I read somewhere that all magic tricks were illusions. That for some reason it is only the bigger ones, the huge extravaganza that are shown night after night in venues such as Las Vegas, or the lavish stage productions that were so jealously guarded during the late nineteenth century, also known as magic's Golden Age, have claimed this title for themselves, and the smaller peices of magic, these days the bread and butter of most conjurers, get the rather unfortunate name of simply 'tricks'.

Tricks. It implies deceit. A lie. A joke even, at someone's expense of course. But whose? Certainly not the magician's. So the trick then is similar to the bar-room stunt, the betcha. I suppose the cross-over here would be the pea and shell game. Or 3 card monty, find the lady. A betting game, a fairground battle of wits, a way for the trickster to make a bit of money. Is this an illusion? I suppose you could say that the spectator is under the illusion that he might win, and of course he will. But only the first time.

It is unfortunate that most smaller illusions have thus become seen as merely tricks or puzzles, a sort of chuck-away magic to fit today's disposable society. Not just because of the fact that so many of those larger illusions of yester-year are using the same methods scaled down to create the modern day effects. But also because it degrades the potential for a truly magical experience for the audience.

Surely a few properly thought out illusions are better than a host of quick tricks? Surely the audience would prefer for a short moment to be taken out of themselves and into a fantasy where their presumptions about the world have been challenged, where there is a glimmer of what movie-makers call 'The Suspension Of Disbelief', where the truly mysterious might - by some fluke of weird nature - be actually happening to them, than the alternative, the feeling of watching a trick that is only going to make them feel naive.

So what can we do to big up our tricks and bring them away from that joke-shop-right-next-to-the-fake-poo short term hit? How can we bring relevance and motivation to the magic we do? Maybe we need to see it from the audience's perspective, think about how we want them to feel and ask ourselves "Is this a trick,or an illusion?"