The Art of Illusion

Illusion is one of the arts that has always defied human logic while simultaneously capturing an audience’s interest.

From watching David Blaine performing insanely magical tricks like floating above the ground, breaking glasses telepathically or removing your belongings from your body without you noticing, to his predecessor, the Emmy award-winning David Copperfield – magic has enticed us. Both of these illusionists are known for combining storytelling and illusion to distracting the mind while tricks happen behind the scenes.

One such aspiring illusionist is Tangeni Magician.

Moving around town and gathering audiences through strange introductions and performing at formal events, Tangeni also has a few tricks up his sleeve.

Magic, not to be confused with supernatural magic, is made of illusion, stage magic and close-up magic, and is one of the oldest forms of performing arts in the world.

The history of magic finds its roots in ancient Persian when ritual acts of priests came to be known as mageia of magika – which eventually came to mean any foreign, unorthodox, or illegitimate ritual practice.

Nowadays, the art is more commercial. Illusionists are known to pull rabbits from empty hats or transform the colour of various materials. More extreme acts see them cutting off heads from bodies while keeping people alive to making something disappear and appear in another place.

Tangeni is on the safer side of things with tricks that will amaze you but not scare you.

Last week, at the National Theatre of Namibia’s open day, the trickster served as entertainment. This would be the third time I was in the performer’s presence. He walks up to me and asks if he can show me something. He takes my hand, places it palm up on the counter in the theatre’s foyer and wipes it with an alcoholic wipe.

He then takes out a nail, places it on my hand and gives me a rock in the other hand. “You’ve worked with a hammer and nail before, right? So now I want you to hit on the nail as hard as you can.” After several minutes of me refusing and him trying to convince me, he takes the nail and places it on his forehead with the crowd’s anxiety growing by the second. After moving around the topic further, Tangeni reveals his trick – making the three-inch nail disappear up his nose without any injury to himself.

On another occasion, the young magician met up with YouTuber Jackson ‘Jacky Pop’ Nghinamhito in town.

Placing a coin in Nghinamhito’s palm, Tangeni grabs the vlogger’s hand and shakes the closed fists in an attempt to make it disappear.

A few seconds later, the coin doesn’t disappear but the magician removes Nghinamhito’s watch from his back pocket, revealing what the true trick was.

“This is a nice watch,” he jokes. A bemused Nghinamhito laughs at how he got tricked so easily. A subsequent trick sees Tangeni rip a piece of newspaper apart, crumbling it in his hands and unwrapping a piece of fully intact paper from his hands. While the crowd was amazed, someone tried to debunk the method. Tangeni Omwene posted on YouTube that the trick is “not real, the other part of the news paper is folded inside.”

But a magician never reveals his tricks.

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