David Devant was, by the consensus of his contemporaries and most serious historians of the art, the greatest performing magician of the early twentieth century. He was Maskelyne’s partner at the Egyptian Hall in London. He was a performer of such quality that even his competitors, who had every reason to be ungenerous, described his work with something close to reverence.
His performing repertoire was extraordinarily small.
The exact count varies depending on how you divide things, but the figure that gets cited repeatedly — and that Steinmeyer and others reference in their historical accounts — suggests that Devant’s working repertoire at any given time was somewhere in the range of eight to a dozen main effects. Not eight hundred. Not eighty. Eight.
He performed these effects repeatedly, over years, developing each one through hundreds or thousands of repetitions before an audience to a level of perfection that is difficult to achieve any other way.
I thought about this for a long time before I fully understood what it implied.
The Collector’s Problem
When I started learning magic seriously, I had the instinct that most beginners have: accumulate. Learn as many effects as possible. Build the biggest repertoire you can. More is more — more options, more versatility, more tools in the kit.
I spent considerable time and money in the first few years acquiring effects, learning from videos and books and workshops, building what I privately thought of as a library. And the library was real. I could perform a significant variety of things. I had options.
What I could not do, for most of this period, was perform any of them at a genuinely high level.
This is the collector’s problem: the time invested in acquiring the next effect is time not invested in mastering the current one. And mastery — real mastery, the kind that produces the quality of experience that makes an audience member say something months later — does not come from decent familiarity with a large number of things. It comes from deep, repeated, refined engagement with a small number of things.
The mathematics of this are simple and brutal. A performing hour contains a limited number of effects. If you are performing for forty-five minutes, you might present eight or ten main pieces. The question is: do you want those eight or ten pieces to be competently executed, or extraordinarily executed?
Competent execution requires a few months of serious work per effect, typically. Extraordinary execution requires years — years of performing the same piece, under varying conditions, for different audiences, learning from each performance what the piece needs and what it can give.
If your repertoire contains fifty effects and you perform professionally once or twice a week, you will not give any of them the repetitions required for extraordinary execution. You will maintain a large range of competence and produce no depth.
Devant, apparently, understood this with unusual clarity. He chose depth over range. He chose to know eight things extraordinarily rather than a hundred things adequately.
What Mastery of a Single Effect Actually Looks Like
I have one effect in my current working repertoire that I have been performing for almost four years. I have done it in hotel lobbies and on conference stages. For groups of three and groups of three hundred. In German, in English, in the slightly halting mix of both that happens when I am improvising with a bilingual corporate audience. I have performed it when I was well-rested and prepared and when I was exhausted and running on inadequate sleep after a delayed flight from London.
I know that effect in a way I do not know anything I learned six months ago.
I know where the moments of vulnerability are and how to protect them. I know where the moments of maximum impact are and how to build toward them. I know which parts of the presentation can flex without losing the thread and which parts are structural. I know what happens when the specific audience situation requires an adjustment — when someone makes an unexpected response, when the timing is slightly off, when something in the environment creates a variable I have not planned for.
This knowledge is not theoretical. It is the residue of four years of performance. Each repetition added something: a refinement, a clarification, an understanding of some element that I had only partially grasped before.
The effect is not the same as it was when I started performing it. It has been shaped by the audience, by the conditions, by my own developing understanding of what it can be. I am still learning things about it.
The Curation Problem
The difficult thing about embracing the conservation principle is that it requires letting things go.
The effects you have invested time in learning but are not going to master. The routines you find interesting but that do not belong to the specific repertoire you are building. The techniques you have practiced but that do not serve the particular artistic vision you are developing.
Letting these go feels like waste. The investment was real. The learning happened. And now you are setting it aside in favor of going deeper on something else.
But this is exactly what curation is. The curator of a great museum does not put everything in the collection on display. They choose, carefully and with significant editorial judgment, what belongs on the wall. The choice to exclude is as important as the choice to include. The excluded work is not unimportant — it may be beautiful and valuable — but it does not serve the specific experience the curator is building.
Devant curated his repertoire with apparently the same rigor. He did not perform everything he could perform. He performed what served his performing identity, and he performed those things at the highest possible level.
My Current Working Number
I am, right now, working seriously with approximately six effects in my keynote and corporate performance context. These are the pieces that have been through enough development — conceptually, technically, and through actual performance — that I trust them fully in demanding contexts.
I know more effects than six. I could construct a different repertoire if the performing context called for it. But for the work I am actually doing, six deep beats sixty shallow.
The effects that do not make the current working repertoire are not gone. They are in development, or in reserve, or waiting for a context that might call for them. But they are not on the stage.
Devant knew about eight tricks. It was enough. It was more than enough — it was the condition that made extraordinary possible.
I am trying to know six things the way he knew eight.
It turns out to be harder than knowing fifty things adequately. But the work is more interesting, and the results are different in kind, not just in degree.
Conservation is not restraint. It is the discipline that makes mastery possible.