The magicians trying to change the world – one card trick at a time
What image does the word “magic” conjure up? Paul Daniels sawing Debbie McGee in half, or Harry Potter chanting
“Expecto patronum”? Or perhaps just a sweaty little man (they are almost always men) trying gamely to placate a party of sugar-high six-year-olds with balloons while their parents slip out the back?
With its razzmatazz, secrecy and ritualised trickery, being a magician is not a calling most associate with a social conscience. But there is an intellectual dimension to magic that was already old the first time someone thought of putting an egg into a bag and then making it disappear (believed to be in the 16th century). Good magicians have always understood and exploited the psychological blind spots of their audience. In 1876, a magician known as Professor Hoffmann collected a series of articles he had written for a popular boys’ magazine into a book, Modern Magic, which explained how classic tricks were performed. “He believed young people should learn to perform magic because it would be useful in their professional lives and in the furtherance of the British empire,” one present-day acolyte, Will Houstoun, tells me. “Magic teaches you to stand in front of a room and talk, problem-solve, deceive and spot deception.”
Today, the practical applications of magic are being used by a new generation to conjure up a better world.
The ‘magic humanitarian’
Jamie Balfour-Paul
Balfour-Paul, AKA Jamie Gibberish, is a former charity worker who works his magic on some of the world’s most deprived children in refugee camps around the Middle East and the north of Africa. He travels with little except an ornate wooden box he picked up years ago in Egypt. “I try to make a point of getting everything into that box, and I choose props based on familiarity – newspapers, bottles, ropes,” he says. “But in Lebanon [where he is based], if you don’t have a rabbit, you might as well go home.” At one point he had three of them hopping around his Beirut flat because they kept growing too big to fit into a hat.
A shy man, he comes alive when swallowing a balloon or pulling a multicoloured streamer from his mouth, but his first charity job was as a volunteer agricultural adviser on a tree-planting scheme in Palestine. After rising up the ranks into management, he decided he wanted to return to working directly with the people he had set out to help.
Now he has set up a charity called Magic for Smiles. “‘Psychosocial’ is a bit of a buzzword. But being in a community where your parents don’t have any status, and you can’t play because it’s quite cramped, is very stressful. There’s obviously happiness and destressing through entertainment, but magic also helps with concentration, creativity and interaction. Funding is a problem, and it’s quite a lonely life; just me and my bunnies driving around. But it’s worth it to see the children’s faces light up.”
Magicians in residence at Cambridge University
Clive Wilkins and Nicky Clayton
“Pick a number between one and 100,” says Clive Wilkins. So I do, but don’t tell him which one. For him and his professional partner, Nicky Clayton, magic is no less than a portal to the future. Clayton is a professor of comparative cognition in the psychology department at Cambridge University, where Wilkins – an artist and novelist as well as a magician – has a permanent residency. The pair met at a tango class and are never seen abroad together without identical homburg hats.
But their showbizzy style conceals a serious academic purpose, which they are promoting around the world in illustrated lectures designed to fundamentally challenge the way people think (next stops: China and Germany). “The argument we have been developing is that magic reveals a number of interesting roadblocks in our thinking,” says Clayton. Such as? “There’s egocentric bias – where we think others see and think more like us than they really do; and confirmation bias, where we see what we expect to see, so can miss the most obvious things. Magic capitalises on these blind spots in our thinking; magic occurs in the mind of the spectator, not the hands of the magician.”
Wilkins seamlessly picks up the baton: “We suggest that the human brain has been very good at creating civilisation over the last millennia, but in a postmodern world, scientists and artists are wondering what the next development is going to be. Perhaps the way forward is to find some alternative way of seeing. Maybe we can trick ourselves into seeing further. We have to see over and above ourselves.” With that, he waves a piece of paper in my face. It reads “46”, the number I had almost forgotten I picked. I leave with the roadblocks rattling in my brain.
The student magician
Cat Lee
“At 19, I couldn’t cook or pour a drink. I’d never eaten with a knife and fork. It’s really embarrassing on a date to ask: ‘Please can you cut up my food?’” says Cat Lee, who is based in Merseyside. She is now a poised 22-year-old law graduate, but is more interested in developing her modelling career than pursuing a legal career. Part of the thrill of it, she says, is that her bookers don’t know she has cerebral palsy.
The turning point in her life came when her mother signed her up for a summer camp for young people with hemiplegia, a condition that leaves one side of the body incapacitated, and can be caused by stroke, epilepsy or a head injury, as well as cerebral palsy. The camps are run by Breathe Arts Health Research, a charity set up more than a decade ago by a group of magicians who believed the dexterity used in magic tricks could be used therapeutically to help young people who had little support from the health system.
Working with occupational therapists from a London hospital, they discovered that some children could make life-changing progress in coordination – and confidence – in just a fortnight. Its co-founder David Owen (who is also a barrister) demonstrates a trick – the mystery of the jumping coins – in which money appears to leap from one place to another. Repeating it in slow motion, he shows how it involves a series of 10 movements, from pinching the coins to pick them up to pressing both palms flat on the table and turning hands over together and separately. “It’s a professional-level piece of magic that some children master and others don’t, but for all of them, it is building skills that most of us take for granted,” he says.
Cat was one of their successes, who left the 10-day course capable of building an independent life and is now a mentor, encouraging younger children at the camps. She doesn’t do magic tricks herself, but uses the props to exercise her hands. She credits the performance skills she learned with enabling her to overcome her physical difficulties and the resulting psychological ones. Her tears well up as she recalls the camp’s impact on her life. “Now I am who I am, and I can never thank them enough.”
The medical magician and the surgeon
Will Houstoun and Roger Kneebone
“As a student, I saw medicine as a science. As a surgeon, I saw it as a skill. As a GP, I saw it much more as a performance, and as a patient, I see it as all three,” says Prof Roger Kneebone. He is sitting in the cafe at the Wellcome Trust in London. Opposite him is a younger man whose gaze is steady and intense, and whose hands are in constant motion, flicking and cutting a pack of playing cards.
Kneebone runs a master’s course in surgical education at Imperial College, and the man with him is Will Houstoun, one of the UK’s leading closeup magicians and editor of the Magic Circle’s house magazine, the Magic Circular. Five years ago, they started working together to investigate the parallels between magic and surgery.
“First, I was looking at dexterity, as both involve sleight of hand,” says Kneebone, “but most of a surgeon’s time isn’t spent in the operating theatre, and I realised there were far deeper parallels around capturing and managing attention.” He set up a radical department of performance science and appointed Houstoun its magician in residence, and they began to give joint lectures.
Magicians are, by necessity, secretive, Houstoun says, but there is a separation between a magic trick and the techniques used to make it work – such as how to create a theatrically exaggerated state that looks natural, and shift attention with your gaze. “If you want someone to look at an object, look at it. If you want them to look at you, look at them.” He illustrates his point with a baffling three-coin vanishing trick.
A medical consultation is a complicated process in which a surgeon has to listen to a patient while simultaneously making judgments and taking clinical notes. The ability to create a connection – to hold that patient in thrall – hasn’t traditionally been considered part of a surgeon’s skill set, yet it is as important to clinical practice as it is to a magic show, they explain. For the patient, it’s the difference between feeling heard, and safe, or just another statistic, another chore. “Magic doesn’t work if you do it at people and neither does medicine,” says Kneebone. “A medical consultation is all about dual narratives: what is really going on and what seems to be going on, so even if you’re delivering bad news, the patient has a sense they are further on.”
The magic special needs teacher
Goldie Puricelli
“My whole interest in magic came from an interaction with a 16-year-old autistic boy,” says Goldie Puricelli. “He was into magic, so I learned a trick out of a cracker and when I showed it to him, it sparked concentration. It was only a crappy little trick, but it stopped me in my tracks.”
Within two years, Puricelli had charmed her way into the Magic Circle with a repertoire of tricks involving cards and coins. A one-time teenage runaway, Puricelli has worked for 20 years in a south London special needs unit, and began using magic as an incentive for children with dyslexia. “I said I’d reward them with a new trick every week before I realised how hard that was,” she laughs. “But it’s great, especially for the girls, because then they go on and learn for themselves.”
Soon, she was wondering if she could put it to work for another marginalised sector by incorporating British Sign Language. This would stop deaf people being excluded from the magic of magic by having to look simultaneously at the magician and an interpreter. “Everyone, from magicians to interpreters, said it couldn’t be done because it involved using two languages simultaneously,” she says. So she teamed up with a deaf YouTuber, Jazzy Whipps, and within an hour they had scripted a bilingual card trick. It wasn’t just any old trick, but one regarded as a holy grail of closeup magic which involves identifying a randomly selected playing card in a pack and is known in the magic community as Any Card at Any Number.
Puricelli is now turning her attention back to autistic teenagers to see if she can use simple tricks to help them with social interaction. The signs so far are good. “It’s a double illusion,” she says. “There’s the trick itself, but also the illusion of intimacy. People on the autism spectrum tend to struggle to make eye contact and the trick gives them a way of connecting within their safe boundary.” Importantly, for young people who often feel they have no prospects, she says, “it also gives them a skill that can lead somewhere”.
Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology of Magic, at the Wellcome Collection, London, is on until 15 September.