 AS A MAGICIAN DO YOU FEEL THE TRICKS YOU PERFORM ARE ENOUGH TO ENDEAR YOU TO YOUR AUDIENCE?
I have spent the best part of the last thirty years working on and off as a part time and full time mystery performer. I use the term mystery performer because although in the past I have worked as a close up magician, stand up magician and even as an escape artist, my real love is mentalism and psychic entertainment. So for the past decade or so I have concentrated solely on mentalism and haven’t picked up a sponge ball, done a torn and restored card to wallet, or linked a Chinese anything in all that time. What I did do during seven years as a performer and Tarot reader in Spain, is ask my audiences, both one to one during readings and as a whole during my cabaret show: “What do you think of magicians and the art of magic?” I have to tell you that in all that time the overwhelming response was negative. So as an exercise to ensure my performances don’t (wherever possible) fall into that negative category, I decided to analyse, organise, collate and catalogue the negatives, in an attempt to identify the most common public gripes and eliminate them from my performances. Guess what, I managed to narrow the list down to the top four. So here are the top four public gripes in no particular order.
Let’s take them one at a time. Magicians are just show offs– Well of course many are, to be honest in ability to stand up on stage in front of a live audience, does require a decent dose of ego. The problem however occurs when the magician confuses confidence and arrogance which are not the same things. If you do confuse the two you will most definitely end up with very few friends in your audience. The, “look what I can do” attitude which some magicians I have worked with in the past seem to possess, alienates the spectators and sets up a ‘let’s catch him out’ mind set. Most Magicians are Boring – Well I am afraid I have seen my fair share of performers who simply had me cringing. The problem isn’t usually the trick but more often than not the execution and presentation. I have seen some guys performing outstanding routines using the latest pieces of technical wizardry that made their audiences yawn, while other times I have seen a performer like my late friend Scotty Thomson, who was registered as blind, amaze and entertain a crowd of fifty people with nothing more than a pair of children’s plastic safety scissors. I get the feeling that many magicians perform effects based on the method rather than what the audience sees. As magicians of course we are attracted to the secret and the gimmicks, but performing a trick because you like the way it works, doesn’t mean it will entertain a paying audience. They Waffle Too Much – Well too much of course is a relative judgement and I suppose takes us back to the previous point. If the performer is boring you stiff with what he is doing, then two sentences could be too much. And of course I am a mentalist and mentalism is damn near all talk, which is why scripting is so important. Script an effect, record it then pair the script down to its bare minimum. Some years ago I watched a very good friend of mine Gary Hack, a school teacher and amateur actor, perform a rendition of “A Chip In The Sugar” a monologue written by Alan Bennett as part of his BBC talking heads series. For just over an hour Gary sat on chair on stage and talked, but rather than being bored stiff, the whole audience was instead entranced. It doesn’t matter how much you say as long as what you say matters. They All Do The Same Tricks – What can I say, there simply is no excuse for this – absolutely none! I personally don’t perform other people’s material and steer clear of using commercially manufactured props, but that is just me. However if I did, I feel there is still no reason why any two magicians or mentalists should ever have to perform the same routines. The fact that Jamie Raven performed Cardtoon on Britain’s Got Talent and floored the judges, really shouldn’t prompt every other magician in the country to add it to their working repertoire, but it did and sales of the trick went through the roof!! Put it this way, if we throw out ninety percent of all the magic in print, on the internet, or for sale from the dealers as being totally crap, and divide up the remaining ten percent by all the those performers who ever perform in front of an audience, each would still have more material than he could possibly use in a lifetime. So there we go, years of audience research condensed down to the top four gripes about magicians and magic. HOW DO YOUR PERFORMANCES SHAPE UP? Comments are closed.
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