Your attention – that is truly the best gift you give the magician every time you follow through with the acts.
Magic is a wonderful thing. It's mysterious, entertaining and to a certain extent an incandescent entity that emanates a mystifying aura of an exalting glow. Magic is however not just entertaining and trivial. It is also in a way educational. Magic teaches us that even though there is a reason for everything that we perceive in this world we can be simply amazed by things even when we are unaware of those reasons and that there is no reason to be amazed any less after we know the secrets to the tricks. Magic is a way of thought – a manner of vision.
Magicians and magic for that matter use a lot of mechanisms for which one can be made to believe in what happens is real. You might see a trick at the first glance and think it is about to be something ordinary or maybe the magician lowers your confidence in a particular trick by showing you something and then turning it into something else. Failing to meet expectations and then suddenly exceeding them is one of the things the follow-through comprises.
The magic of attention entails the perfect example of a follow-through mechanism. Be it the simple sway of a hand or the simple flick of the finger – be it a snap or a clap or some wand’s wave, these are just some of the common ways magician uses to divert one’s attention. This kind of misdirection is often used to pull off tricks that require explicit procedures that involve the elaborate use of some move or technique which in itself could be revealing. This kind of misdirection draws attention and allows the audience to be engaged in something else that has little to do with the main trick.
Often certain tricks lead up to a story for the audience to believe in and then the performance is precisely the opposite or something different from the build-up. An example would be as follows. Say the magician tells the trick is going to disappear a coin in front of the audience and instead the audience is left awestruck by not the disappearance of the coin but by the disappearance of the very instrument that was supposed to do the said trick. Such is a misdirection amongst all the others to present a beautifully crafted trick that’ll entertain and inspire.
