Mirrors of the Magician's Soul.

Magic, like most performance arts, relies on communication with an audience. Apart from voice and gestures, perhaps the most important communication tool of the magician is...the eyes. This is true even more so for closeup magic then it is for stage, and I've always felt that television performances of magic are marred by the inability of the performer to make direct eye contact with the audience.

Possibly the best treatise on the use of eyes in magic that I've ever come across is by none other than Juan Tamariz in his "The Five Points in Magic" (Eyes are the very first point he writes about). He speaks of the importance of that visual connection to the audience, and suggests that the magician should imagine that his eyes are connected to the audiences by threads which should never be broken. That eye contact should be maintained. He isn't saying that you should stare at them until they become uncomfortable, or that you cannot look away, just that that visual conection to and from the audience must be maintained.

The eyes can communicate, and Tamariz suggested looking at just your eyes in the mirror with the rest of the face blocked off to see just what kind of expressions and emotions can be shown by just the eyes. Eyes can express all sorts of emotions, whether soft, kind, angry, sinister, threatening, welcoming, confused, sad, friendly and so on. Eyes are how you can express your humanity.

Likewise, observing your audience's eyes can give you clues to how they are responding to the magic. You can see how attentive they are, whether their gaze is where you want it to be, their emotional state, and what their level of interest is. People might try to fake reactions, but the eyes generally give things away.

Now that idea of watching where an audience's gaze is is very important. It's not so much about misdirecting. It's more about, as the late Tommy Wonder used to say, attention direction, making sure that the audience is not only looking where you want them to, but also controlling their level of focus on that point. One of the ways you do this is by the use of your own eyes. Generally, where you look is where the audience will look (assuming that they are engaged in the performance), and how intensely you look is a cue to how mush the audience should focus their attention.

Here's another point, this time courtesy of Bob Fitch (as spoken of by Eugene Burger in the Chicago Visions booklet). You should finish a thought before moving your eyes. Finish a sentence while maintaining a focus on somebody, and then move your eyes. This is how you can convey sincerity. Constantly moving your eyes while doing things or speaking to someone will create an effect of shiftyness.

Here's another tip about eyes. Generally pupils become wider due to two different stimulii. One, low light (due to the need to capture more of the available light). Two, high interest. Interest level of your audiences can be partially gauged by how large their pupils are. This is why dinner by candlelight is so effective for lovers - the low light enhances the appearance of interest in their counterpart by widening the pupil.

Mentalists these days seem to be using NLP more and more these days. NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) also teaches about eye accessing cues. They are worth a look, and certainly they feel intuitively right, but their actual veracity is still under dispute in academic circles.

So what are eye accessing cues? Basically the NLP people argue that your eye movements reflect how you are accessing memories. By observing what kind of directions the eyes go, you can infer what sensory modality they are accessing, and whether or not the memory is being recalled or constructed. Theoretically, you can also detect deception.

So here is how it works. If the eyes go up, they are in a visual modality. If they are in the middle plane, then they are accessing an auditory modality. If they look down, then they are in a kinesthetic modality, thinking or re-experiencing feelings. If, as you look at them, their eyes are to the left, then they are engaging their imagination to construct a 'memory' in whatever modality the vertical direction indicates. If they look to the right, then they are attempting to recall actual memories. This is where claims of deception detection come in, If you ask someone where they have been, and their eyes go up and to the right, then they are trying to recall an actual remembered image of where they have been. If their eyes go up and to the left, then they are attempting to construct an image of someplace that they haven't actually been.

So that's the basics of NLP eye accessing cues, but there is a great deal more about eyes in the NLP literature.

In any case, I see that that is enough for one post, so with a glint in my eye, I'll sign off.
Be seeing you,
Escherwolf