Reviews
Magic Moments in Life
by Hsu Jen-hao
In recent years, Lin Lu-chieh has utilized magic performances, interspersed with storytelling and role-playing, to narrate stories through magic and reflect on life through performance. Moving beyond the mere "magic tricks" of traditional magicians, he employs metaphors and metonymy to strike at the "magic moments" of life. Breaking free from the conventional magician’s stage framework, he has transformed his craft into a cross-disciplinary solo performance, garnering attention and sparking considerable discussion within critical circles.
From "Birthday Party", which reflects on his life’s journey, to "Role Play", which incorporates the 20th century legacy of Chinese magician Chung Ling-soo, Lin has developed a distinctive style. With a minimalist stage and his ability to narrate and perform solo, he extends the possibilities of magic into a performance that prompts contemplation of life, gradually forming a unique artistic signature.
2019 "Birthday Party" at NTCH Experimental Theater
This time, in "Dazed and Confused", co-created with director Lee Chun-cheng. Lin essentially returns to the mode of "Birthday Party" but expands its scale and deepens the breadth of his personal life narrative. He turns his confessional tale of becoming a magician into a philosophical allegory about navigating life through the lens of magic.
Lin Lu-chieh opens the performance with a familiar magician’s trope—playing cards—before gently unraveling his journey to becoming a magician. From age 13 to 30, how was this 17-year magical life forged? Lin’s honest confession departs from the typical "never compromise" success narrative. Instead, becoming a "magician" emerges as the result of self-healing after a series of traumas and compromises in his pursuit of meaning.
It all begins in a childhood Go (board game) classroom. Amid the familiar routine of teenage study and exams, playing Go became an outlet for a stifled adolescence. Back then, Lin was a standout in the Yilan Go classroom, winning game after game and gaining immense confidence—until one match when his defeated opponent scattered the pieces on the board, pleading for a rematch. Young Lin agreed, only to lose the second game unexpectedly. From that moment, he stopped winning at Go, and the game faded from his life.
2024 "Dazed and Confused" at Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre
Photo by Wong De
Later, inspired by baseball star Wang Chien-ming’s Major League success, he briefly dreamed of becoming a baseball pitcher. Then, family karaoke sessions sparked a desire to become a singer as captivating as his idol, Taylor Swift. But while dreams were plentiful, reality was harsh. These grand teenage aspirations—like his first glimpse of Taipei 101 after the Hsuehshan Tunnel (main artery between Taipei & Yilan) opened—became towering, unattainable memories. Living in the shadow of an academically gifted older sister and an athletic younger sister, teenage Lin yearned to break free and find a way to stand out. Yet reality, like the scale he stepped on in a department store as a child, allowed him to deceive himself into thinking he fit the standard, but proof always eluded him.
Lin candidly lays bare his lackluster youth, interspersing it with a few magic segments: first, a trick involving misaligned color recognition, then a feat of memorizing pi’s digits, where he asks the audience to randomly flip to a page and line, and he flawlessly recites the numbers that follow. Beyond marveling at his magical ingenuity, we glean life lessons about "the seen and unseen" and "randomness versus order." The magic and narrative echo one another, reflecting the dull surface of a "loser’s" life while revealing the surging "magic moments" beneath.
The pursuit of life’s highlights ultimately leads Lin to the path of becoming a magician. It all starts with a Rubik’s cube at home, through which he discovers passion, applause, and a way to sustain attention. The colors and suits of a poker deck serve as both eye-catching tricks and mystical units of time: 52 cards in a deck correspond to 52 weeks in a year, with four suits representing the four seasons—spring, summer, autumn, and winter. In repeatedly manipulating the deck, the young magician perceives the passage of time, the cycles of creation and destruction, life and death. The scattered cards on the floor transform into a testament to the cyclical nature of the seasons, and Lin turns magic into a poetic expression of life’s narrative—the most moving moment of the solo performance.
2024 "Dazed and Confused" at Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre
Photo by Wong De
He then recounts his journey from busking at Park to hourly gigs at department stores. His father’s gray overcoat from the wardrobe becomes the teenage magician’s first costume. Lin seems to gradually emerge from his gray, lackluster life. He tells us that a miracle is the fleeting moment when someone believes, and success hinges on the applause of others. Sustaining that applause is no easy feat—he endures the malicious bullying of high school classmates who "shuffle" his deck with a water hose, the departure of a childhood companion who once walked home with him, and the dazzling ring he conjures from a box, unable to hold onto a heart that could catch his life. He gets into university but leaves everything in Yilan behind, venturing far away to chase his unfinished dreams. Looking back, he earnestly asks, “If everything had been accomplished, would I still have become a magician?” Had he won that Go match, become a pitcher, risen to fame like Taylor Swift, or had someone agreed to catch his life, perhaps Magician Lin Lu-chieh would have made himself disappear today.
2024 "Dazed and Confused" at Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre
Photo by Wong De
At this point, the dialectic between magic and life crystallizes. The "magic tricks" of magic are the highlights born from a lackluster life’s search for "magic moments." It’s precisely because life is riddled with regrets and unfinished chapters that teenage Lin continues his pursuit of becoming a magician, striving to be the grand magician of his next performance. Thus, the show concludes by returning to the initial Rubik’s cube moment, inviting the audience to witness whether the object pulled from the box magically aligns with the dream he envisioned.
"Dazed and Confused" is Lin Lu-chieh’s small-scale solo performance responding to his own life through magic. The magic interludes fulfill his duty as a magician—from familiar poker card tricks to guessing numbers in a flipped book, a levitating table, and conjuring a ring from a box. The magic acts are few but serve as perfect complements to the life narrative.
This is Lin looking back on his journey, from a gray teenage past to a performance practice that moves forward until the end, embodying the realization of his own life. The English title, Dazed and Confused, captures both the audience’s emotional reaction to the magic and the performer’s state of reflecting on his life—stunned yet perplexed. The path to self-realization as a magician is filled with surprises and glory, but also setbacks and self-doubt. Yet as long as someone believes, miracles can happen. What "Dazed and Confused" ultimately offers us is the belief in our own lives behind every miracle.
2022 "Role Play" atat NTCH Experimental Theater
Photo by Chang, Chen-chou
Compared to "Role Play", this performance lacks historical depth and formal experimentation, but it deepens and broadens the dialectic between magic and life narrative established in "Birthday Party". The one-hour show remains modest in scale, yet the performer’s sincerity is deeply moving. One looks forward to Lin honing his craft further, expanding the humanistic narratives that magic can evoke. The solo performance path he has carved out may, in the future, grow into a stunning new theatrical text.