This blog is really intended as a place for me to express my own personal views on professional magic, if you are a prospective client then I would suggest that the Portfolio page is of more use to you. Please feel free to comment on any of the posts and be aware that these are my opinions at the time of writing and I can change them whenever I feel like it!
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
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
I recently wrote somewhere that magic was a performance art and although I didn’t think that there was always room for art there had to be an element of performance. The point I was trying to make is that if you work in a commercial market such as mix and mingle I felt the art side of magic was bound to suffer. If this wasn’t the case then we wouldn’t all be doing the same kind of material – commercial magic. Very often we need to make an impact but we only have a very short window of opportunity to do it in, that’s where stock commercial routines come into there own. They’re direct and require little thought on the part of the spectators, perfect. So that’s it then, there is no art in commercial magic?
Not exactly. I was limiting myself to the tricks and that’s always a mistake.
Very often the art lies not in the tricks we do or even the presentations we frame them in, the art lies at a much more personal level. If you think that there is no art in interrupting a group of people, or in starting a conversation with a stranger then you are missing out on a large aspect of what we do in these “artless” environments.
For those magicians who look down their noses at Children’s Entertainers and think their is no room for art there then again you maybe missing where the real art is. It isn’t Run Rabbit Run, it’s the art of talking to children and gaining their respect. In street performing the art is in crowd building and control not getting the melon under your hat!
Maybe you think that the job of a magician is to do magic tricks in which case you are not only wrong but you are in the wrong line of work. Do anything but be a magician and then you can do tricks whenever you want and not have to worry about the art. We have all had the experience of the spectator who can do a few tricks, or who, after you’ve performed a trick, declares “my son can do that.” They’re not saying “I’m a professional magician” or “my 8 year old is a professional magician”, they are simply pointing out to you what you should already know – the trick is not that important. Magicians are professional communicators, and our job is to engage with spectators and that is where the real art lies.
So let me re-state my original point: Magic is a performance art. There should always be a performance and the art should be present in every atom and every second of what we do.
I recently wrote about the need to keep fees up and not to drop them in the recession and even though I’m staring down the barrel of a pretty quiet December I still think that dropping fees is wrong in the long term. The problem is that the majority of magicians out there are doing anything to get the work and prices are being cut left, right and centre and I can’t blame them. Also the younger performers who don’t have the overheads that some of us do and can afford to work cheaply are doing so and to be honest I can’t blame them either. The end result however will be that they will “kill the pitch”, (to use a street performing expression), quite literally cheapening what we do and turning the work of the close-up magician into a commodity that has little perceived value.
So far I’ve bitched a little and not really offered any ideas as to how we can combat the problems that this recession has brought to our profession, so I wanted to redress the balance a little: read more
With the announcement of as storytelling laureate and the fact I mentioned storytelling in a recent post I felt compelled to talk about about, you guessed it, storytelling! One of the best definitions of a story was in “Funky Business” and it described a story as something that converted “information into emotion” and that is essentially what a good presentation of magic should do.
Imagine the typical presentation from your “good” magician:
“Please take a card. Now put it back in the pack. Was that your card – Ta Da!”
I can imagine the rush for the film rights on that one. read more
Our profession is full of competent magicians. They’re good enough to keep the client happy and they do a good job. They perform a small number of tricks very well and always receive good feedback from the audience. They charge a good fee and are worth the fee they charge. They will have a nice photo of themselves on their website. read more
The following is based on notes from a lecture that I only gave once.
5 ways to approach developing Trade Show material:
• Close-up Magic that has no link to the company you represent but entertains.
• Fixed Set
• Magic that uses the product as the prop
• Common Language
• Brand driven read more
There’s a real problem with fees at the moment, no matter how low you’ll go someone else will do it for less. Hey, why shouldn’t they? After all we all need to make a living and if they’re not working on that day then surely agreeing to work for a p**s poor fee is okay. No it isn’t – not for you, not for me, not for the whole profession. read more
You may or may not have noticed that the blog has morphed into a fully fledged website. After spending so long working on pushing Brandmagic it dawned on me that I didn’t actually have a site of my own that was anywhere near up to date.
So I was wondering if you could help out:
If I get no replies then I know I’ve gone wrong somewhere.
Once the site has bedded in then I will get back to the task of posting stuff that might be interesting. A few things spring to mind:
Please let me know if this actually lands in your inbox etc.
I recently worked with Gazzo and he did something that had a huge impact on me. When he entered the circle for his show, (the crowd was already in place), he brought a drummers stool in with him and sat down Sat down! The effect this had on the audience was tremendous. All of a sudden the focus shifted and it was as though Gazzo had breathed in and drawn the audience closer with that breath. read more
