Happy New Year to you all.
I don’t do resolutions, but this year I’m hoping to post here a bit more often. That’s the plan anyway!
For a start, here is a very interesting card trick from magician/ psychologist Richard Wiseman. Make sure you watch the video to the end!
The Christmas Party season is almost over for me. Just a couple more this weekend and then that’s it, I can have a rest.
Not that I don’t like the work, it’s just that after a while one raucous company Christmas do is much like another. There have been a few interesting moments this year though.
There was the lady who swore blind that the card I’d made appear between her hands was hers even though I’d mucked it up and found the wrong one (it does happen, rarely, of course). I found the right one folded up in my wallet - my standard ‘oh bugger I need to rescue the situation quickly with something good before they realize I actually have made a mistake’ effect - which impressed everyone except the lady who’s card it was. Even though it was the one she’d signed at the start. I think the drink had been flowing.
One of the things I love about close-up magic is the unscripted interaction with the audience. It can lead to some sublime moments. I perform the Kaps money effect quite a lot (a wad of paper turning into a wad of money), and I was just introducing myself at a table with the paper in hand when a gentleman said ‘If you were a real magician you’d turn them into money!’.
‘Oh. Well, I suppose you are right there sir.’
Boom!
Now that was an easy table.
I’ve just finished reading the excellent ‘Art of Astonishment’ series of books by magician Paul Harris. (That and work have kept me away from the blog for a bit!)
The 3 volume set includes most of his published effects from the last 30 years and is full of highly imaginative close-up magic. As I read through, I realised I had seen many of the effects from other magicians’ performances without knowing Paul Harris was the originator. I think that’s a great indication of how good the material is.
The theme that runs through the books is that magicians are facilitators helping the audience to experience astonishment - that childlike feeling of wonder when you see something inexplicable. It is that moment before the applause and laughter when people gasp and their mouths drop. As we grow up we are conditioned to reason things out and we lose our ability to feel ‘astonishment’.
Children are in this state almost all the time, because everything is new and amazing to them. That’s why performing sleight-based magic for young children often doesn’t work because they just think ’so what?’.
Getting to the point where the audience feel like you are helping them can be quite difficult in commercial situations. You often don’t have time to really get to know people and many audiences automatically slip into the ‘magician vs. spectator’ scenario because that’s what they’ve come to expect from magicians they have seen before.
The book does outline practical ways to facilitate and extend the moment of astonishment. For example, by not belittling the moment when the magic happens with jokes or body language, and by expressing a little astonishment yourself. These are subtle things that many of us magicians may do all ready, but it is very interesting to have the theory behind magic analysed like this.
This was supposed to be a bit of a review, but it’s turned into another ramble. Suffice to say ‘The Art of Astonishment’ is a great series of books I’d highly recommend.
Last night I performed at a wedding with a Halloween theme. The hotel was decorated with cobwebs, spiders, coffins (not real ones) and an assortment of severed limbs (again, plastic not real), which I thought was an interesting touch for a wedding.
It sounds a little macabre, but it actually worked well and all the guests entered into the spirit of things. Everybody was in gory fancy dress for the evening do, my favourite being a man with an alien emerging from his stomach.
The weirdest thing (from a magician’s point of view) was the bride saying I was ‘Just like Derren Browne’. I look nothing like him and at that moment, I was performing my sponge ball routine.
As part of Channel 4s celebration of 25 years on air, More4 is showing The Secret Cabaret by Simon Drake on Sunday 7th at 00:10 am (or very late Saturday night if that makes more sense).
This was a great magic show, incorporating Simon Drake’s dark and Gothic style of illusion and other unusual variety acts like a chap who swallows and regurgitates stuff. If I remember rightly, Ricky Jay had a regular spot on the show performing card magic with a cheating/ gambling theme.
Well worth watching.