Sister Snog is a club for smart, savvy business women. This year they held their “Diamonds & Pearls”, Christmas lunch at Vanilla and asked me to go along to perform close-up magic. What a great way to start December 2009. Here are a few photos of the event taken by the hugely talented Lucy Williams . What more can I say. Thank you ladies for a fantastic gig!
The Amazing Annie & Hela from Sister Snog
I have worked for Index Communications on a number of occasions, at events ranging in size from 30 guests to 700. Most recently I performed at an intimate dinner event for 30 people and provided an after dinner cabaret.
Below is a testimonial/referral from Rebecca Lawrence-Bristol:
I first came across Peter Wardell when I witnessed him teasing an audience at a local open day of a venue. He had been booked to engage and entertain the audience and in my years of event management and corporate hospitality options, I hadn’t ever seen anyone quite so able to adapt his act to the feedback (or lack of!) from the audience. He joked, teased, provoked and impressed. It was refreshing and creative and I made an instant decision to book him for some of my events.
Years on and having worked with Peter a few times, I would never even think about booking a different magician and entertainer. Peter has enthralled groups of mine who enjoy entertainment and those who usually don’t! He has an ability to measure an audience within moments and - alertly – communicate accordingly. His acts are full of magic and fun, clever audience participation and very fast wit. I have seen him joke and tease eminent medics in a totally non-humiliating way. Even amongst British reserve, no-one is left feeling awkward. By the end of one of Peter’s acts, the whole room is filled with laughter, surprise and a sense of fun.
My personal belief is that no matter who one has in the audience and whatever the size of audience – from a handful to a few hundred – Peter Wardell is THE showman, THE magician, THE motivator and THE ultimate performer for any event. Don’t even hesitate – book him!
Private Drama are an award winning events company that I have been working with since their early days and when the M.D of Private Drama held his 50th Birthday party and needed an act that would play well to 35 of his closest friends he asked me to come along and perform a 30 minute after dinner cabaret.
Strange as it may sound the biggest problem with these smaller cabarets is visibility. The rooms are rarely set up for a performance and as I perform some effects on a table it is important that the guests can see the top of the table. Luckily for me Adam from Private Drama had arranged for a small platform to be set-up at the end of the room, (you’d expect that from one of the countries leading event organisers!) and so part of the issue was resolved, however with the room being long and narrow it is difficult to balance raising yourself high enough for the people at the back to see while not going so high that the guests at the front are looking up at the bottom of the table. On this particular occasion I feel we struck a happy medium.
The great benefit of more intimate cabarets is the variety of material you can perform. Smaller effects that are often reserved for close-up work can very often fit in to this style of performance although it can be a pretty close judgment call. For me it meant at this event I could perform the Cups & Balls, which Adam actually had requested, along with a few other classics.
Thank you so much for your brilliant performance on Saturday. I had lots of comments on the night about your astonishing cabaret performance and I am still getting emails today from friends who are still puzzling how you managed to make a fifty pound note move from one envelope to another and make a whole variety of fruit roll out from under your magical cups. Absolutely fantastic!
I’ll be busy on the Rackspace stand at the following shows:
Cloud’09 – 7th-8th October 2009 (part of IP Expo)
Ecommerc3 Expo – 20th-21st October 2009
Rackspace are a regular client of mine (& Brandmagic’s) and it’s always a pleasure working for them. The stand team are really clued-up as to what needs to be done at an exhibition to maximise ROI.
I’ll also be presenting on the Symantec stand at an exhibition at the Celtic Manor in Newport in the middle of the month – invitation only I’m afraid!
I will post about these shows once they have happened and outline how I incorporated the company messages into the presentations.
I seem to have spent so much time on Brandmagic over the last few years that I have neglected my own publicity, to the point that my own web-site was redundant.
So I’ve been working pretty hard on getting a site up and running for myself as opposed to the business and finally here it is. I hope you like it, it’s still in it’s infancy and I hope to build on it over the next few months so please watch this space!
The site was built on WordPress using a template from Theme Forest, called Cubit. The images come from a variety of sources and I’ve used Photoshop to create the overall feel.
I think the biggest difference between this and most performers sites is the Portfolio section – unlike a blog or a simple testimonial page I want this to be constantly growing. I hope to outline any creative thinking that was used in the run up to a particular job and (for magicians), outline effects I used and the reasons why. I had the idea for this sometime ago and was going to use the blog as the place for this kind of thing , however the portfolio page is now a separate entity. For a fantastic example of the way I want the page to work visit the website of graphic designer David Airey
Please feel free to leave any comments about the site. (Also I’m sorry about the RSS feed messing up but it will be sorted.)
