To anyone and everyone with an interest in the matter: within these pages you will find a systematic understanding of the art of performance magic through the lens of semiotics. I begin with this pronouncement because it will mean two very different things depending on the history of the reader...

Imagine for a moment that you are an artist who wishes to convey something to your audience through your art. In the same way that the painter will use painting, the actor will use acting, and the musician will use music, you, as a magician, will use magic to convey this something to your audience. Makes perfect sense, yes? What if I told you that you couldn’t do that?

I began doing magic when I was fifteen years old. I sat down in the drama studio of my high school having just met the one I would later call my mentor and watched as he took a 3 of Clubs between his fingers, shook his hand, and then all of a sudden he was holding the Jack of Hearts. A sensation came over me. A pulse. A heat. People around the table gasped, eyes wide. Others laughed. I died. For a brief shining moment I was dead. There was nothing, a comforting nothing, an intense nothing...

We begin by looking back. Jerzy Grotowski was a theatre theorist and practitioner who, in the practice of his experimental POOR THEATRE, sought to define what theatre was as separate from other categories of performance, sought to “resist thinking of theatre as a composite of disciplines” so that it may cease its competition with other more (literally) spectacular mediums such as film. In his canonical book, TOWARDS A POOR THEATRE, he describes the purpose of art and theatre as being...

In the structure of art, the given frame of an art form is what generates the relationship between the artist and the spectator, the quality of which is determined through the process of transcendence within that frame: creation yielding interpretation. If within the art of magic our signifier is the Effect, and every Effect is orchestrated through the FW structure, then it is through this fundamental structure that transcendence should occur and the meaningful relationship between the artist and the spectator should be generated. In this chapter, we posit that magic fails where other art forms succeed because this process is, in a sense, cut off at the knees...

Every day there is a supposed revolution in magic. With the advent of the internet, every day there is another website releasing the latest and greatest Effect that is supposed to revolutionize the way magicians perform their magic, supposed to change the way audiences think about magic altogether...

The art of magic has reached a crisis point. This is the crisis point: the moment when everything that has come before cannot solve the problem and so something more needs to be done in Act 3 before there is resolution...

First premiered August 4, 2011, at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto, Ontario, at the SummerWorks Theatre Festival.