Magic is a game about presentation and perspective. Through charisma and showmanship, a great magician doesn’t control supernatural powers that make the impossible a reality,but instead controls the audience’s attention at any given moment. They use hand gestures and big smiles to make us look away from the backstage scuffling and sleight of hand that’s the truth behind the trick, but the mark of a great magician is that one can’t even tell when, in the course of a trick, they were actually being played.

Lyn Dillies, whom the University welcomed to kick off the fall semester on Wednesday night, is a truly great magician. Actually, excuse me, she prefers to call herself an “illusionist” and refers to her tricks as “miracles.” They’re appropriate terms, considering half of her act involves a half-and-half blend of classic card and sleight of hand tricks where Dillies charms the audience through puns and personal anecdotes, and grander setpiece moments where Dillies and her assistant shrink, disappear, levitate or escape from locked boxes. Through the whole hour of magic, a crowd of first-years, orientation leaders and curious upperclassmen cheered.

Dillies is a figure worth her applause breaks. In 2013, she became the first woman to receive the Milbourne Christopher Award, which is the Academy Award of magic. Fittingly, her show subverts the cliche “beautiful assistant” character, since her assistant is a man. In one miracle, she seemingly twisted his body into a knot, as comeuppance for a history of women split in half or squished into boxes at the hands of male magicians. Dillies also made history as the first illusionist to ever make two live elephants appear in succession at the opening of a zoo in New Bedford, Mass.

Obviously, due to the size of Levin Ballroom, there were no elephants at Wednesday’s show (darn it!). But Dillies did hit the expected tropes of a career illusionist, from pulling doves out of rainbow cloth to card tricks. But the real highlights were the grand miracles. After naming each trick, Dillies and her assistant would bring some new contraption onto the stage and use it to perform a seemingly impossible feat, as spotlights danced around them and bubbling orchestrals prepped the audience for the next big reveal.

These miracles ranged from a workout machine shrinking Dillies to the height of a turtle, to a tiny box her assistant seemingly disappeared and reappeared in, to the grand finale: a trick called “metamorphosis,” first performed by Harry Houdini, where Dillies’ assistant not only escaped from a locked wooden box, but traded places with Dillies in it. Perhaps the most memorable, however, were tricks that involved audience participation. One poor orientation leader was asked to stick his neck into a guillotine-like contraption — as Dillies peppered the crowd with puns on “losing your head,” — but emerged safely even after the blade came rocketing down. Another OL laid down on a balance beam supported by two foot-stools, until Dillies pulled the stools away and the woman stayed suspended in mid-air. Dillies even passed a hula hoop through her body and the beam, to prove that nothing was propping her up.

And of course, there probably was something propping her up. Balance beams can’t levitate, people can’t disappear and elephants don’t just materialize out of thin air. But not once through the hour did Dillies’ sleight-of-hand and immense charm fail to keep the audience from catching on to the real trick. Like with any great illusionist, between their claps and cheers, the audience was left asking themselves, “How the hell did she do that?”