ‘illusion’ – alongside modes of communication such as speech, gesture, observation, call-and-response, and so on. Like many before me I have developed my own plastic, sleight-of-hand vocabulary. I find these tools so much less cumbersome (and certainly more malleable) than a ‘box of tricks’ – leave alone a company of assistants and a trailer truck of equipment. It’s therefore not much of a negotiation for me to realise a transformation to say, ‘perambulating legerdemain’; I don’t even need the seclusion of a telephone box!

There is an obsession with ‘appearance’ and ‘disappearance’ in popular discussions of magic. For what it’s worth, however, conjurers’ own

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lexicons would recognise perhaps a dozen categories of illusions demonstrating the ability to turn the laws of nature on their heads. Here is just one of these typologies, helpfully synthesised by a friend who is both a fine artist and a magician: ’Production, Vanish, Transposition, Restoration, Penetration, Levitation, Animation, Suspension, Mind-Reading (or Clairvoyance) and Physical Anomaly (i.e. Headless Woman)’ (Sheridan 2002: 25).

I thus see my practices as a magician (and strategy consultant) to be concerned at their core with illumination and revelation. At the same time I do feel resistance to being drawn into a discussion about the techniques including technologies of ‘deception’ or ‘fabrication’. All this focus on means is disproportionate and seems to imply that magic can be understood through knowledge of its techniques.

Perhaps at its apogee magic transcends its means. For my part, my intention in conjuring is to incite as well as to instrumentalise (for a purpose other than gratification) a transcendental state in the ‘audience’, as opposed to devising an intervention whose sole purpose is to elicit kudos for any imagined or real virtuosity on the part of the magician. Of course the very presence of a magician on its own has been known to trigger this very state of quasi-psychosomatic enchantment.

I have said that I instrumentalise the magical experience. What I mean is that in my unfolding and developing practice my formal interventions are curated and devised to engage the ‘audience’ in a wider narrative. I am interested in the discourses preoccupying civil society – and as an interdisciplinary artist my actions are inevitably emerging from and responding to events around;

Photo: Andrew Atkinson

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my hope though is that my actions as a magician or otherwise are dialogic as opposed to didactic.

Nothing like being preached to by a magician!Mainstream, public notions of magic

sometimes pose challenges for me in my own practice.

My creativity as a magician is, no doubt, to some degree spurred by my frustration with public, and indeed creative community, characterisations of the live art form of ‘magic’ to essentially be about the exposition of virtuosity at creating illusion (or its semblance) – of extreme dexterity and/or marvellous ingenuity, sometimes embellished or underpinned by a nominal narrative structure. If I have not already made that point – I also find limiting and frankly bathetic the labelling of magic as exclusively a tributary of popular entertainment.

The art form does have at its functional, working heart some of the processes of what we

can crudely call ‘deception’. However, the latter’s more pejorative connotations as well as the high/er profile of popular/populist conjuring have contributed to a qualification, if not the tainting, of magic’s claim to be considered a ‘serious’ live art form, whose practitioners are capable of having discursive, critical theoretical preoccupations. It has its complexities if one has things to say as a magician but are not seen to fit into the continuum between con artist, deity/public icon, children’s entertainer and so on.

One also needs to take account of the impact of the near-global peer networks of magician-entertainers (most of whom are passionate amateurs).

The above manifests itself in the visibility, numbers and public profiles of ‘successful’ magicians who achieve their standing through evidence of popular following or knowledge, or sometimes through fame engendered by the mass media; below the tip of this iceberg are a host of individuals who are almost without exception self-selecting members of a plethora of organisations for magicians, aspiring magicians and their associates, who are in turn in close engagement with practitioners deemed to be ‘successful’: all this creating its own critical mass to iteratively derive and legitimise typologies of magic and magicianship.

These loose agglomerations of magicians define and patrol the mainstream discourse on magic – and erect canons and epistemologies which through their (at the very least tacit) endorsement by formal and informal peer groups give rise to hegemonical definitions of magic and magicianship which are not necessarily as comprehensive or inclusive as I have been indicating. Indeed these definitions function as an ideology which is not amenable to easy interrogation due to the sheer asymmetry of power and demography, whereby mainstream practitioners are preponderant and thus weigh heavily in the debate such as it is.

It all makes it difficult to define and declare oneself a magician if one feels one’s practice

Photo: NicholeRees

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does not conform to these mainstream formulae and if one is aware of not sharing the same knowledge base.

To put some perspective on the challenge of contesting magical orthodoxy, one can draw a hypothetical analogy with music. Were it left to popular musicians (by defi nition the most populous sub-set of practitioners of music) to promulgate a defi nition of ‘music’, there would be scant chance of ethnographical or anthropological considerations receiving prominence; however no-one would argue that these latter were illegitimate, irrelevant or even marginal on the basis of being a strictly minority view.

However, as stated earlier, the practices and following of popular magic by-and-large eschew critical, theoretical or dialectical enquiry and do not generally value it as a legitimate area of concern. Hence the popular and popularly maintained online encyclopaedia Wikipedia off ers a taxonomy of magic and magicians which has long privileged ‘entertainment’ as a reference point and classed magicians as performers of ‘tricks’ and ‘eff ects’. It is a predictably reductionist and exclusive view of magic – which extends to excluding from classifi cation or inclusion those magicians who may not have ‘peer’ standing or validation, as I sketched earlier above. Their own entry about me is a helpful case in point – my relative invisibility on the conventional magicians’ radars and Richter scales a past source of ambivalence and tendentiousness on the part of authors/editors.

As I hope I am making clear, I identify myself

as a magician whose inclination is for more metaphorical landscapes than the (more literal) ones of engendering deception and illusion for their own sakes. Whilst historically it has been the virtuosity alone of the conjurer that has been the primary object of gaze, in my own excursions as a magician (and live artist, as one and the same) I have been attempting to place virtuosity and critical enquiry side-by-side, each to leaven and interrogate the other.

In my continuing attempts to elucidate the proscriptions and conventions of popular conjuring and its prevailing methodology – wherein the event or action is prescribed to be a form of divertissement, more often to draw attention to the semblance of or actual virtuosity – I am at the same time clear in my mind that an authentic, encompassing contemporary magical eschatology/A-Z would and should admit a practice of magic which can be eff acing of virtuosity, and which subordinates it to critical purpose.

I fi nd it valuable to devise expositions of ‘magic’ to inhabit either/equally spaces associated with contemporary interdisciplinary arts practice or public spaces that are in every sense unmediated.

Although my preoccupations are discursive and critical, in my ‘actions’ I do draw extensively from a palette in which virtuosity features prominently (however subordinated). It makes for a dichotomous relationship – one that stretches between the populist divertissement of ‘dazzling sleight of hand’ and the strictly experimental, improvised, essentially un-premeditated and avant garde; at times – even often – I do feel confl icted.

Ideas for multifarious projects arise from my abiding interest in the processes of civil society – with which I also have a professional engagement with a hat on as policy adviser and strategist consultant. Germane also is my recognition early on that the persona of ‘magician’ was more or less aff orded licence by society at large to enter otherwise proscribed territories.

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As my experience of magic has evolved, so I have become more alive to its catalytic (always instrumentalised) properties – for instance when ‘dropping a magician into unexpected contexts’.

In the ten years to 2008, I embarked on a tranche of interventions in the public domain, away from formally designated ‘cultural venues’, whereby I more or less outwardly effaced my inclinations to subvert whilst at the same time (Trojan Horse-like) seeking out ‘engagements’ which would permit experiment/s, covertly or otherwise. Several of these resulted from direct approaches to me – through the website I maintain as a ’Magician’ – from individuals or organisations wishing to contract an entertainer. It is in an inquisitive (though occasionally inquisitorial) spirit that I foisted these live/public art actions-by-stealth on (mainly unsuspecting) patrons.

Closer to a mainstream centre-ground, during 2007–8 I directly interrogated what it is to be a magician in a time of unsustainable global consumption and production practices – undertaking public artistic collaborations with individuals, organisations and also U.K. government agencies including: a Texan banker, a community health group, the British Museum, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

The collaborations immediately above succeeded an accidental ‘magician in residence’ project which took place 2000–4. It was a period of being appointed to public office in London government in my capacity as a magician/artist – to contribute to the development of a culture plan for the capital city; I was Co/Vice-Chair of the Cultural Strategy Group at City Hall.

In 2008 I embarked on a number of conversations with practitioners across sectors with the aim of assembling a suite of actions to take place in the unmediated public space. Provisionally titled ‘Throw’, the intention was for the project to unfold over some years as a series of one-to-one collaborations between myself and about a dozen others.

At the core of ‘Throw’ would be the virtuosity, physical and emotional rituals, processes and actions involved with throwing a playing card at some considerable speed (over 100mph) and distance (the better part of a hundred metres). Prospective collaborators would take responsibility for bringing and binding intentionality and purpose to the spectacle; each obliged to devise, prescribe, curate, direct and above all site the actions which I would then have to carry out. My primary task in all this would be to identify and secure collaborators. The ‘outcomes’ are not conceived as formal theatrical events requiring production and communications support.

I have long toyed with collaborating with a neuropsychologist to map and describe ‘the morphology of the magical event’, particularly its incontrovertible effect on our physical and emotional processes.

There are three images, created specifically for this piece, that I collaborated in.

They are by the photographers Andrew Atkinson, Nichole Rees and Marcus Tomlinson. They were taken in the photographers’ own studios, two days apart in the same week in April 2008. None of the images has been digitally altered. One of the photographers utilised natural light only, another was at pains to light me with studio lights and the third experimented with multiple techniques in situ to subvert my appearance whilst shooting straight. Unexpectedly I became struck by how these images illustrate the paradox of how we each see what we want/need to see – neatly encapsulating my digressions above about how the magic I know and see is not necessarily that which is discerned/discernible to others.

r e f e r e n c e s

Jeff Sheridan, Jeff (2002), in ’Conjuring and its Cousin’, in Helen Varola (ed.) Con Art, Sheffield: Site Gallery, pp.25.

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Main photo: Marcus Tomlinson

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