CAMELOT Theatrical Special Effects

My brother, the behavioral psychologist in our family (and an amateur magician), explained something to me today that I never considered. He's reading "Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think" by Marc D. Hauser and came upon the concept of VOE, "Violation of Expectation," as a long-researched concept by behavioral psychologists that has served as a measure of not only sentience in animals but childhood development in humans.

It has been found in many studies (do a Google search) that infants as young as four months begin to react when they sense the VOE phenomenon. My brother used the "French Drop" as an example but psychologists have used several different tests. Try this "Dishabituation Event" on your child.

Children develop this "concept of impossibility" at such an early age that psychologists now argue whether it is "learned" or "genetic." Hauser, in his book, says that dogs and primates (monkeys, apes, you) are suckers for "magic tricks" but cats are not (which might have been a good thing for Roy Horn to have known.) Monty Python had great fun with "Confuse-A-Cat," "Puzzle-A-Puma" and "Bewilderbeast" but Hauser points out that cats simply cannot be confused because they have no concept of "expectation" as much as we, their masters, would like to anthropomorphize them.

"Violation of Expectation" (VOE) therefore becomes the principle upon which "Magic" is based, and explains why you can be a big success at childrens' birthday parties as well as on-stage in Las Vegas. We humans, genetically, know at a very early age (four months) when something "just doesn't seem right." A magic trick, therefore, is anything that violates your expectation. Your eye follows the French Drop worker's moving hand and, when it opens empty, gives you that primitive "What the...?" reaction. The dog raises its ears, the monkey furrows its brow and the kittycat could care less... it doesn't even sense that something happened.

So the next time a spec asks you how you did that, just tell him: "I simply violated your expectation. You did it to yourself!"

Unless he's a cat.

We theatrical special effects mavens need to conceptualize this in reverse: Whatever "violates the expectation" on stage is a bad effect. If the ceiling rings and the actor answers the phone, that's no good. If the gun goes "pop" instead of "BLAM!" that's no good. VOE is good for magicians, bad for theatre.

Unless you're performing "Cats." (I crack myself up!)

posted by C. J. # 4:19 PM