Magic, whether you consider it an art or a craft or, perhaps, both, only exists for a moment or two. The performer and the audience co-create an experience that triggers a reaction and an emotion.
Magic doesn’t exist outside of the performance space between the performers and the participants. It’s relational. It doesn’t exist in a book or stashed somewhere in a drawer.
I recently found this from English director and writer, Peter Brook, on the ephemeral experience of performance:
When a performance is over, what remains? Fun can be forgotten, but powerful emotion also disappears and good arguments lose their thread. When emotion and argument are harnessed to a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself—then something in the mind burns. The event scorches on to the memory an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell—a picture. It is the play’s central image that remains, its silhouette, and if the elements are rightly blended this silhouette will be its meaning, this shape will be the essence of what it has to say. When years later I think of a striking theatrical experience I find a kernel engraved on my memory: two tramps under a tree, an old woman dragging a cart, a sergeant dancing, three people on a sofa in hell—or occasionally a trace deeper than any imagery. I haven’t a hope of remembering the meanings precisely, but from the kernel I can reconstruct a set of meanings. Then a purpose will have been served. A few hours could amend my thinking for life. This is almost but not quite impossible to achieve.
Peter Brook
