Actual impossible magic
Magician Vincent Gambini performs his one-on-one show in a cafe. Spending a day there gets Maddy Costa thinking about fakery, cynicism, and wonder
By Maddy Costa
A busy cafe in Norwich. A woman and man sit across from each other at a table half-secluded beneath a flight of stairs. I can’t see his face, only his hands, which are restless, darting birds, picking things up, putting them down. The expression on her face as she watches him is so shrewd, except when a grin erupts, sunbeam through clouds – a brief interruption to the constant, furious focus. I’m trying to watch them both without watching: surreptitious, because no one likes a bug-eyed voyeur, and yet I can’t help staring, entranced by the drama, the inscrutability of the scene. He passes her an envelope and she glares at him as she opens it, her face tense with scepticism – until the contents of the envelope release laughter. “I knew it!” she exclaims, but the shake of her head conveys something else: the bewilderment of not knowing. Even if what she predicted would happen just happened, it’s clear she has no idea how.
This is Close-Up by Vincent Gambini – the magician alter-ego of Augusto Corrieri – as seen from the outside. Vincent/Augusto is performing this brief but intense one-to-one at The Yard Coffee as part of the Norwich and Norfolk Festival, to person after person, back-to-back for hours, so that the work is unobtrusively absorbed into the flow of cafe life. All about him are people with laptops and lattes, garrulous friends, couples sharing a brunch, late lunch. Nothing unusual, all routine.
This is the scene I sneak myself into, strategically positioned somewhat to the back left of Augusto, where I can spy on proceedings: the responses of participants, but maybe also the subterfuge trickery that makes Vincent’s magic work.
In a blog post on the N&N Festival website, Augusto addresses the doubleness of magic: the duplicity and sham of it, the wonder and uncanny mystery of it. “We know the skilled performers have practised, and those sleeves look a tad suspicious,” he writes, “but as hands and objects vanish and transmute, we feel a genuine sense of awe and bewilderment, as though we’re witnessing a ritual of transformation, or an ancient dream.” A film he made in early covid times with Hugo Glendinning, The Disappearing of Vincent Gambini, danced this line with melancholy poise: ghostly, dream-like images of people’s reflections in the windows of a mostly empty Brighton interweave with mundane film of Augusto in his flat, flicking a lipstick case so it cracks open into a cane, plucking a card from his empty hands, melting a coin into his skin. Sleight of hand requires endless hours of practice – but the film also grants momentary glimpses of the machinery it requires, too: the coin slid between shirt buttons, the card side-slipped so it can always be found, the deck of cards that fans to show 52 aces of hearts. Beneath the film was a poignant question: what happens to the idea of escapism when humans are trapped by a virus that no one can escape? And an answer, albeit an enigmatic one: the idea that “the props are telling me to focus on what really matters”.
When I sit at the cafe table opposite Augusto myself – because it makes sense, halfway through the day, to stop observing participants in Close-Up and become one – focus is my primary objective. I am going to watch the hell out of this thing. And so I notice the [redacted]. I’m not surprised when the [redacted] emerges from the [redacted] because I spotted it [redacted], pre-prepared. When he makes a “mistake” – pulling the jack of clubs from the deck of cards when it’s meant to be the ace of hearts – I know it’s a ploy to enhance the marvel when the ace of hearts spins from his fingers. Don’t get me wrong, all of this is delightful, as well as meticulous in skill. But I know these are tricks.
And then something happens so audacious, so absurdly, giddily inexplicable, not just a trick but actual impossible magic, that I’m literally in tears of joy.
I won’t tell you what happened, just as I’ve made other redactions, because spoilers would ruin the effect of Close-Up and my hope is that anyone reading this might get to experience it directly one day. More than that: it’s a work I’d encourage people to seek out, travel distances for – with the caveat that hyperbolic expectations are unhelpful, full of risk.
Before Norwich, Augusto performed the work at the Brighton festival, and the GIFT festival in Gateshead, but Close-Up was originally made to be experienced outwith an arts context: in cafes, whether greasy spoons or tea rooms, where participants have no idea that they are going to take part in a live performance until they find themselves sitting at Vincent’s table. This seems to me an optimum circumstance for an encounter with magic: anticipate nothing, be astounded by everything. And as I watch participant after participant, many of them people who particularly enjoy one-to-one performances, or magic shows, or those oddball art works mostly programmed at festivals, I catch myself judging people’s reactions. Why so muted? Why so undemonstrative? Why aren’t you more emphatically astonished? I want everyone to be like the people whose bedazzled faces deliver performances of their own: wide-eyed and open-mouthed in amazement, exclaiming shock and awe.
They’re difficult words, shock and awe: two solid decades haven’t disassociated them from the “Global War on Terror” – that surge of Islamophobic imperialist aggression, early 2000s edition, deemed necessary because of the “weapons of mass destruction” claimed to be amassed in Iraq. To see “fake news” as particular to the 2020s, product of technological advancement, social media and the exploitation of artificial intelligence, is to live in a blinkered present severed from history. Am I disappearing up a tangent, an irrelevant digression? Maybe. Except that Close-Up plays with fakery, deliberately, and 2025 is volatile with fakeness.
Close-Up is structured as a film script, Vincent and each successive participant cast as actors in a scene, a scene being filmed in a cafe, this cafe, or very like it, where people sit with computers and coffees, and one woman by the window gazes at nothing, lost in thought. The invitation to enter this scene isn’t so much towards escapism as away from certainties, untethering day-to-day existence from the notion of fixed reality, offering the fake or imagined or dreamt as a substitute for, or constant presence within, the real. There are negative, intimidating aspects to this. On the train home from Norwich, I message a friend who participated in Close-Up in Gateshead and also declared it brilliant: I’m trying to work out how Augusto achieved the final astounding surprise and want to know [redacted] in case it gives me a straw to cling to (it doesn’t). “I got really angry at not knowing how it works,” she responds. “It’s so clever, such a study of the control of transparency being the tool of trust building which leads to opacity. This is how we get duped!”
For sure, Vincent Gambini is here to dupe people. “Magic is never far from the world of con artists and swindlers,” Augusto observes in that N&N website post. And con artists and swindlers are never far from politics and power. A war that purports to save people, to safeguard democracy, to ensure a nation’s safety, also effects the opposite: genocide, dictatorship, days and nights of screaming danger. An election that promises to make a country great again tips it closer to collapse. And yet people continue to trust in these systems, even as trust fractures, becomes dust.
Back to the table, the cafe, the artwork. I focus on the props, the packet of cards that, seen from behind, is [redacted], the cup that conceals [redacted], and recognise that Close-Up is telling me something serious and profound about reality, something ultimately positive: that however hard you stare at a scene you will never see all its potential layers; that there is danger in uncertainty, in reality unmoored, but also possibility, because anything that exists can be seen differently, and anything that can be seen differently can be changed. But change requires belief in possibility – see how circular this is? – and a refusal of cynicism. The adult cynicism that insists that this is how things are, how they have always been, how they will always be. That offers no alternatives to imperial capitalism because humans are hard-wired to be selfish, competitive, greedy: the reality of human existence.
Against such cynicism Close-Up offers wonder: joyful illusion as a salve for disillusionment. Towards the end of the day, two women enter the cafe, mother and daughter, aged maybe 60 and 40 respectively. “Are you the magic man?” daughter asks Augusto’s producer, Steve Goatman, who sits by the door organising the flow of participants, and immediately I adore her. Daughter has a ticket, Mother by the power of universal joy gets a ticket thanks to a no-show, and in turn they transform into children before my eyes: mesmerised and not a trace of scepticism about them. They get me thinking about wonder as a human quality, how easily children access it, how it is shed in adolescence (so brilliantly depicted by the arrival of Ennui in Inside Out 2), how adults are more guarded, alert to suspicion, wary of being caught out, because they bear the scars of broken trust. Close-Up reignites wonder, and what a privilege it is to sit in its presence for an entire day: so much so that I was tempted to go back the following day and do it all over again.
As the cafe empties out in late afternoon, I keep locking eyes with participants in ways I find unnerving: do they realise I’m pretending to be a regular punter when actually I’m here to review the work? Have they clocked that I’m also sketching portraits as I watch, because I’m taking an art class at the moment and need the practice? The last person hangs around at the end and we chat: “I’m sorry I was staring,” she tells me, “I was trying to work out if you were the woman at the window” – the woman in the script, lost in thought. There was no equivalent woman when I was participating myself, and it didn’t matter: being told something is there when it isn’t is the calamity of 21st century politics, but also activating for the brain, which searches and imagines and, if it desires, creates what it wants to see.
What might happen if people let go of fixed beliefs? Allowed themselves not only to imagine but to notice that what they’re imagining could already exist? This is Mariame Kaba’s question for those who consider the abolition of policing and prisons a pipedream. Where people live with their needs met, with secure housing, healthcare and jobs, Kaba argues, their interactions with policing systems are minimal to non-existent. So when people ask her how abolition could ever happen, she responds: “We don’t have to imagine that far into the future. It’s here.” Again, this might seem a massive leap from Close-Up, except that to commit to politics easily dismissed as utopian, maybe even naïve, is to overlay reality with them day after day, until they become the reality, for everyone.
The final words of Close-Up offer a reminder: “anything is possible”. It’s a simple but generous gesture towards what really matters. As long as humans retain the capacity for wonder, the capacity to imagine, the desire to connect, there is hope, and as long as there is hope, a different reality can be found. Even if, right now, we have no idea how.
I appreciate that not every website can have the widest range of critics but reading this kind of suggested that the writer wasn't particularly knowledgeable about magic.
What a great read!