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The Effect

In Transformations: Creating Magic Out of Tricks, Lawrence Hass uncovers some of the higher secrets for creating strong, entertaining performances of magic.

Drawing on over fifteen years of experience as a performer and as an award-winning teacher of college courses on magic performance, Dr. Hass shows that being an excellent magician does not reside in knowing lots of “tricks,” but rather in the thoughtful application of psychological and theatrical principles that transform our best tricks into experiences of magic.

As world-famous magician Eugene Burger has said: “This is a wonderful book written by a very talented performer. It is full of secrets. . .that will make you a better, more engaging magician.”

Pages 185 - Hard Bound

Along with seven clear, engaging essays on magic performance and eleven fully-realized performance pieces from Larry’s repertoire, Transformations also includes a previously unpublished routine by Eugene Burger and forewords by Jeff McBride and Marc DeSouza.

“This is a wonderful book written by a very talented performer and master teacher. It is full of secrets: great tricks and thoughtful scripts, and also the subtle strategies of presentation and psychology that will make you a better, more engaging magician. Prepare yourself: you and your magic are likely to be transformed." — Eugene Burger

“In the following pages, not only will you gain a deeper insight into the history and mystery of Larry’s search for magic, you will also learn secrets for transforming your own performances.” — Jeff McBride

“Dr. Hass has a revolutionary approach to performing, teaching, and learning magic. He focuses. . .on making magic meaningful. . . . I have seen him perform many of these routines for several different audiences. They never fail to elicit a tremendous response.” — Marc DeSouza

Cost

£23.99 from http://www.magicmagic.co.uk

Difficulty
(1=easy to do, 2=No sleights, but not so easy, 3=Some sleights used,
4=Advanced sleights used, 5=Suitable for experienced magicians only)

Not really applicable as long as you can read

Review

Tricks become magic through powerful presentation.

I’ve not yet finished reading this book and I’m only around half way through at the moment but what I have read so far has been very thought provoking as well as an entertaining read. The book, through a series of essays takes you through a journey of examining different parts of your performance and using a quote from the book, it reminds the reader that “there is much more to magic and magical performance than secret methods and finger flicking technique”.

There are a number of ‘tricks’ included in the text although the book is not about these, other than using them as an example of how they can be dissected and reassembled into something that makes them a performance piece – a piece of magic ( a fully worked up presentation of magic).

Hass gives the view that nearly all DVD’s are designed and structured in order to explain the method only and that few will cover the theory and construction of the performance and therefore the methodology of the actual magic.

“There is much more to magic, and magical performance that than secret methods, gimmicks and finger flicking technique and this is where the book begins. The series of essays and explanations will help you question your actual knowledge of magic and make you realise what parts of your performances are ‘ tricks’ and how you can turn these into pieces of magic.

“Tricks are the eye candy gadgets and gimmicks that fill the magic draw waiting for us to make something of them”. Tricks are the tools that we use and we should be less interested in the tools and more interested in what we can build with them.

Overall

This is an easy to read book but you may still need to read parts of it a few times to absorb everything. There’s just so much common sense contained within the text that you find yourself constantly asking “how can I apply that”?

This has been a great purchase of me and I’ve found more in Transformations than I have so far in many other books. For a magician I think that this book is a ‘MUST HAVE’ and it's one of the few magic books that I’ve not been able to put down.