The Plot in Magic (1)

One of the most import­ant things for a prop­er the­at­ric­al per­form­ance piece in magic (or Men­tal­ism) is the plot. Many routines lack of a plot. They seem like a use­less demon­stra­tion of clev­er prin­ciples, designed and put togeth­er to show­case the performer’s clev­erness, dex­ter­ity or ‘skill’ – or whatever is good to ful­fill this wish of some ego-driv­en individuals.

Many magi­cians exper­i­ence dif­fi­culty in find­ing and identi­fy­ing plots for their routines in order to cre­ate an effect­ive present­a­tion. But the whole thing is not as dif­fi­cult as it seems. Com­mon sense and an under­stand­ing of people is what we need. Magic is a per­form­ing art for real people, and there­fore we should have an under­stand­ing of what real people are inter­ested in and about what they really care for.

In order to give you some inspir­a­tion and (some­times con­tro­ver­sial) ideas and meth­ods, I will start a mini-series of art­icles con­cern­ing this top­ic and deal­ing with it in a short, snappy and clear way.

What is a plot?

Well, it is the story, motiv­a­tion and motif behind trick demon­stra­tion. But I am not talk­ing about story-telling magic. I talk about the under­ly­ing theme, which must be emo­tion­ally inter­est­ing to people. Themes that get their atten­tion and hold the interest. Richard Oster­lind put it abso­lutely right in one of his books, where he talks about the under­ly­ing plot an effect has and what it means for an audi­ence. Read what Richard Oster­lind has to say about it.

Some of the simplest and most basic human wishes seem to be very strong plots for a per­former. For a mentalist/​psychic this could be a goldmine:

• Being able to read someone’s mind.
• Being able to read body lan­guage of oth­er persons.
• Being able to fore­see the future.
• Being able to see things oth­ers do not see.
• Being able to find lost things.
• Being able to escape or free one­self from restrictions.
• Being able to repair things (see Uri Geller and the watches).
• Being able to influ­ence a per­son (without her know­ing or noti­cing it – hyp­nosis or influencing).
• Being able to expand one’s senses (see­ing without the eyes, using touch, etc.)
• Being able to manip­u­late objects (met­al bend­ing, telekin­es­is, etc.)
• Being able to spot dangers (Rus­si­an roul­ette kind of tricks)
• Being able to com­mu­nic­ate with dead persons.
• Being able to fore­see one’s own death time.
• Being able to understand/​conquer death.
• Being able to know what’s after death.
• Being able to time travel (in order to right­en things out, find things out, etc.)
• Being able to become rich.

Sure there are many more which could be added. Note that the search for a plot is much easi­er, if you start the sen­tence with the words ‘Being able to’ …

With that tech­nique, it is a simple task to find plots for almost any top­ic (love, health, travel, suc­cess, fear, gambling, etc.).

Here an example: gambling is some­thing many people are attrac­ted to or find inter­est­ing. Using the ‘Being able to’ tech­nique, just ima­gine vis­it­ing a casino and then let your mind go wild:

• Being able to know the opponent’s cards in his hand in a game.
• Being able to know the out­come at the roul­ette table.
• Being able to fol­low oper­at­or with the three shell game, in order not to be cheated and win.
• Being able to pre­dict the out­come of the lot­tery, Bingo, (name it).

Anoth­er example, deal­ing with the top­ic of ’met­al bend­ing’. Bend­ing metal­ware is fine, it shows the abil­ity to wield some sort of mind power over objects (same as telekinesis).

But then, you could com­bine that with anoth­er plot (repair­ing things). So, a key bend­ing demon­stra­tion could be per­formed the oth­er way round: a bor­rowed key is put into a bench vice and bent. Then, the mys­tery man uses the ‘psych­ic powers’ to restore it back to a good and usable con­di­tion. Thus, it makes sense and ful­fills the spec­tat­ors’ deep wishes to be able to restore broken things.

(to be continued …)