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| Lähtö / Départ (FIMFA Lx14, São Luiz Teatro Municipal, 2014) |
The late master magician Tommy Wonder wrote about a trick named Zombie. The Zombie is a classic of stage magic. It’s a trick where a silver ball seems to float above and below the cloth the magician is holding. It’s a trick that in the hands of a skillful performer can be a miracle of living and floating ball or in the wrong hands it can look what it essentially is, a ball attached to a stick that magician is wiggling behind a cloth.
The cloth hides the secret from the audience, but the stick is not the secret. The stick just prevents the ball from falling. Magic doesn’t happen in the magicians hands. Magic happens in the spectators mind. The real secret is the way the magician moves it, acts with it and how the whole thing is presented. If we remove the cloth from the trick, in the right hands it will still create an illusion of a living and floating ball regardless if we can see the stick or not. It will be puppetry. So there you have the difference of magic and puppetry. In magic you have a cloth, in puppetry you don’t need one. In puppetry, when properly done, you will have an illusion even without a secret. In the wrong hands it doesn’t matter if there’s a cloth or not, it will still be just a ball and a stick, not magic, not theatre. If done right, people will want to believe in the illusion. When you have this believe, you will have people who listen. What will you tell? What point of view will you take?
With magic, the problem is that you are hiding the secret from the audience. If you hide something, people will want to know what it is that you are hiding. This makes it very difficult for the audience to focus on anything else. The problem is that the secret is usually nothing interesting, just a stick or something. So for me the question is often, is the secret worth hiding, or is it just distracting the audience? Can there be magic inside a drama, or will the magic with other subject matter transform magic automatically into puppetry or visual theatre, or something. Is it possible to communicate something with magic? Something else than just the feeling of amazement. Is puppetry magic without secrets? and which is more interesting, to astonish or to communicate? And all these boxes and definitions of art-forms... Does it matter what it is? I see I’m thinking a lot of these things, but in reality I have never cared much in what box I’m sitting in. Sometimes magic, sometimes theatre, sometimes cinema, sometimes circus... whatever it is, if something is interesting, that’s enough for me.
During the years, FIMFA has had huge variety of different kind of shows, different fields of work, but the main thing has been that it’s been always interesting. In FIMFA have always felt like home. Thank you for all the years and happy birthday FIMFA!
BIO
Kalle Nio (FIN): Magician, visual artist, director and performer. Artistic director of the company WHS.
He played in FIMFA with Keskusteluja (Maria Matos Teatro Municipal, 2010), Nopeussokeus - Speed Blindeness (Museu da Marioneta, 2011), Lähtö / Départ (São Luiz Teatro Municipal, 2014).
