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Magic Is Real
How the universe winked at me, and why I think it means we will be okay
Sometimes, particularly when things look hopeless, a little magic is all we need to remember that amazingly improbable things really do happen, and are often connected with our own thoughts and desires.
They almost never happen completely intentionally. I don’t mean we can just wish for something we want and get it. But sometimes the universe seems to offer a little “wink” that it is capable of responding playfully yet quite convincingly to our actions, as if to remind us that someone or something is listening.
I became convinced of this back in the late ’90s when I won a Fulbright to travel to New Zealand to work on the “changing shape of narrative.” I was invited to give a talk about digital technology and the future of storytelling, as part of the opening day ceremonies for the Te Papa Tongarewa museum. It was a great honor, and about half of the hundred or so people in attendance were Māori, the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand.
If you know anything about Māori culture, you would probably be as intimidated as I was at the prospect of trying to say anything of value to people who had preserved a civilization as rich as theirs through song, dance, poetry, storytelling, and chants (where the word tauparapara comes from). But they were extraordinarily welcoming (they even conducted a big welcoming ceremony called a pōwhiri, which actually put me at ease) so I went for it.
I was on stage, explaining how interactivity introduces a new dimension to storytelling and why, as a theater maker, I felt comfortable migrating to the digital realm. I wanted to show how breaking the “fourth wall” created a wonderful if uncomfortable tension between performer and audience. I remember saying, “Now I want you to feel in your bodies how the room changes when I move my body through the proscenium arch between the stage and the audience. It’s magical.”
“Coincidence is the skill of a great storyteller.”
I put my hands up in front of me, said “Watch this…,” and then just as my palms passed through the fourth wall, the lights went out, fire alarms in the building went off, and red emergency lights came on…
