It's like magic. No really, it could be.

I’ve written earlier about illusion and misdirection on stage. After all, what is stage combat based in, if not illusion and misdirection. Hell, all theater is illusion, and the willing suspension of disbelief. But – there is something inherently different about watching a magician or illusionist perform as opposed to watching a play. This got me thinking about stage and street magic in general, and wondering why with all the incredible illusions available to the general buying public (don’t believe me?) more integration between traditional magic and traditional theater hasn’t taken place?

Performing a magic act is, to my understanding, an act based initially on spectacle. The performer is asking the audience to view an event and be astonished, perhaps disturbed, or in the case of that Criss Angel guy, Mindfreaked! Whatever the hell that means. I’ve never been mindfreaked without generous application of whiskey, and golly, do I know how to make that disappear. Magic!

Anyway, magic performance is inherently based in spectacle, but the best performers seem to downplay the suspension of disbelief. In fact, a good magician seems to say, “I defy you NOT to believe what you’ve seen.” Theater – that is, good theater, attempts the same thing. An audience views an event on stage, and is moved to a different emotional state. They laugh, they cry, or if you’re watching a Tim Errickson show, sometimes both, at the same time, with a little drooling. And all while becoming a better person, because Tim can do that. Hi, Tim. Tim, for the not Tim person reading this, is a director here in NYC.

I digress – where magic tries to stomp the willing suspension of disbelief flat, we are, as performers, complacent with asking our theater audiences to suspend their disbelief more and more. Yet despite the similar motives and hoped for results of both general types of performance, there seems to be a strange division between magic and theater. Stage and street magic employ very sophisticated skills and technology in a seamless manner (in different ways) to defy apparent reality right in front of an audience. I think the aim of the best magicians is not to terrify their audiences, but rather challenge them to question their perceptions and what they know and accept as truth. I would argue that good theater does the same. So, a live theatrical production that also employs some killer “magic” might be quite an amazing thing to experience.

I’m probably not thinking anything that hasn’t been explored before, but I feel like this may be a way for me to advance the nature of fight choreography. Amping up the visuals and emotional content of what audiences experience by adding a deeper level of illusion. Paradoxically that deeper illusion may illuminate deeper truths.

That’s mostly mouse farts however (and believe me - mouse farts is nothing) if I don’t suggest and employ something more vibrant. For that, I’m looking at a specific piece of magic… an illusion by mastermind Sean Fields called “Sick.” In short, I believe it offers the potential for realistic knife wounds in real time, and the attendant blood and gore might just change people’s perception of what a stabbing or slashing is like. It’s not clean. It’s not neat. It’s awful, horrific, gut wrenching to see and profoundly gross. Some of those links are pretty disturbing folks. Sorry.

If a work of theater dares to present an act of violence, we should endeavor to bring as much truth to that moment as possible, and there are some magicians out there who have already done all the work for us. Maybe it’s time to start bridging the gap a little.