“Let me tell you, it almost never goes up the sleeve”: Veteran educator and practicing sleight-of-hand artist Lawrence Hass drops some information on the audience in a TEDx talk. The PhD and former professor is working toward a philosophical understanding of stage magic. He wonders how magic performance can be so ancient and universal without having ever been seriously addressed by Western philosophy.
Hass was professor of humanities at Austin College before moving to Memphis with his wife, Rhodes College President Dr. Marjorie Hass. In addition to academic duties, he’s been known to teach magic to magicians at Jeff McBride’s Magic & Mystery School in Las Vegas. In his TED talk, he works toward a sturdy definition that separates magic from the the idea of “tricks.” He asks if techniques developed by magicians are somehow more manipulative, deceptive, or dishonest than any other kind of art or stagecraft. Magic, he ultimately determines, is “The artful performance of impossible things that generates energy, delight, and wonder.”
Lawrence Hass
For Hass, who makes his Memphis debut at Beth Sholom Synagogue Saturday, December 1st, the live performance of stage magic constitutes a message of hope and transcendence. “As we live our lives, we constantly confront limits,” he says, listing the usual suspects: sickness, loss, death, and transition, things we want but can’t have, and things we wish were true but aren’t. Then performers like Harry Houdini come along and show us we can escape. Illusionists like David Copperfield defy gravity and levitate. Magicians get their audience thinking big while working on a smaller scale. He’s a prestidigitator, a card manipulator, and a conjurer able to bring inanimate objects to life in his hand.
Impossible, you say? That’s the point.”When everybody wins in the world, that’s real magic,” Hass concludes at the end of one of his online card tricks. It’s a good line. It also seems to be a reasonable summation of this newly minted Memphian’s performance philosophy.
