Like the Button Says

J and I had a conversation today about trying to perform magic during the COVID pandemic, and I wanted to share a couple highlights. The first is that he, I, and a number of our other usual collaborators had all independently come to the conclusion that we really didn’t enjoy or want to pursue digital performances or Zoom shows. None of us felt satisfied by the forays we had made, and the medium seemed always too much of an impediment to what we wanted to do artistically and to the kinds of connections we found meaningful with our audiences.

The second was that we were both experiencing a lot of frustration because so many of the instincts and intuitions we had spent years developing for how to create an enjoyable experience were now wrong. Time and time again we would brainstorm an interesting idea for a new show just to realize some element of it was fundamentally incompatible with the realities of living safely during The Age of COVID. And this extended frustration that other skills we had spent so long honing were also useless or not applicable, like close up magic that we couldn’t be near enough an audience to share.

The last was that this was just about the longest we had gone without some kind of show, some kind of magic production, and we felt we had been neglecting magic because of it. We were working so hard to come up with something that maintained the size and level of production we had painstakingly achieved in The Before Times that we had failed to produce anything that could live in this new reality. We were stymied because we failed to appreciate just how fundamentally different this performance climate is, and now that we do we are stepping back, scaling back, and looking back to the basics that got us here. This was all oddly summed up when, while we were talking, I found an old button I had gotten at an instillation J and I visited when we both lived in New York when we were first working together. So, like the button says:

--Z.Y.