It takes a village to make a magic trick.
For instance, behind almost every comedic charmer of a performing magician, there’s a lovable nerdy math genius-type in a quiet room, engineering and creating magic acts for the stage.
But sometimes, as in the case of master magician Caleb Wiles, one person fills both roles.
Caleb Wiles creates magic tricks from the ground up and performs them for audiences, as he has done on TV shows like “Penn & Teller’s Fool Us” (twice), and as he will do this weekend at the Magic Studio on I-Drive.
Wiles has been a magician for more than ten years. He said he loves to teach people about the world of magic tricks…including whether it’s acceptable to call them “tricks”!
“I like the word ‘tricks,’” said Wiles. “Some people get really wound up about that, [saying] it's an ‘illusion,’ and ‘tricks’ seems to degrade it. I want it to be kind of open to everybody, so to me, they are tricks. I also want to make sure that people know that these are tricks, that when they walk home I'm not really reading their mind, even though I'm giving them perfect evidence that it looks like I am reading their mind! I don't want to have people leaving my show believing things that aren't true.”
The science of magic
Rather than encouraging people to suspend their disbelief, Wiles prefers that his audiences try to figure out how a trick is done.
“To me, that's the fun of magic,” Wiles said. “It’s the delta, the difference between knowing something cannot be done and then seeing something impossible right in front of your eyes… People have no place to put that. They can't just wave it away and say, ‘this is technology,’ they can't just say it’s sleight of hand. They go, ‘He never touched the deck, he never wrote anything down. How did that happen?’ And the grappling with that, is the thing I love most about magic.”
One-on-one wonder
With the rise of distance magic and virtual meeting spaces after COVID hit, Wiles is no stranger to that type of Zoom-style performance. (In fact, he did a trick for Nicole Darden Creston that she absolutely could not figure out.) But he prefers human connection and entertaining audiences face to face. He described magic as a singular experience.
“It's just the proximity, especially close-up magic, where you know, I tell people all the time, the magic happens in your hand,” said Wiles. “‘I borrowed your wedding ring, and then the magic happened in your hand!’ There's no other thing in life that gives you that same feeling. You go to a comedy show and it's amazing, but you're sort of a part of the audience as a unit, but then in a magic show, it's like, ‘It's your hand, man!’ It's up close and personal, and I just love that connection.”
