YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN MAGIC!!!

How can you be a magician and not believe in magic?

I have been performing magic  and mentalism since I was eight years old. I did my first paid performance when I was eleven and no it wasn’t a kid’s show it was for adults.

I have performed on stage, in cabaret and close up all over the world. I’ve busked, I’ve jumped handcuffed and chained into rivers and been suspended from burning ropes in a strait jacket, I’ve run my own two man tent show and learned to fire eat when I was nine.

I have performed with coins, cards, ropes, sponge balls and even livestock, I’ve done gigs at weddings, in restaurants, on boats, in casino’s and even in my swimming shorts at pool side barbeques.
 
But no matter where, when, what or how I have performed, I have always wanted my audience to perceive what I do, as the real thing, yes real magic.

The problem is most modern audiences are aware that what the magician is doing isn’t real, people these days know that you cannot cause a solid object like a coin, to dematerialise in one hand and rematerialize in the other.  In fact I’d go as far as to say even if you could do it for real they’d still assume it was a trick.

Many years ago at a Lecture for Leicester Magic Circle, Pat Page said,

“The problem these days is that many up and coming magicians seem to trivialise the magic. They seem to forget the ancient magicians of the past held great power and were often revered and feared by the man in the street and kings alike.”

Talking to Pat after the lecture he said to me,

“How can anybody be a magician and not believe in magic?”

Now of course I don’t think for one moment Pat was suggesting that you convince yourself you truly possess magical powers which you should use to instil fear and respect in your fellow man, but instead I feel he meant that as a magician, you should attempt to create the illusion that you believe the magic you are performing is real. This technique is called acting.

Imagine this. You perform a simple coin vanish for a five year old child. The usual response is “Where did it go?”  To which you reply it’s behind your ear, an answer which normally prompts the child to search behind their own ear for the coin. The child believes the magic is real.

Perform the same effect for an adult and the usual response is “how did you do that?” But it gets worse because that response these days is often followed with “you won’t tell me your secrets so I‘ll Google the answer on my phone”.

This I think is the point Pat was trying to make all those years ago. The magic has become trivialised and therefore many audiences these days view magic acts as a series of puzzles to be cracked, rather than moments of wonder.

This isn’t of course a new concept as you’ll see by the quotes at the end of his post, but unfortunately today the tricks of the trade have become so accessible and open to exposure online, that I believe the only way to convert modern audiences from “how did you do that” into “where did it go” is though creativity, originality and acting as though you believe the magic you are performing is real, comes from you and not the prop you bought from an ebay magic shop.

I’ll leave you with three quotes by George Anderson from his book “It Must Be Mind Reading” printed in 1949 and a little formula of my own.

“Imitation is common in Magic. In writing, the plagiarist is an outcast. In magic the copyist is encouraged.”

“When a dealer sells you a trick, he’ selling you the props with which to build yourself an addition to your program. Remember he’s sold the same props to many other magicians, what you do with those props determines your rating.”

“Style and imagination made Blackstones’s dancing handkerchief a thing of beauty, worth thousands of dollars.  Assuming that Harry long ago paid a dealer a dollar for the trick, he got a dollar trick and invested creative thought and art in it to bring it to its present value.”

Here’s a simple formula I try to use myself.
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Be creative, be original and don’t copy others for you are unique. Invest time and effort into the presentation of every effect you perform and most importantly try to suspend your own disbelief and convince your audience, that just maybe what you are doing is real by believing it yourself.

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