23.08.2010
Creativity, Performance, Productivity, Stage
The Magic State of Mind
I have asked a number of successful magicians if I can interview them. Most of them said “Yes”. The plan is to either accompany each of these interviews with “take-aways”, a summary of the key points and advice, how it applies to the rest of us and how it can help us develop as magicians & performers. I will post these, along with the videos on a new site soon, with the intention of getting one or even two videos up each month. Hopefully you’ll subscribe because if there is enough interest then people will be more inclined to say yes to being interviewed. It’s a virtuous circle!
The new site is The Magic State of Mind, and will be live by the end of the week, (in one form or another). It’s aimed at helping magicians with their creative projects and their productivity. I have a number of great people lined up for interview with the focus being on their success and how they achieved it. All of the people I interview will have another angle on magic that isn’t just entertainment, let’s call it “Applied Magic”. Motivational Speaking, Trade Shows, Writing, Inventing, Publishing etc. I don’t want to talk about tricks as there are enough sites already doing this.
You can subscribe on the site itself, or by clicking HERE. If you are already subscribed to this blog then you will get updated automatically as I will post links to the videos here as well. If you’re not subscribed to this blog then just fill in your email address in the box on the left and you will get updates about both this blog and The Magic State of Mind.
The Andy Nyman Interview
Andy’s interview was the first interview I did so please forgive any technical or artistic cock-ups. Andy was great but my delivery of these can only get better. The interviews are recorded from Skype calls so the quality of the picture and the framing isn’t perfect but I believe the content makes up for it.
I have to say a huge thank you to Andy for being my test pilot, he is an incredibly busy guy so I owe him big time. As I said there were some technical hitches, not least the fact that we were cut off abruptly, mid sentence at the end which only adds to the mystery in my opinion. Maybe in true horror genre style I can persuade Andy to make a sequel?
To see the video on the Magic State of Mind site and read my take on what Andy said click HERE
Please leave comments and join in the conversation. Post on Twitter, Facebook etc. I’ll be extremely grateful.
10.07.2010
Creativity, Performance, Productivity
Earlier in the week I posted a request on Twitter for professional magicians to give what they considered to be the best advice they could give a newcomer to the profession. I’ve listed some of the responses at the bottom of this post and as this is my blog I have commented on the general themes. I’ll break it down into three key areas, (it’s the engineer in me):
The Foundations.
Personal Approach
Business Approach
The Foundations:
This has to be the best starting point for every performer – develop your skill set. This doesn’t mean learn a thousand tricks and then get your business cards printed, it’s more about quality than quantity. You need the core routines that you can build your career on. For me it was the cups and balls. That one trick has allowed me to get thousands of performance hours in front of real people and it is still the bedrock of my professional repertoire, (some people think it’s the only trick I know!) The truth is that I now have a substantial body of material but without that foundation I would have spread myself too thinly and that would have made progress very difficult. If you have a desire to perform close-up then 5 solid tricks will allow you to work drinks receptions and dinners, but they must be SOLID, PROFESSIONAL ROUTINES, not shoddy pieces of crap that you think “will do.” The time you spend performing these tricks in front of a live audience will benefit you far more than the hours you could waste learning new material that will probably never see the light of day. Until you start performing you’re always practicing. Your confidence will grow and so will your reputation as a worker and that as they say is priceless. Too many magicians “buy” their careers and then try to grow into it but if you take the time to get the basics right you will be successful – it’s a universal in any business! So I don’t care if you can cut the cards twenty different ways with your teeth your still not a magician until you can stand up in front of an ambivalent crowd and entertain them with a top-change. So get the f**k off YouTube and get in front of some real people with a trick that doesn’t work itself. You’ll thank me for it!
Personal Approach:
The advice you will often hear is “be yourself.” Well I think that’s only part of the message. It needs to be broken down into more manageable chunks. I mean how can you be yourself if you have no idea who you are in the first place? I wrote about this in
my last post. You need to define for yourself what it is about you that want to convey in your performances before you can be yourself. This doesn’t mean going on a retreat and taking a swim in “lake you”, it simply means that you must be comfortable with who you are and that is something that only comes with time. Confidence and arrogance are very similar in tone but are a world apart in the way they are perceived. Pat Page once called me arrogant and looking back on it he may have been right. I was close to finding my confidence on stage but I hadn’t quite crossed that line when he made that comment about me 15 years ago. I was in a part of my life as a performer that found me moving from the street into the “corporate magic” world – on the street I was confident but on stage I wasn’t and so I compensated with arrogance, not intentionally but by default. I don’t want to sound like the journeyman but it does take time and the less experience you have the more carefully you have to control your “confidence.” It doesn’t work for everyone, some people are just arrogant and all the time in world won’t change it. Which brings me onto my next point
“Be yourself” is too wide a window of opportunity, it allows you to get lazy. No-one has to work at “being them self.” You are you regardless of the effort you put in. What you should try to be is the best of yourself – always.
Business Approach:
Do you have one? What is your marketing strategy? Do you have a CRM system? Do you issue contracts with a full set of T&C’s attached? What was the last business book you read? Are you using social media to boost your profile? You get the picture.
Being a professional magician is about magic 20% of the time, about business 80% of the time and a job all the time. I’m obsessive about business (but that doesn’t mean I’m any good at it), and I’m always learning. I am far more in awe of magicians who demonstrate an aptitude for business and a true entrepreneurial spirit than a good faro shuffle. Some have both skills and I try to make them my friends. I’m shallow like that. You should approach the business of magic with the same passion that you approach the magic itself. The first will enable you to exceed your expectations in the second. I don’t believe that you have to be a starving artist to be truly creative, in fact the more on top of the day to day running of your business you are the more time and space you will have to spend on your artistic projects. Nothing kills creativity like a VAT return! And the business side of things really feeds the artistic side. To create good marketing material you need to fully understand what it is you do. Creating good sales copy that doesn’t read like a yellow pages ad is hard and a creative challenge, it forces you to focus on what it is that makes you unique. Business starts in the same way as your magic with strong foundations. A few really good clients are worth more than a hundred nameless faces who book you once. Again it’s quality not quantity. If you know Paretos principle then you’ll understand that 20% of your clients will bring you 80% of your work, so it’s important to build relationships and try not to piss too many people off. Business is about people and so is being a magician. They go very well together.
So there it is. Easy isn’t it? Get good, be nice and always answer the phone.
Here are some of the responses I got from my initial request, feel free to add your own comments, actually I insist.
Buy Michael Ammar’s card miracles 1 & 2 and Mark Wilson’s book of magic!
Get on stage. Work for free. Pay to work. The more stage time you get the better you’ll be.
As woody allen said – ”99% of success is turning up”.
Be yourself. And if that doesn’t work. Be someone else.
Try not to do to much magic ,it only upsets people.
Also remember to pay some attention to the ugly women
The tricks aren’t important, you and your interaction with audience are.
Smile
Take ur wallet with you on stage/performing
Remember your job is to entertain.
Don’t neglect the business side of showbiz!
You can’t beat getting in front of people. I joined an amateur variety group when I was 15 and did regular charity gigs. Helped me hone routines in the early days.
Don’t always listen to advice from family and friends. They’ll usually say you’re great when you’re not necessarily.
Believe in what you’re doing. Believe what you’re doing. If so, they will believe too. Your target is to enjoy, you and your audience.
Jugglers will hate you – mimes won’t talk to you – and it doesn’t matter if David Copperfield bought Claudia, Kate Moss still prefers magicians.
Buy “Marketing for Dummies” and anything by Seth Godin and read each twice. Finally, don’t copy what others are doing.
Learning to sell and market yourself is 100 x more important than learning card tricks.
Distinguish between magic and tricks! Understand rapport and confidence. Overcome fear!
Be yourself and if you think something works have the courage to do it, even if most disgree, who’s to say that they are right.
20.06.2010
Creativity, Performance, Productivity, Street Performing
As a street performer I became very familiar with edges. Your edge is defined as the front of your audience and it’s vital you get it right if your show is to succeed. Some performers would lay down rope or draw a chalk circle, others, magicians normally, would start working at the edge and then back away leaving the spectators in the perfect position. Over the years I tried all of these in my attempts to set the perfect edge. On the street learning to create an edge was crucial.
So why is it so important?
Edges outlined your performance area but they also outlined your intentions to perform and attracted interest. The act of building the edge was the method as well as the outcome. Your edge also determined the scope of your performance. Set your edge to far away and you’ll not be able to create the energy you need to fill the show, too close and you cut off sight lines and therefore vital income streams. Creating the boundary also built your “4th wall” , an osmotic layer that provided a means of filtering what came in and what left the performance. Shows could not risk being a two way street, with equal input from either side of the wall. Control was always needed to prevent things being taken over by the masses. The edge contained the energy of the show – if the wall was breached and holes appeared then energy would be sucked out of your show faster than you could create it . Skilled performers will plug the gap as fast as possible stopping the show until they have.
Boundaries and edges are essential. They are a force field that provide identity and focus.
If you don’t spend time outlining your boundaries and intentions then you can’t expect others to understand what your place in the world is. You may well be ignored or taken for a ride. Without your boundaries clearly stated you are more exposed to ridicule and criticism by people who just don’t “get it”.
You need to know where your boundaries lie or you can’t ever know how far you can go in pursuit of your goals. Boundaries act as guide lines that have a bearing on all the decisions you make. If you set them too far away you’ll never be able to fill the space and you’ll eventually be lost in the crowd. Set them too close and you’ll never extend your grasp, you’ll feel hemmed in and your performance will be crushed.
If your edge isn’t defined then it becomes difficult to know what was you and what wasn’t. Your ideas and thoughts will become mixed with those of other people and again you’ll lose yourself in the crowd. You run the risk of pursuing someone else’s dream and not your own, of becoming a second rate version of someone else and not a first rate version of yourself, (to paraphrase Judy Garland). Performers are often told to “be yourself” but without boundaries who is that? Hey it’s easier to be someone else, someone who has clearly defined who and what they are already – but that’s a sure route to deep dissatisfaction.
As performers we offer ourselves up as a finished product but the truth can be very different. We are often ill-defined parodies of others, fuzzy and blurred around the edges with only a packet of cards separating us from the people we’re performing to. A magician, a corporate entertainer, a mindreader, a magical entertainer, close-up magician, blah, bah, blah. What is it that make you unique? Where is your edge? Have you set your boundaries?
Go ahead draw a chalk circle that says exactly who you are and then work that edge. Use it to create interest, build on it and take control of your performance before you lose yourself in the crowd.
03.05.2010
Performance, Productivity
There are a number of ways to make yourself feel better about yourself and the work that you do. One of the simplest is a method used a great deal in the entertainment industry is to knock the other guy. I mean if you see someone performing you can easily slag off their performance and by doing that you will lift yourself above what they have done and hence you feel better. Even more impressive is to criticise their performance and then build yourself up as the expert by stating how you would have done it differently. That will increase the gap between you and them – you’ll look really good then. Just go on YouTube and look at the comments that people leave – very often it just condemns or insults the person who has posted and that can only have the effect of making the individual who left the comment feeling powerful. Maybe the tone of the comment can suggest that you are the expert, slightly patronising, all knowing. Yeah that’s the way. I do it, you do it. The reality is that unless your comment is going to improve the performance or help then you should probably shut up! Oh and if you are “the expert” lift people up to your level, don’t cling on to your knowledge, share it and share it freely. Anyone who is putting themselves in the line of fire deserves a degree of respect and isn’t necessarily a sitting duck for ridicule, you don’t become the smartest person in the class by throwing stones at the poor sod whose struggling, especially in the glasshouse that we’re in. There’s merit it pretty much every sincere attempt to deliver a performance regardless of the end result.
Alternatively you could just focus on making yourself a better performer than you are at the moment and forget about where that puts you in the grand scheme of things. You could look forward and towards those people who have something to teach you and stop looking back at the ones you feel a degree of superiority over waiting for an opportunity to stick the boot in. You can stand on the shoulders of giants because they have shoulders broad enough but if you stand on the weak you will more than likely crush them and the problem with that is that you will be at the same height you were when you started, and you’ll have all kinds of shit on your boots.
Like I said, I’ve done it more than once and it’s never made me a better performer. So if I’ve ever slagged you off, ridiculed your performance or knocked you when you were down – I apologise. I’m no expert but if I can help make you a better performer then I will. All you have to do is ask.
03.02.2010
Performance, Productivity, Street Performing
You know the test that you can pose to people, “Can you tell me what the numbers on your watch are, Roman or Arabic?” Most people can’t tell you because they have been looking at the damn thing every day for such a long time that it is now taken for granted and ignored. Well how mindful of your environment are you when you perform. read more
07.01.2010
Creativity, Performance, Productivity, Stage
Most close-up magicians will say that they do a cabaret, however most of them don’t. What they do is Close-up magic and they stand further away. It’s a bad habit formed from magicians usually being given the job of compere and then later on trying to tie that same material into an act. A good cabaret needs structure and it can’t be a hotch-potch of tricks thrown together. It needs a beginning a middle and an end. Structure is what makes the difference between a poor cabaret with strong magic and a great cabaret with standard effects. The structure is more important than the magic. read more
07.12.2009
Creativity, Performance, Street Performing
While I was away in Spain I heard that Jim Cellini had passed away. People closer to him than I was will write at length I’m sure about the man and his life, that’s how it should be, and of course my thoughts are with his family. read more
30.11.2009
Creativity, Performance, Productivity, Stage
Image from www.SXC.hu
As I write this I’m sitting on a coach traveling to Madrid having just finished performing at another InterMagia, festivals of magic for the general public. The Spanish love magic, there are probably about 70 pure magic festivals across Spain each year, maybe more. One of the many positive aspects of working at festivals like these is that I get to work with some world class acts and even better I get to spend time with them during the long Spanish meals that we’re treated to. read more
