To start with, the bemusement which seized us, as we all took off the blindfolds and stared speechless at the walls of the narrow room on which pictures of the most renowned conjurers were hanging, was just a taste of what was about to come next.
Magician Andrea Boccia in the flesh, whom I later learnt to be one of the best in his field, introduced himself and the forthcoming show, though in a wisely vague guise, so as to let us gradually realize what we were becoming integral part of, step by step, trick after trick.
As we beheld the performance, each one of us had a different response: some were skeptical, some were trying to foresee his moves, some were virtually fighting against him, some simply felt out of their depth, others were merely enthralled. But all our reactions shared one common feature: the fact of being taken in by our own ‘sense perception’ and the ‘language’ Andrea employed, which, coupled together, meant that our ‘reason’, profoundly affected by our ‘emotions’, could barely -or not at all- cope with the outcome of the trick. The skill a great magician needs to master is indeed the ability to juggle the ‘ways of knowing‘ we have at our disposition, so that we are misled by them themselves. The whole show hinged, in fact, on deception, on drawing the attention of the audience here and there at the magician’s whim; this is the key to a successful performance, achievable only through years of painstaking training -Andrea started developing an interest in magic when he was a five-year-old child and since then has taken it to a further level.
Unfortunately all these carefully formulated deductions and reflections only dawn on us a posteriori. They never occur while we are right in the middle of the trick, when we are captured and suspended in a surreal atmosphere, to be left, immediately afterwards, baffled and powerless to realize what has just taken place at the same time. Our eyes see images that are not there, our ears hear sounds that are not being uttered, our mind processes facts that are not happening: this is what magic is all about and yet there is a logical explanation. Sometimes though, it is better to overlook the latter and abandon oneself to the involving and fascinating power of the former, flying away from reality to a world of awe and wonder.
