dgmagic - UK magic blog by magician Dan Gifford

I had a bit of a nightmare last night.

I was booked to perform an hour of close-up magic followed by my stand-up magic act at a large family party. It had all sounded OK over the phone, the venue had a stage, there was a PA I could use, start times all set, children would be entertained separately by another entertainer etc.

The problem is, most things sound OK over the phone, especially when the booker hadn’t even seen the venue (I didn’t find that out until later!)

The venue had a large dance floor in the middle with a stage at one end. The DJ had set up on the stage, completely filling it. The tables and chairs were arranged all around the dance floor and couldn’t be moved in case they damaged the floor.

The children’s entertainer was performing in the same room and left just before I was due to start my stand-up act, leaving the kids sliding up and down the dance floor.

The close-up magic was fine, in fact it went really well. I suggested I should carry on with it rather than attempting my stand-up act but the booker said no, and the customer is always right.

So there I was, stood in the middle of the dance floor with the distant audience surrounding me and restless children unable to resist the shiny dance floor.

I quickly changed my act to try to make it play to people who couldn’t see directly, adding a couple of less visual magic tricks, but it was very difficult to get any kind of rapport with an audience so far away and spread out.

You live and learn.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 7:05 am and is filed under Blog, Magic, Stand Up Magic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.