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MAGIC
By
MISDIRECTION
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Back in Chapter Five the maneuver was particularized at some length. But it might be well to restate it again here. The maneuver is the management and manipulation of circumstances and actions. This contrivance of situations and affairs is planned with skill and an unerring surety. Actually it is a series of movements, all inter-related, executed with skill and a sure perception of the reactions of the spectators. It is planned definitely, for a definite purpose. It is planned to meet and overcome difficult and dangerous situations.
The entire routine making up the Kellar presentation of The Flower Growth is a maneuver. It is maneuver at its most deceptive. Not only is it an adroit and dexterous arrangement of moves and conditions, but it is a series of routined actions that expertly probes the gullibilities of the spectators successfully. So ingeniously concealed are the various movements involved, so dexterously planned are the expedients to cover the various essential actions, that the members of the audience are totally unaware as to when and how they have been hoodwinked.
Perhaps an effective maneuver employed by the writer in the performance of The Passé Passé Bottles might serve as a less complex illustration.
As is well known by most magicians, this bottle and glass transposition begins with a glass at one location and with two nested bottle shells, covering a duplicate glass, at another place. The effect is that the bottle and glass change places while covered with cylinders.
In order to accomplish the trick it is necessary to steal the outermost shell bottle in a cylinder which eventually will be used to cover the glass. Normally this is secured in the act of showing that the
cylinders both fit around the bottle somewhat snugly.
However, when I used to perform this trick, I found it advisable to vary the routine somewhat. The shell bottles, covering the duplicate glass, were placed upon a light stand at the right, as the performer faces the audience. On a similar stand at the left was the glass.
After showing both cylinders, one was put over the bottle and the other was used to cover the glass. The first section of the presentation was merely a hoax. I pretended to transpose the bottle and glass. Then, without showing them having passed, I pretended to cause them to pass back to their original locations.
But as I took the cylinder from the bottle, I took it with my left hand. This would be the hand normally nearest the glass, it being on the stand on my left. As I took this cylinder with my left, I took the outer shell of the bottle with it. Then, going to the stand on the left, I revealed the glass as having returned to its original location by picking up that cylinder with my right hand.
All of this took place during the by-play, which the audience recognized as a hoax. But it permitted the shell to be stolen when the attention was upon what the lifting of the shell revealed. No one particularly noticed—or cared at this stage of the game—which hand was employed. The same may be said of the tube taken from the glass. Using the right hand was perfectly normal and natural because the left hand held the first cylinder.
Then, as I stood facing the audience, I was in perfect position to place the tube containing the bottle shell over the glass, it being in my left hand which was the hand nearest the glass. The same held true of my right hand. This maneuver carried the shell to the glass without any suspicious movements. It eliminated the weak excuse of slipping the cylinders over the bottle to show that they both would fit over it. I did not care for the original move because it seemed to me to be pointless. Here, the more involved and complicated maneuver effectively and unobtrusively accomplished the necessary objective.
Notice that this was a routined series of movements. It was a planned and managed succession of actions for the purpose of accomplishing an essential part of the deception. It was not a single isolated move. Rather it was a planned series. This distinctive identification—the series of moves as contrasted with a single action—is the essential mark of the maneuver.
On page 128 of SHOWMANSHIP FOR MAGICIANS is the beginning of an explanation of the mechanics and routine I use for the Quong Hi cabinet trick. This is a complex device. Successful deception depends upon an involved maneuver in showing the cabinet and in the presentation of the trick. While there are several mechanical features in the device itself, successful deception is almost entirely due to the series of carefully worked out moves necessary to accomplish the operation of the device. Many of these moves are actually part of the mechanics of operating the trick but they are disguised as part of the presentation and are so accepted by the spectators.
Without this planned series of connected actions successful deception is almost impossible. Single isolated actions are impossible because the integration of one with the other is absolutely necessary.
This necessity of integrating the series of movements is the distinguishing feature of the maneuver. Each successive action must not be considered as an individual operation. It must be looked upon as a part of a whole unit. Elimination of one movement in the series would destroy the whole.
Consider You-Do-As-I-Do in its most familiar form. This, too, was discussed in SHOWMANSHIP FOR MAGICIANS. The effect, as is well known, is that the performer and spectator, each, selects a card from the pack of cards he holds. Each person replaces his card on the top of his respective deck and cuts it to the center. The packs are exchanged and each person finds his own card in the pack formerly used by the other. When the cards are turned over, both cards are found to be the same.
This deception is made possible by a maneuver. The performer knows the key card at the bottom of the spectator's pack. When the spectator selects his card from his pack and replaces it on the top, cutting the pack brings this key card immediately above the spectator's card. When the packs are exchanged the performer merely finds the key card and takes the card below it. This is the spectator's selection. Of course, in the meantime, the spectator has found his card in the deck originally handled by the performer.
Why must this series of moves be considered as a unit, rather than as a series of separate actions? Because the ultimate result depends upon the entire series, not upon any single action. The entire deception rests upon the integrated whole.
It is not at all necessary for the performer to go through his first action of selecting a card from his pack. He pays no attention to this card anyway. The identity of the card has no bearing upon the result. But the act of apparently selecting a card has. Eliminate this first, otherwise purposeless, action and you destroy the deception. Remember the deception is that each person selects the same card apparently. Eliminate the first selection by the performer and you change the deception to one wherein the performer merely discovers the identity of the card selected by the spectator.
This is what happens anyway, of course. But it is not what the spectator's understanding leads him to believe. The spectator's mind is convinced that he is witnessing a trick of sympathy, not one of an identity discovery.
Realize the power of the spectator s understanding coupled with his perceptions. Realize the effectiveness of the attack on the spectator's understanding. Realize how the perceptions are entirely deceived through this attack on the spectator's understanding. The perceptions see the performer look at a card. They also see the spectator look at a card. The perceptions see the two people exchange decks. They see each person seek a specific card from the deck he now holds. They see that the cards are identical.
But the understanding goes further than that. The understanding thinks that the performer notes his first card. But he does not. The understanding thinks the packs are exchanged so that each person may find the card he first looked at in the other person's pack. The understanding believes that both persons are seeking the card first noted. But they are not, of course. The spectator is looking for the card he noted. The performer is not. He is looking for the card the spectator first noted.
But to go back to the utter necessity of connecting this series of essential actions: As was mentioned before, the performer's act of looking at his first card cannot be eliminated without destroying the deception. The act of placing both cards on top of the packs and cutting them to the center cannot be eliminated. On one hand, the performer's act is necessary to maintain the deception. On the other hand, the spectator's act is necessary to identify the card to the performer.
The act of exchanging the packs is essential. Without it, without the exchange instead of the spectator handing his pack to the performer, the deception is impossible, the deception of sympathetic discovery. Fully as essential is the remaining act of each person again finding his own card, apparently, in the opposite pack.
Thus, the whole series of actions, integrated as a unit, becomes a maneuver.
The individual actions in any maneuver may be separately identifiable as those of simulation, dissimulation and the like. But when they are integrated, when this integration is essential as a unit, they cease to be separate units and become an individual entity as a maneuver.
In AL BAKER'S BOOK, that virtuoso of deception has explained what I have always considered to be one of his masterpieces. The trick in question is Al Baker's Pack That Cuts Itself. While the individual moves are separately distinguishable as dissimulation, primarily, the deception is only possible through the carefully planned routine of integrated actions. Without the complete maneuver, the deception is impossible.
The acts of securing the thread, attaching it, carrying over the extra card, adding the first selected card, cutting this card into the pack and adding the second selected card—all—are a single integrated series. They are a single maneuver that depends upon careful interlocking of each portion.
This difference between a carefully integrated series of actions, pointed and planned to a definite objective, and a simple routine of disconnected movements is sometimes difficult to differentiate. The Mora Wands is a sympathetic animation accomplished through the use of two hollow pillars. Each pillar is rigged with a cord, terminating in a tassel, which is operated by a sliding weight. While dissimulation is necessary in tilting the pillars so that the sliding weight may or may not become operative, no definitely connected series of movements is necessary in order to accomplish the deception. Aside from the demands of routine, there is no necessity that the movements be in any definite order.
The reverse is the case with Petrie-Lewis' Cords of Cairo. In both cases, the ultimate effects are substantially the same. But the mechanism, as explained in BLACKSTONE'S SECRETS OF MAGIC under the title of More Chinese Wands depends upon a concealed black thread connecting the two cords. It is necessary that the distance the thread traverses be held constant. This is accomplished in a variety of ways. It is essential that the pillars be handled in a particular manner to maintain this distance. Yet the handling of the pillars must not seem to be calculated or planned. Therefore, for the most part the moves are examples of dissimulation. But from the standpoint that these moves must be carefully articulated, one to the other, the entire series of moves becomes a genuine maneuver.
There are many examples of planned maneuvers in such tricks as The Linking Rings, some versions of The Cups and Balls, The Multiplying Billiard Balls, and others. The deceptive features of The Organ Pipes Trick and its related version with water jars, The German Water Trick, depend upon articulated successions of actions. Several illusions of the transformation and substitution variety rely upon a planned series of movements by the various characters. Such illusions are Murder In a Telephone Booth explained in SHOWMANSIIIP FOR MAGICIANS—the screen illusion, called A Magical Appearance, explained in the Blackstone book above mentioned; The Mystery of King Tut, Who and Which, Three Kings and a Queen—all in the second volume of The Tarbell Course In Magic. There are many more of these tricks with humans that are based upon carefully planned series of actions by the various characters. All of them are possible through the deceptive features in the maneuver.
Any trick, the deception of which depends upon a carefully preplanned routine of moves, accomplishes its deception through maneuver and its effect upon the judgment and understanding of the spectator. The deception is accomplished primarily through the interpretation given to what the spectator perceives. This interpretation is definitely shaped by the maneuver's influence upon the spectator's understanding. Without the maneuver the spectator's understanding, as well as his ultimate conclusions, might be entirely different and consequently without deception.
The maneuver is chiefly used to bury significant actions and things in such complicated detail that their significance is totally lost.
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