Ramón Mayrata, specialist in illusionism: “In each era, magic is something different” | Culture | EUROtoday

Ramón Mayrata (Madrid, 73 years previous) involves the novel from magic and magic from fascination. Find within the phrase the spell that makes the world comprehensible. The appointment with him is on the Juan March Foundation in Madrid, whose library he ceaselessly visits to seek the advice of his assortment of illusionism. simply printed The fantastic thing about magic (Eolas Ediciones), a short however absorbing essay by which he touches on shamanism, science and sociology by means of illusionism. Upon his arrival on the library, two overseas magicians who’re immersed in examine wish to meet him. He attends to them gently. It would not matter how a lot time we now have; The interview will likely be quick.

The magicians of La Mandragora

In his childhood, Ramón went to the studio of his uncle, the illustrator Pedro Mayrata Serrano, the place drawings of various motifs hung, however the ones that caught his consideration essentially the most had been these devoted to magicians, illusionists and shamans. Over the years he grew to become a author and essayist, however of his sides (anthropologist, poet, novelist) definitely the perfect identified is that of a scholar of illusionism.

“When I was 17 or 18 years old, I lived in Paris for several months and, upon returning, I stayed at the house of a magician I had met. He put me in contact with high-level magicians from Madrid (including Juan Tamariz), who were very young at the time. The Madrid Magic School had been created, and there were about seven or eight magicians initially. At the head was Tamariz, and another of the important characters was Arturo de Ascanio, a lawyer who had written essays on magic.” Ramón ceaselessly speaks of the latter to differentiate between methodology and impact. “Ascanio talks about there being an external reality in magic and an internal reality. And it is true, when a magician acts, one thing is what the spectator is seeing and another is what the magician is doing.” Ascanio, who by no means devoted himself professionally to magic, left an indelible mark on the technology to which Mayrata belongs.

“After the Second World War, magic practically disappeared from the theaters and took refuge in the music halland there are two or three generations of children who have not seen magic, because they have never been to a club. And the same thing happens with another part of the population that never goes there. That audience recovers when magicians start doing close-up magic (with small objects), which is very economically unprofitable, because it is done for very few people, but when you do it on television, it is as if you put a telescope on it. And a series of new venues emerged in the 70s. The most famous of all was La Mandrágora, and Juan Tamariz and many magicians of his generation worked there.”

Mayrata was one of many scriptwriters of By artwork of magica TVE program from 1982, directed and introduced by Tamariz accompanied by Emma Ozores. But his tv interval was transient. Before turning 19, his poems appeared within the anthology Mirror of affection and dying (1971), prologue by Vicente Aleixandre and chosen by Antonio Prieto. Luis Alberto de Cuenca, Eduardo Calvo, Luis Antonio de Villena, and Javier Lostalé additionally wrote on this quantity. He continued with the poetry assortment Snake Aesthetic (1972). He was already learning Social Anthropology and traveled to the Spanish Sahara, in precept, to carry out his navy service.

A younger man tells concerning the Spanish Sahara

“They formed a study commission and they removed me from serving in the military. A great fortune. As the territory was intended to become independent, I was going to write a history book that would serve as a basis for high school studies for when the territory was independent. Hassan II requested an opinion from the court in The Hague on whether the Sahara had been independent or not. To defend the position of independence with historical arguments in the court in The Hague. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was in charge of the treaty part, etc., and we from local history. I was working there for a long time, until Spanish politics changed and I had to leave, because we had been defending something that was suddenly not going to happen,” he says with resignation.

“Over the years, I wrote a novel based on my experience in the territory, The desert empire. Knowledge of a society as strange as the Sahrawi allows you to understand other ways of life and the world. There have been other novels about the Sahara, but about later events.” It appears that his expertise there may be a part of his manner of seeing and understanding actuality and illusions.

“The Sahara, when I know it, is a society that is governed by magical thinking. When I was in the Sahara I discovered that there was a religious brotherhood that was spread throughout Algeria and Morocco, which in its ceremonies used magic games identical to those that magicians did in Madrid. Many of the games were similar. I began to investigate and I had read the memoirs of the most famous magician of the 19th century, his name was Robert-Houdin, who is a man whom the French “They were hired to challenge the holy men of Algeria.” He asks me—it will have happened to him many times—not to confuse Houdin with Houdini, and this is what I convey to you, since the latter took his name from the former. “The French set up Houdin performances in Algiers and invite all of the holy males and marabouts of the tribes. Houdin brings a few of them on stage and does a collection of video games by which they make them ridiculous. Robert-Houdin felt nice contempt for the magic that these holy males did, and in addition an amazing lack of awareness. First, as a result of that kind of magic was produced in one other context. And secondly, as a result of that kind of magic was of nice high quality.”

A polyglot poet explains the impossible

Could Mayrata communicate with the Sahrawis? “In the Sahara, Harsania is spoken. What occurred is that with a colonial presence, many additionally spoke Spanish or French, within the case of Mauritania, Algeria and Morocco. So, there have been methods to grasp one another. I began learning Arabic, as a result of Hasanía is a dialect of Arabic, however I didn’t grasp it sufficient to have the ability to communicate it with them.”

Mayrata’s deep knowledge leads us to shamanism. “In the case of shamans, it was thought of that the trigger was not bodily, however that it was a spirit that at that second was stopping a girl from having a baby, for instance. The shaman explains to her {that a} god or a demon is stopping it, however that there’s one other spirit that’s in favor, and that he’s going to intercede and can lastly make sure that she has one. As Levi Strauss says, the operate that each one these items have is symbolic, however by means of that operate, you obtain actual results.

They additionally bolstered that with illusionist magic. For instance, when the lady was already in labor, they might cover a black stone or a bundle of hair in her mouth. They introduced their lips near the physique of the one that was going to present delivery, spat as if they’d absorbed the evil and confirmed it to them. It was giving visibility to that which is invisible, resembling therapeutic, and so on. ” Mayrata’s vision of ritual magic is not, of course, that of an intended deception, but rather that of a psychologically necessary process. “It will not be a trick completely different from the one which an actor does when he goes on stage. It will not be a distinct trick that they do in direct cinema after they do a montage. It will not be a trick, a way to inform a narrative.”

The many lives of Mayrata

It is not possible to cowl in an hour of dialog the determine and the numerous tasks undertaken by Mayrata: the Frakson publishing home (based along with Juan Tamariz), the Master Coralbiannual journal of illusionism, his novels (resembling The blood of the Turk), or just the character that makes him deal with a newcomer the identical as any of the good figures with whom he has rubbed shoulders. One of them, maybe the one which has marked him essentially the most, is that of the one-armed René Lavand, whose phrases he remembers: “Adding poetry to my games, I know that I add poetry to astonishment.”

Fiction tears actuality and exhibits the world in all its breadth. There was a poem by the Count of Lautréamont that outlined what the poetic picture was, “the chance meeting on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” that the surrealists preferred a lot. The illusions of the creators of illusions are poetic photos, two distant realities approaching one another. The extra distant and exact, the extra highly effective the picture will likely be, it would have higher emotional energy and higher poetic actuality. I imagine that poetry is a drive that doesn’t should do with a exact, inventive style, however is the frequent foundation of all.”

Talks about his new e-book The fantastic thing about the not possible: “It is a bit the quintessence of my experience. I don’t know of any aesthetic essay on illusionism, this is the first. The world of magic is very evanescent, so where is the beauty of magic? That is the question I try to answer. Then I have to go back to the origins of magic, the fears, the ritual… starting with the Renaissance, in our societies magic becomes secularized, and becomes a performing art. From there I take a walk through the illusionism. In each era, what the spectator has experienced as magic is something different. Magic is based on the art of making impossible things. What are meetings like for magicians? “You can meet a 14-year-old boy, a 90-year-old man, a civil engineer…” Mentions the many illusionist associations that exist in Spain.

“The nice capital of magic in the meanwhile is Madrid, the place many individuals from all around the world come to study. Magicians from all around the world consistently come right here.” If she had been a personality in a film, Mayrata could be the one who offers the keys to the thriller that the protagonists have to unravel: the alchemist, the librarian, the bookseller, the clever man. The viewer would know that he has been within the journey longer than the protagonists themselves, and that opens up a brand new and enticing thriller.