When Magic Tells the Story

The first article in this series argued that you shouldn't add a story to a trick, because the routine already has one that the audience lives through. The second article looked at the words we use between the tricks: the stories that build our relationship with the audience, charge the moment, and bind an evening together.

Sometimes, however, the story and the magic become the same thing. This is the version of "storytelling magic" that I find most interesting, because the magic isn't illustrating a story; it's telling one. From a distance, it looks like what the first article warned against, a magician telling a story while doing a trick. But here, the magical actions are the events of the story.

Bizarre magic is a good place to see the distinction because it puts more weight on words than almost any other branch of the art: the legend, the curse, the object with a past. At its best, bizarre magic understands that those words aren't decoration. They change what the audience thinks is happening in the room. Take the story away, and you change the magic.

But we've all sat through the other kind. A beautifully written legend. Several minutes of history. Then a coin turns over. The story may be good, but it was told at the audience rather than happening to them. The words and the magic are both doing something, but they aren't doing it together.

I'm a fan of David Parr's work. His Invasion Abbreviated is an unusually clear example of what happens when the story and the magic depend on each other: the magic creates the events of the story, and the story gives those events their meaning. David has made the routine available to watch on his YouTube channel, and it's worth taking a closer look at how he makes the two inseparable.

The relationship between magic and story

To see what Parr is doing, it helps to distinguish three different relationships between magic and story.

Magic can sit beside a story. The story and the magic run on parallel tracks. In my first article, the example was a performer telling a warm anecdote about his grandfather while performing the Ambitious Card. Either element could exist without the other and they can compete for attention. The audience listens to the anecdote, waits for it to finish, and then has to return its attention to the card.

Magic can be in service of a story. The story establishes something, and the magic gives it physical expression or consequence. This is where Eugene Burger's Gypsy Thread lives. The story gives the thread its meaning; the magic gives that meaning a physical consequence. The two depend on each other, but they are doing different jobs.

Magic can be the story. The magical action is itself the dramatic action. Remove the magic and the story doesn't merely lose its proof; it stops happening.

That's what makes Parr's routine different. Remove the story from Invasion Abbreviated and what's left is a packet of red cards turning into Jacks of Spades. A decent trick with no reason to exist. The cards have lost the meaning that makes the transformations matter.

Now remove the magic and tell the story without it. You don't get a story with its proof removed, you get a man summarizing a movie plot. The story stops happening. That's the distinction.

The cards become the story

Parr begins the trick by establishing a world: a sleepy town with one imposter among them. The alien watches and waits. When someone falls asleep, the copying begins.

Suddenly a face-down card isn't just a face-down card. It's someone closing their eyes. When that card changes into a Jack, someone has been copied. When it happens again, and again, the infection is spreading. The last red card on the face of the packet is the last human, still awake. When that card goes face down, he has surrendered. When it changes, humanity is gone.

Every significant action is simultaneously card handling and plot. There is no moment when the story has to wait for the magic, or the magic has to wait for the story.

The audience has to understand the rules before the magic can become dramatic. Parr spends the opening establishing a fictional system simple:

• Red cards: humans
• Jack of Spades: the alien
• Face down: asleep
• Transformation: copied

Once those rules are established, the magic can move the plot.

The audience knows what's coming

Parr has given one of the most ordinary actions in a packet trick, the turning over of a card, a dramatic meaning. A face-down card is someone falling asleep. The audience learns that rule before they need it, so when the card turns, their attention is on the character rather than the procedure.

Most magic creates tension through surprise: expectation, violation, astonishment. Parr builds tension through inevitability. Once the audience understands the rules, they don't wonder whether the protagonist will be copied. They dread it. They've already seen what happens to everyone else. They know exactly what is coming.

The final transformation is powerful precisely because the audience knows it's coming. They've watched the other residents fall asleep. They know what happens when someone closes his eyes. By the time the last red card turns face down, they aren't waiting to be surprised; they're waiting to see whether what they fear will happen. The impossible thing has become inevitable. That's why the final change feels like the ending of a story rather than simply another climax.

And then it turns around

David starts the routine with a personal story about skipping school, taking the bus downtown, and seeing a movie he was probably too young to see. Then, after the card trick is over, he says, "And that is the story of how I found out who my real parents are." It's a joke, and it gets the laugh it deserves. But suddenly the alien-invasion story is about the man standing in front of us.

The plot resolved a moment earlier, when humanity fell. This line does something else. It takes us out of the movie and puts us back in the room with Parr. The story has ended, and we're back with the storyteller. The emotional weight of the impossible moment comes back to the performer, where it belongs.

Why it's so hard to build

The fusion of story and magic is rare because it imposes a constraint in both directions. The story has to obey the magic, and the magic has to mean something in the story. You can start with the dramatic event and look for a method that can make it happen, or start with a piece of magic and discover what dramatic event it could represent. Either way, the two eventually have to become the same thing: the dramatic action has to be something the method can actually make happen, at the moment the story needs it.

Look at what a packet of cards can physically do: change, transpose, turn face up or face down, be counted, be different from the others, become identical. Those are the physical actions Parr has to work with.

Parr turns them into dramatic actions:

• Turn face down → sleep
• Change identity → copy
• One becomes many → infection

He didn't graft a plot onto card handling. He found the plot that card handling could tell.

The practical lesson is to look at the magic before looking for the story. What can the cards actually do? What could those actions mean if they happened to a character? Parr's routine begins to make sense when you look at it that way.

Then check the other direction. Replace the trick with an unrelated one, or replace the story with an unrelated story, and see whether the audience would feel the loss.

In Invasion Abbreviated, they would feel both. The story gives the magic meaning. The magic gives the story events. That's mutual dependency. If you want to build this kind of routine, that's what you're looking for.

What this is not

It would be easy to leave the impression that fusion is the goal and the previous two articles were simply the warm-up. It isn't. Fusion is one of the places a routine's tension can live, and it's wonderful when it lands.

But Gypsy Thread doesn't fuse the story and the magic in this sense, and it's a masterpiece.

A strong Q&A act may need no narrative at all. The tension can already exist in the relationship between performer and spectator.

The naming in Derek DelGaudio's In & Of Itself doesn't fuse in this sense either. The impossibility isn't a plot event; it's an experience the audience enters for themselves. The show uses magic to make that experience possible, rather than making the magic itself the narrative event.

Different routines put their tension in different places. Forcing every routine toward fusion would wreck most of them. The point isn't to make magic tell stories. The point is to recognize when it can.

When magic tells the story

There are times when a story can charge the magic. There are times when stories can build the relationship with the audience or bind an entire evening together. And, more rarely, there are times when the magic itself can become the story.

That third version is the hardest to build because neither side gets to remain independent. The story has to obey the magic, and the magic has to mean something in the story.

Whether Parr began with the plot, the cards, or some combination of the two isn't really the point. The finished routine makes them inseparable. When it works, the audience doesn't translate between the two. They don't hear a story and then watch a trick. They watch something happen, and realize they're watching a story happen.

That's when magic tells the story.

Michael Jons is the author of Making Magic Matter: A Framework for Meaningful Performance, which explores story at every scale a magician performs at: single routines, sets, and full shows.