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In the introduction to his Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, Ambassador, Author, and Conjurer (1858), the French magician Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin reinscribes his stage performance as text: 'Could I not, each evening when the clock strikes eight, continue my performances under another form? My public shall be the reader, and my stage a book.' The high time of stage magic coincided with the explosion of publishing and print media in the nineteenth century; the magicians formed by this emergent media culture represented themselves readers and writers as well as a performers. A half century later, Robert-Houdin's most famous reader, escapist Harry Houdini, turned on the namesake he had only known through the medium of that memoir. Houdini's The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin (1908), is an unflattering 'expose" of his idol's claims to invention and originality that leans heavily on Houdini's large library of magical texts and print ephemera. Pitting narrative and archival historicism against one another, Houdini's efforts to re-write his namesake's legacy mark a cultural desire to transform and escape expressed not only through the performed manipulation of his body, but his manipulation of the book and the archive as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I examine the complex role of magic in Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon and argue that Achilles discredits magic as supernaturally powerful by depicting magical practices as ineffectual, resulting in unintended consequences, or as the basis for dramatic, narrative, or rhetorical manipulation and deception. I further suggest that by doing so Achilles transfers the world-changing powers of magic to persuasive language, thus opening the door for a metaliterary reading in which the author asserts that the most potent "magic" is sophistic rhetoric and he himself the foremost "magician." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Many people enjoy watching magicians perform magic acts and seemingly do the impossible. In many of these acts, magicians use sleight of hand, trickery, and special tools. There are, however, other occasions in which audience perceptions are used to make them see things differently. This exploits people's tendencies to see things based on their expectations and prior experience. One of these is perceptual readiness, the tendency for people to see what they expect or want to see. This article describes an exercise that illustrates that perceptions can be misleading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A magic trick based on a mathematical principle and popularized by Martin Gardner leads us to an interesting identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the reimagining of feminist performance art, bodily exposure, and female identity in two recent theatrical works, Annie Dorsen and Anne Juren's 2010 Magical, and Young Jean Lee's 2012 Untitled Feminist Show. In Magical, Juren reenacts a series of iconic feminist performance works, such as Carolee Schneeman's Interior Scroll and Martha Rosler's Semiotics of the Kitchen, while combining them with the illusionist tricks of a commercial magic show. In Untitled Feminist Show, an ensemble of six nude female performers stage a series of scenes and movement sequences that draw on feminist histories to offer visions of what Lee has called a "feminist utopia" in which identity is fluid and elective. These recent performances are read alongside their predecessors from the 1960s and '70s and histories of feminist criticism, arguing that Magical and Untitled Feminist Show chart new forms of feminist identity in the theatre, forms built on evasion and nonidentification, anonymity and abstraction. Finally, the essay links these performances to the wider significance of gendered anonymity in the digital age, taking note of new modes of thinking that make their interventions current and pressing today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the competition between stage magicians and spirit mediums to attain a dominant position in the world of entertainment since the late 19th century. Topics discussed include the differences between magicians and mediums, excerpts of the news account describing the efforts of stage magician John Maskelyne to dispute the performances of spirit mediums William and Ira Davenport, and the author's assessment of the stage performances of modern magicians.

In her essay in the most recent Re: Sources column, Sharon Marcus argues for the importance of theatrical scrapbooks as historical resources and notes that, to date, they have been largely neglected. I offer the current essay as a companion piece to Marcus's in that I would like to argue for the importance of another largely neglected resource for theatre researchers: trade catalogs. Specifically, I will focus on the mail-order trade catalogs of magic supply houses that were prevalent throughout the twentieth century until Web sites took over as the primary marketing tools for these establishments. I also draw upon Christopher B. Balme's idea that historiographic rewards can be earned by paying close attention to the information contained in theatrical playbills. Balme posits that one reason playbills have been neglected is because they are considered to be further removed from a theatrical performance than visual evidence such as photographs, designs, or videos:In comparison to theatre iconography—which in superficial readings would seem to offer the promise of access to the theatrical event, a performance on the stage (which of course it seldom does)—the playbill is foreplay but not the act itself. Like most foreplay, the playbill is clearly designed to excite, to stimulate; but for the scholar in search of the real thing, the transcendent experience and enchantment that is the “performance,” playbills represent a kind of archival ludus interruptus. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ABC television show Lost represents the imaginary, fantastic space of the desert island on which the castaways' plane crashed in tandem with the real, off-island locations of the characters' flashbacks. These spaces, and the narratives they contain, are first depicted as discrete entities, but visual tricks, mirroring, and mise en abyme gradually confuse and collapse the distinction between on-island and off-island spaces. Particular attention is given to the viewer's experience interpreting the spaces and narratives of Lost. The philosophical perspectives of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Gilles Deleuze concerning the archetypal desert island, and the cyclical passage of time experienced there, are addressed in relation to Lost's representation of temporality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1856, Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, the great legitimizer of stage magic, was dispatched to Algeria in service of the French government to perform before tribal assemblies. It was hoped that exposure to French magic would undermine the influence of their own miracle workers, the Marabout. Robert-Houdin's widely disseminated memoirs describe him cowing the Arabs into terror with his illusions, all the better to educate them. This essay draws comparisons between the Algeria expedition and the myth of Grand Cafe, another narrative of 'terror in the aisles' with an emphasis on the dynamic of trained versus untrained spectatorship. Both narratives imagine a naive group of spectators erupting into panic on encountering a new form of illusion. Against them, the superior, trained spectator is constructed. The essay deals with the place of illusion in modern life, as a point of reconciliation between Robert-Houdin's art and the art so many of his successors found themselves in: cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines midnight ghost shows (alternately known as "spook shows," or "spookers") and seeks to reinsert them into theatre history and to posit them as a cultural barometer of the time in which they were popular. Ghost shows were magic shows presented on the stages of America's movie theatres throughout the first half of the twentieth century. A ghost show was usually part of a double-bill with a film, and each built to a special blackout sequence that would close the show. The earliest ghost shows used illusions borrowed from séances, such as table tipping and the production of apparitions, while later ones featured characters from popular horror films and bloody stage illusions such as decapitations and immolations. These productions represent how some enterprising magicians were able to create a trans-medial synergy between their staged magic shows and the emerging motion-picture industry, allowing them to not only survive, but to thrive in the changing entertainment milieu of early twentieth-century America. Ghost shows also stand as early examples of movie events that prefigured the phenomenon of midnight showings associated with cult films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the presentation of physics through theatrical performances by magicians in 19th century France. Illusionist Henri Robin presented magic shows in his theater in Paris, France that utilized principles of physics to create illusions and established connections between magic and science in audiences. The author notes how experimental physics professor Jean-Antoine Nollet offered public demonstrations of principles of electricity. Magicians such as Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin utilized mechanical inventions in his magic show and emphasized scientific discoveries in his performances. The use of optics to present illusions by magicians such as Etienne-Gaspard Robertson is discussed.

The article recounts the magic performance of John Henry Anderson titled "Wizard of the North" to explain the association of the social elites and bourgeois conceptions of a technological modernity to the quasi-scientific magic shows and the role of stage shows in maintaining faith in genuine magical thought and concepts. It discusses Simon During's concept of secular magic or magical assemblage of stage entertainment and his view on Anderson's show. The conclusion shows that the increasingly democratized forms of magic and the contested magical mentalities have a shared cultural forms.

The article offers the author's personal experience on the trades of magic and magical manifestations. It tells the author's early experience of magic, entertainment, live arts and his theories about magic. He shares his experience of devising expositions of magic to inhabit spaces linked with the modern interdisciplinary arts practice which are unmediated in every sense. His experience of magic has evolved and became active and embarked on a tranche of interventions in the regalia.

Just as vision scientists study visual art and illusions to elucidate the workings of the visual system, so too can cognitive scientists study cognitive illusions to elucidate the underpinnings of cognition. Magic shows are a manifestation of accomplished magic performers' deep intuition for and understanding of human attention and awareness. By studying magicians and their techniques, neuroscientists can learn powerful methods to manipulate attention and awareness in the laboratory. Such methods could be exploited to directly study the behavioural and neural basis of consciousness itself, for instance through the use of brain imaging and other neural recording techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]