How Can I Improve Being a Magician

It's a nice thing to know that people are concerned about improving themselves as magicians. The moment that we go beyond doing "tricks" and focusing our thoughts on making magic, we should be proud of ourselves because we are starting to cross the line that separates the tricksters from the magicians.

Well it shouldn't be a surprise that this question pops up in any magic forum once in a while, for starters and even pros alike, because I think doing magic is a life-long process of improving your craft. You and your role being a magician should always be a work in progress. It's just a little bit sad though that you won't get detailed answers from those who should be "in the know". What you will often get in return is either "read books", or "experience will be your teacher", or to be more "engaging" in your performances. But I think there is more to just saying such things. I expect to hear more from those people who are frequently looked up upon than just mere one liners to sum up what they think is the way to improving your magic. Is it just that they are too lazy to expand on their words or is it that they too don't really know the meaning of what they are trying to convey?

I don't want to think that there is anything magical about making your performance in magic quite, well, magical. I believe that there is a formula for this. I have always thought that magic, beyond the sleights and props, beyond smoke and mirrors and the skimpy clad assistants, require a lot of thinking. Enough amount of thinking that perhaps daunts most skilled workers in magic to stop and re-evaluate for a while what they think is working for them. I feel that many magicians are in a dilemma of being in a state of denial. Magicians always talk about doing moves that "people will never notice" or "bigger actions that hide the smaller one", and so on. But who are we fooling? Most often than not, it's ourselves. We accept some de facto information we read or hear somewhere and stick to it thinking that it will work miracles for us. What we are quite missing though is that we are performing for people who could be more intelligent than us, people who can be clever in ways we don't know, people who can actually "think" despite what we want to believe in that audience are merely audience who will gasp upon our invisible pass, or spectators who are often "fooled" by the simplest of sleights. I think the very first step in improving ourselves as magicians is to be honest in a way that we accept the fact that some things will not work, and that there is always room for improvement. Once we are over our self-centered thoughts of being "pros", then we can go into the nitty-gritty details of understanding what can work for us.

I am not a professional in magic. I cannot even claim that I've been doing magic that is truly revolutionary or highly original. Anyone reading this is free to question and challenge what I've written here. What I want to share with everyone is not a recipe for complete success in magic, but the things that I try to ponder whenever I am not in front of my audience, the thoughts I've been playing with when I'm not holding a deck of cards or practising my billet switch, the things that make me think.


THE EFFECT

Let me say here first that what I will write may have some bias towards mentalism effects, primarily because I'm more inclined to be interested in mentalism effects than others, but I think there is a common demoninator when it comes to effect selection that can be applied generally. Effect selection in itself can spell the success or failure of our performance. There are literally thousands of effects in the market today and it presents a bit of a problem for magicians. We most of the time tend to be on the lookout for new effects and believe it or not we are looking for effects that fool us more than our audience members. We have to eliminate that factor first. We are not doing things to impress ourselves. Forget about performing for fellow magicians if that is not your ultimate goal in magic. Well if that is, then one can simply master knuckle busting sleights and perform the lousiest tricks utilizing those sleights in front of your magician friends and you will still get amazing reactions. In the end what we want are effects that will work for us. We have to be choosy in this regard because effects are the very tools we use to get things done, therefore we have to choose the right tools to do the right job.

Choose an effect within your skill level

When I say within your skill level it means two things - skill in sleights and performing style. Unless you are using bulky props that are almost no-brainers, then you should consider the sleights involved for every effect you choose. It's not enough that you can do the sleight, it's imperative that you can do it flawlessly. Sloppy sleights lead to sloppy performances. It doesn't mean that you should avoid complex or advanced sleights, it's just that you should focus first on what you can really do so you'll be able to pull it off in front of people while you are still working on your pass or palming during your practice time. There is also this consideration of working with a sleight that you haven't used for quite a time. Don't ever think that once you have a move down then it will always be like that forever. You still have to re-evaluate your moves especially if you had some time off with the same. Even a simple glide will give you away if you are too confident about its simplicity and perform it without practising. By the time you notice that there is more to a glide it may be too late and the negative effects its sloppy execution may be irreversible.

Choosing an effect to match your performing style means choosing effects that will suit your personality at the time being. This is quite hard to explain really because it requires evaluation of how you perform and what persona you are presenting. Consider this, if you were a starting mentalist and you just happen to use Banachek's stronger routines, it may be perplexing to your audience but not quite as psychic as Banachek would have presented it. The same thing applies if you look like a geeky high school student doing Tudor's heckler routine. It takes more than just the sleights, it's the attitude and persona that you have to consider when choosing effects in this regard. I'm afraid that there is no clear-cut formula for this one and that you have to rely on sound judgment for this to work (or you can ask other people to evaluate if your effect suits your style). You can use the persona of the magician who did this trick as a basis or you can alter the effect to make it more suitable for your performing style. As with practice and experience we are bound to grow and improve (hopefully) so then we can better gauge an effect to match our style.

Avoid convoluted effects

You will often hear magicians say that most effective effects are the simplest. Not always true. There are some quite complicated magic out there and are as good or even better than the simplest ones. What does it mean though when it is said that a trick is simple? This means that the trick is simple in plot, while the moves or performance may be on the other hand utterly complex. Choose an effect with a simple plot so that the audience won't have to figure out the story of your trick. How do you know when the trick has a simple plot? If you can describe the whole effect in about three sentences or less then you can say that the plot is simple enough. "A selected card is lost in the deck and later found inside the magician's zipped wallet which is in the pocket of a spectator at all times", "the spectator merely though of a word and the mentalist revealed it", "the two objects which are several feet apart changed places without the magician touching them" are just few samples of simple plots. The way you will execute those is a different story. Try to avoid effects that are too complicated and has so many muddled-up things going in-between that people are merely confused and not amazed. If you are going to lose a selected card in the deck then be direct about it. You don't have to ask the spectator to insert the card into the deck and go into a frenzy of card manipulations just to show that the card is actually lost. In mentalism avoid choosing effects that are too "restrictive". There are mentalism effects I've seen that should be done in some strict sequential order for it to work. The bad part is, it is quite obvious to the audience that the trick won't work if done another way (or have them questioning behind the back of their minds) and that there is something fishy going on with those instructions that were given by the magician (mentalists usually say "quite fair" when they actually mean quite stiff conditions). Steer clear of effects that employ more than at most two "basic effects" in magic (technically the basic effect is a vanish, or a production, or transposition, etc) unless it really goes into the flow of the whole thing smoothly and very important, logically.

Another pitfall of some effects are kicker endings that mean nothing to the whole plot. I read an email on my inbox recently describing a card through window effect but with the added kicker of having the card change at the end of the trick. What's the point with the last part, that I don't know. A card through window should be a card through window. The effect may be made stronger by introducing conditions that will make the trick "seem" to be more impossible. Notice that the word I used is seem because the conditions we introduce in a trick can actually mean nothing technically yet add levels of complexity in terms of the audience's perception. But when you go the extra mile of changing the card once it has penetrated the window is just detracting from the strong premise of CTW and should be avoided because it may even be an anti-climax. For the record I haven't seen the actual performance of the effect nor plan on buying it, but the description itself just turned me off. I may be wrong though.


That's it for the meantime. I have other things to do today and so I will talk more on future posts.