Identifying the boundaries of magic A qualitative study of expert magicians

Magic is ill-defined, and few published works in magic directly address magic’s underlying aesthetics or its theoretical basis. Instead, information is transmitted informally between magicians through lectures and personal conversations (see Rissanen et al., 2013). In order to capture some of this socially-disseminated information, we carried out a series of interviews with six acclaimed, expert magicians who think deeply about the techniques and meaning of their magic. We probed their personal definitions of magic, their beliefs about what constitutes “good” and “bad” magic, and their attitudes about the aesthetic boundaries of performance magic. We report the outcomes of a thematic analysis of these interviews. Participants highlighted many of the same fundamental features of good magic. However, they differentially weighted these features, perhaps explaining variability in their performing styles. These magicians felt that there may be no entirely adequate, singular definition of magic because magic is a non-linear system where small changes in the performer, audience, or environment feed forward in unpredictable ways to impact the experience of magic.