The Levitation
Of all feats of magic, the levitation is the most unique. It’s fascinating and often beautiful theatre, yet it struggles to create a concrete moment of astonishment, and is prone to be passed off as a mere “trick.” It’s difficult to take a levitation seriously, in any rational sense. It is just so out there. And yet, they can be incredibly captivating, commercial, and supportive for a magician’s reputation.
Mind reading is plausible. Most people will buy a presentation of a card divination trick if it focuses on the “picking up of subtle tells” by the spectator. And that’s because it’s true. Poker pros use such techniques on TV all the time, and the public has a strong fascination with that. Now the magician may be simply forcing the card, and may have absolutely no real experience in the art of cold reading, but selling that concept to his audience can be achieved as to provide an emotional hook to the effect, cover the method, and generate astonishment revolving around that this “mind reading” effect might be real.
A vanish is plausible. It might be plausible through an explanation of the hand is quicker than the eye, that what the audience is seeing is merely an illusion, that if they truly forget the coin is there, it might just vanish. Audience can buy that if presented well by an experienced performer who can back it up with good magic. Everyone has had the experience of not seeing something right in front of them, or having something seemingly vanish from one place only to be found someplace else.
Levitation is impossible. Nobody has ever had an experience where they witnessed something levitating, unless of course they were at a magic show. It is so far removed from reality and so physically unfamiliar that even the flawed Too Perfect Theory applies itself almost by default. Magicians are so eager, when presenting a levitation, to through in every possible proof to disprove the use of a string or support, that they seem to pinpoint the method for their audience simply by which proof they didn’t include. Hmm, he waved his hand above and below but not to the sides. I wonder where the string is running?
And that’s the problem. Without proofs, levitations lack impact, yet with them, they often become obvious. Also, the more proofs you include in your act, the longer the levitation is occurring, allowing the audience more and more time to closely scrutinize every action of both the object, but also the magician. The second rule of magic says never to repeat a trick. Well, in my mind, a levitation is really a trick that is infinitely repeating itself for as long as it is occurring. Every millisecond where that floating silver ball doesn’t begin to accelerate exactly 9.8 meters per second towards the ground is a magic trick: the same trick they saw the millisecond before, and the same trick they see for the next three and a half minutes that that zombie ball floats around stage through various hoops.
So do we not do levitations? Do we only do them for a second or two? Some would argue agree with those statements. In close up magic, an object levitating for a few seconds can be a very powerful and memorable feat. Or, as Daniel Garcia explains on volume 2 of Loops, suspensions or animations can become even more powerful than outright levitations. And I feel like suspensions and animations of objects fall into the same camp as levitations. If it were a real talent, it seems that the same energies and powers used to move something along the table would be the ones developed further so that one could cause things to float. But there is a difference here: animations and suspensions are plausible where-as levitations are not. Therefore I feel they can evoke astonishment far easier. People have had objects move unexpectedly (from wind, pressure, condensation, magnets, whatever).
More on this later…
