The 10 Commandments of Magic (Cont'd)

Commandment No 4: Act Normal

In all our classes, the trainers say, “Think natural” and “Act normal”.

We know there’s always a secret move in every trick. The definition of ‘secret’ means that others shouldn’t know it is being done at all. How is that possible, you ask.

Simple, we must look natural while carrying it out.

One good example is palming. We’ve learned how to do a basic finger palm. If your hand is clenched tight into a fist or open with your fingers extended, doesn’t it look abnormal, and therefore suspicious? Our hand’s natural position is a semi-closed fist and people know that. Do anything else and it’d look ‘fake’. People will find it fishy.

Another problem many budding magicians face is the ‘blink’. It’s a natural physiological reaction to blink our eyes when we tense up to make a move. We can’t see ourselves blinking, so we think others won’t as well. Even if the audience doesn’t spot anything, we need to control this habit. Why? It doesn’t look natural.

Magicians aim to convince people that the impossible can happen. To be truly convincing, we need to perform the trick naturally to give the impression.

Commandment No. 5: A Bigger Action Covers a Smaller One

This commandment essentially refers to misdirection. Misdirection can be defined as a form of deception in which the attention of the audience is focused on one thing in order to distract its attention from another.

It is human tendency to focus more attention on a larger action than a small one. Think of it this way: we’ve all seen cheesy action movies where the hero points past the villain’s shoulder and the villain obediently turns around to look, allowing the hero to sneak in a punch or to make his escape.

Magic largely revolves around the manipulation of this human tendency, but of course with a greater level of subtlety. You don’t often see a magician pointing behind the audience and shouting “Look!” so that he can surreptitiously roll an elephant on stage. As said, in magic it’s done subtly.

If you recap what you’ve learnt in all the magic lessons so far, you’d realize how, in many tricks, we use a larger action to cover a smaller action. The smaller action is usually the “secret move”. Being a “secret” move, it should obviously remain a secret to the audience.

For example, in the trick where we use a magic wand to call up a coin from two empty hands, we use the larger action of turning our entire body to cover the secret move of transferring the coin together with the wand to the other hand.

Another example would be the Professor’s Nightmare (also known as Rope Trio), during the part where the magician lets the audience inspect the ropes and, under cover of collecting back the medium length rope, the magician proceeds to execute his secret move of forming the cross on the long and short rope.

Equal care should be put into practising the misdirection as well as your secret move. The key to mystify the audience is to make your cover-up action look natural and spontaneous. This takes practice! The more nonchalant you are, the more natural the move would appear and the more the audience would be unable to catch the smaller, secret move.

Commandment No. 6: People Will Look Where You Look

When I was in primary school, a teacher told us to try a simple experiment to prove his theory that people around us are “kaypo” (busybodies). In the experiment, we stood in a cluster in the middle of the school quadrangle and kept our heads turned to the sky for several minutes. The result was that fellow students started moving towards us with their heads tilted to the sky. Some asked what we were looking at but most just scanned the sky curiously, trying to figure out what had drawn our attention.

That experiment indeed proved that people are quite “kaypo”, but it also proved that people will look where you look. Even in daily life, like holding a conversation with someone, if you stare at something other than the person you’re conversing with, the person will gradually start to wonder what you are looking at and turn to look in the direction you are staring at.

I can’t explain it, I didn’t study the human brain or psychology or whatever, but here’s my take on it. Generally, when we focus our eyes on something, it’s in preparation to make an action on the object.

Understand this human behaviour and you are on your way to incorporate it into your magic show.

This is what the audience thinks. When the magician is looking at an object, like his rope or his wand, the audience thinks that he is going to make his magic with that object, so they focus all their attention on the item as well. A miracle can happen in the blink of an eye, so they don’t want to miss it.

Once again, it’s a perfect opportunity for magicians to exploit a human tendency. Pretend to focus on an unimportant object so that we draw their attention to the object, thereby distracting them from the crucial part of the trick. However, this means that we, too, must not look or even risk a glance towards the direction of our secret move. This is harder to pull off than it sounds!

Are you executing the secret move? Look somewhere else! This will throw off the audience as they wouldn’t be looking at the spot where the secret move is happening.

I’ll use the Professor’s Nightmare again as an illustration. During the counting portion of the trick, imagine if you stared at your hands while you were switching ropes. Immediately, the audience will be clued that something important is happening there. Look somewhere else! Be subtle and nonchalant.

As you can see, we magicians recognise and exploit human tendencies so that we can make something that is logical appear magical.

By the way, pointing past a person’s shoulder and shouting “Look!” only works in B-grade movies.