Derek DelGaudio knows that when many of us think of magic, we summon cartoonish stereotypes: top hats and wands at children’s birthday parties; mumbo-jumbo at Interstate-adjacent casinos; G.O.B. on “Arrested Development.” DelGaudio told me, “I daily suffer from the slings and arrows of being ‘a magician.’ ” His conviction — one he articulates with winning passion and occasional Shakespeare-quoting grandiosity — is that magic offers a means of exploring ideas just as complex, and of provoking emotions just as powerful, as those encountered in any other art form.
To this end, DelGaudio devises performances that combine sleight-of-hand with more theoretical preoccupations drawn from performance art, conceptual art and what’s known as relational aesthetics: a tributary of the first two in which spectators become indispensable, unpredictable participants in creating an artwork’s meaning.
