“All Transparent”: Pepper’s Ghost, Plate Glass, and Theatrical Transformation

Abstract

Stage tricks are like theatrical ghosts: they take us captive through their improbable yet explicit manifestation.¹ A magician throws a handkerchief into the air, but a dove flies away. In the moment of transformation or disappearance, questions arise: What happened? How did it work? The questions betray the uncertainty that perhaps, for a moment, the handkerchief became a dove. The dove may captivate the eye, but the transformation—from an object into a magical thing—forms the crux of magic’s appeal. The mechanics of magic immediately calls upon a multilayered history comprised of insubstantial and unseen things. Thus, analyzing stage tricks and magic performance requires a reorientation toward the material stuff of stage performance, especially those things that lurk in the shadows and yet resist their own disappearance. Reorienting the gaze toward the material object and thing can radically shift focus as “the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object” (Nabokov, qtd in Brown, “Thing Theory” 4).