It was the first cold day of the year. You know the one, not just when the temperature drops a bit, but the one where after months of sunshine, you know fall is coming, you can feel it in your bones. Nobody expected the cold, even though it was the end of September. Walking from thirty-degree heat into a chilly November evening already felt like time travel. It was unpleasant being outside and even worse heading down to the riverbank, where the wind and the proximity to water gave the air a piercing quality that was difficult to not take personally, but I had a mission. I was going to see a magic show on a boat! I had a very specific personal interest in seeing this show because optical illusion is something I had been working on incorporating into theatre performance for many years, both in a practical and research sense, working with neuro-optics and publishing various findings on what this means on a cognitive level and it was exciting to hear that someone was trying to combine traditional magician's tricks with theatre performance.

 

 

  

The environment, while physically inhospitable, couldn't have been more inviting for a bizarre, out-of-body experience. As though moving through a David Lynch film, my mind picked up on details that swam out of the fog into my field of vision, only to dissolve again: a half-eaten Danish resting on a plate, left unattended; a little dog curled up in blankets for warmth; the smirking mermaids inlaid in the backlit tables, glowing like embers without heat, cups of steaming tea belonging to no one, fuzzy blankets that somehow made you even colder. This was on no way a typical setup we associate with a glittering magic show extravaganza. Rather, I was repeatedly reminded of Susanna Clarke's fantasy novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, where magic is simply a part of life, as wonderful and dangerous as any other force of nature.

The show was part of the Théseova loď festival, which ran from 24^th to 27^th of September aboard the Prague theatre boat Tajemství. The 2025 edition marked the festival’s third year as a platform for emerging artists, recent graduates, and invited performers from across the Czech Republic.

The program featured theatre, pantomime, physical comedy, magic, film, music, and genre-crossing experiments, reflecting the event’s interest in forms that resist fixed categories. The lineup included works by practitioners of modern magic, physical theatre, commedia dell’arte, and contemporary mime, alongside screenings by students of the Film Academy in Písek and a public discussion on the contemporary position of pantomime and grotesque performance. Additional elements included a family-oriented piece inspired by Slavic mythology, a closing musical evening, and a community clothing and prop exchange held on the boat throughout the festival.

The performance I was heading to was called Umění moderní magie and it was a one-person show by the Olomouc-based artist Adam Kotínský. He is a Czech artist and magician whose work centers on modern magic, a field he has pursued since childhood. When it comes to magic, Kotínský is impressive - he is the current Czech national champion in this discipline and in 2024 placed seventh at the European FISM Championships in Italy. His career has included performances both in the Czech Republic and abroad, with appearances in Tunisia and Georgia. He gives off the air similar to anyone else who has mastered a highly challenging and very niche skill, like precision archery or calligraphy, and his specific practice focuses on card manipulation and making objects vanish. He also studied acting in Prague, a background that informs the way he approaches live performance and structures his presence onstage.

Here is what happened next.

As I mentioned earlier, it was a rainy evening, shockingly cold. The fog seemed to sneak onto the boat along with the few shivering spectators, and the little string lights, so festive in the summer, reflected on the wet tables like winter fireflies, making the atmosphere eerie and gloomy. It felt like February in Victorian London, not late September in contemporary Prague. Performing to a small group of chilly theatregoers swallowed by the dark belly of the boat and only sparsely filled the theatre space, Kotínský made some visible blunders during the performance. To me, it was not clear whether these were deliberate and part of the narrative he was building (he later admitted that they were not), which in turn generated an ambiguity that I found rather fitting for the overall foggy ambience of the evening. He was cold. The audience was cold. We were all on a cold boat, rocking gently in silence on a foggy river. This gave the performance an Ursula Le Guin-like feel: the magician's apprentice casting a spell, a coming-of-age story, a young, shy man attempting entertainment, failing at it only to achieve true magic towards the end. He became an unlikely hero, and the mild awkwardness of the situation (for example, when he dropped an object or seemed to lose thread of a complex trick) certainly played into his hands, because he was the hero we rooted for. I briefly wondered where, purely from a dramaturgical and directorial standpoint, the “theatre” component resided – from where I sat, this was a straightforward magic show interlaced with fairly uncomplicated narrative sequences that were performed as movement pieces set to music. The arch of the show followed a traditional magic show as well – the tricks got progressively more complex, culminating in a large-scale card extravaganza, the audience was (somewhat reluctantly) involved in assisting in several of the tricks, the magician's assistant was a traditional mysterious young woman in a black dress and heels. However, the overall environment of the evening created an experience quite different from the prototypical magic show: the audience seemed to root for the magician by the end because everyone got so cold that doing anything involving a high proficiency in hand dexterity seemed like a feat, the hesitant participants shivered on stage, the mysterious magician's assistant also ran tech, promptly supplying light and sound cues sitting behind the console set up in the front row of the audience, the atmosphere in short created a meta narrative, one where we all floated in another dimension and being entertained by magic beyond the veil.

 

  

  

The Japanese actor Yoshi Oida opens his book on actor training with an example from film. Oida recalls the popularity of Ninja films, noting that one of the things that made these films so attractive was the "magical" power of the main characters. Ninja warriors could slither up a sheer rockface or crawl upside-down across a ceiling. They walked on water and even became "invisible" at will. This magic traveled to film via magic shows in the early twentieth century and takes its root from the stage. According to film scholar Colin Williamson, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw magicians who “aspired not to catch and entertain the eye but to engage audiences in a complex game of perception”. This game “pits the evidence of our senses against the evidence of our minds”. It is a game audiences take great pleasure in playing and losing, because the resulting uncertainty about how tricks work generates a delightful, sometimes profound, experience of wonder.

When we talk about transplanting the skill set of a magician onto a theatre performance, this process comes full circle, from theatre to film to live performance once more. And here, I am interested in the kind of magic Oida mentions, making the impossible seem possible, not just in film, but on stage. In practical terms, the focus becomes on how optical illusion can be utilized in live performance. One of the most important components of making an illusion successful relies on the naturally occurring gaps and adaptations in human perception. Humans fill in the blanks and misinterpret so effectively that they often buy into the most unlikely scenarios, for instance, that people can fly. This process is a vital component of human perceptual and cognitive make-up and, when exercised in performance, can enable production of new meanings.

Although, as humans, we learn to fully rely on our senses, especially vision, for an accurate representation of the world, these representations are merely approximations our brains create. For example, the retina, an array of photoreceptors in the back of our eyeballs, has a gap where the optic nerve leaves the eyeball to transmit visual information to the brain. This creates two blank spots, five to ten degrees in diameter, in the images of the world. We do not usually perceive these gaps, as they are filled in by our brains based on surrounding areas and other information. Another example is visual acuity. We are able to distinguish fine details only in the foveas, the very center of our retinas that has a high concentration of photoreceptors. The peripheral areas of our eyes provide blurry images devoid of detail, forcing us to move our eyes constantly to get a detailed picture of the world, for example while reading. This phenomenon is exploited in display technologies called foveated rendering, which reduces the processing power required to render images on a display by rendering in high resolution only in a small area in the direction of the user’s gaze.

Traditionally, magic is based on visual illusions and redirection of attention. Visual illusions are distorted percepts of reality resulting from imperfections of the visual system. For example, the Ebbinghaus illusion, where an identical ball is perceived smaller or bigger depending on the size and proximity of the balls that surround it. This happens because perception of an object is influenced by its context. Other illusions are based on the visual system relying on previous experiences with the surrounding world. In the Shepard’s tables illusion, as another example, the tables appear different in size and shape, but the table surfaces are actually exactly the same. The brain, which has learned the rules of perspective from experience, interprets the left table as receding in depth and thus thinner and longer than the one on the right. Prior experience and expectation are also exploited in magic. In a trick called the Vanishing Ball Illusion, the magician pretends to throw a ball in the air after throwing and catching it several times. Observers, guided by the reliance of the visual system on past events to predict the future as well as cues from the magician, are convinced that they have seen the ball being thrown in the air, but it does not go back, making it seem like the ball has disappeared.

Many magic tricks rely on redirection of attention. Visual attention is limited in its capacity, and although it appears like we are aware of most of our surroundings at all times, we only pay attention to a few things at a time. In the famous Invisible Gorilla experiment, Simons and Chabris demonstrated the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, or not paying attention to something in plain sight because of being focused on something else. In their experiment, observers were asked to watch a video where two teams of players, one dressed in white T-shirts and another dressed in black T-shirts, passed a ball around. The observers were asked to count how many times the players wearing white pass the ball. In the middle of the video, a person dressed in a gorilla suit passes across the screen, stops, pounds his chest, and leaves. After the video, observers are asked to report whether they have seen the gorilla, and half of the people report that they have not. The brain cannot process all we see at the same time; we simply do not have the capacity to do so. Concentrating on one area of a scene makes us blind to another area, even though it could be right in front of our eyes.

This limitation is exploited in many magic tricks. For example, in the bending spoon trick, the magician offers the crowd several spoons to examine while bending another spoon held in her other hand on the table surface. In the assistant levitation trick, a magician’s assistant appears lying down, floating in the air, when in fact they are lying on a mechanical device attached to the magician. To redirect the observers’ attention away from discovering the device, the magician uses a hula hoop, passing it around the assistant several times to prove nothing is attached. In the spike-through-the-body trick, the magician falls onto a spike and is impaled and suspended in the air. In reality, the magician falls onto a platform, and the dramatic fall redirects observers’ attention from the second prop spike that emerges from a special corset on the magician’s abdomen. In short, magic in theatre is a conversation between performer and audience, a shared exercise in perception and wonder.

  

 

Kotínský and I had a chat about the show about a week later, via Zoom, and then met in person another week later. He carries a Rubik's cube around with him and, when I ask why, he says it's just something to hold in his hands and then offhandedly fiddles with it and assembles the color sides so fast, that my eyes don't catch the movement – where there were bits and piece of color before, there now sat a perfectly completed puzzle. He talks a lot about skill. At the end, we agreed to try out an experiment together, seeing what would happen if we blended magic with live performance and practical art research. This will be a short performance scheduled for coming February, open to the public, and the details along with the updates on our process will be posted on the webpage of the Centre for Aliative Research (www.aliatology.com). Towards the end of our first chat, which was the Zoom call, I asked Adam if magic is real. He thought for a beat before responding: “Yes, of course. Je to záblesk.” I retain his original Czech here for a reason – because, just like magic, the word záblesk evades a simple definition and instead can mean a flash but also a glimpse, a flicker and perhaps most tellingly, a glimmer, which is defined as “faint or wavering light, or a brief sign of hope/understanding”.

 

 

Olga Krása-Ryabets