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ok. this has been playing on my mind a couple of days now. how can you seperate yourself from the magician...or stop the magician from taking over?
i mean. it's quite scary in a way. imagine you come up with a name for yourself and you become really good at magic and start to climb the ladder quite fast. lets say your friends have always called you bill but now they start calling you mr magic (sorry for the poor names) you want to keep your magic seperate from your social in a way. it's like sean william scott is an amazing actor, but to many he will always be called stifler.
can you see what i mean? one identity grows over the other.

I'd say embrace it. Love it for the creature that it is and let it go every once and a while. Take it for a walk from time to time.

Try holding back and not performing for anyone for a week. Learn that feeling and use it as a gauge.

We could go back into your childhood but I think there's a law against that in England.

You're both right -- you do need to have that "down time" but you also need a means by which to "turn on" that other side of yourself. The best lesson on this issue that I remember was my friend Peter Pit and how he deliberately kept all the stuff involving his shows (clothing, autograph collection, photos, all the "business stuff") in an office completely separate from the rest of the house, his bedroom and "personal" life, as it were. He had a ritual, for lack of a better term, that allowed him to transform from being "Peter" into being "Peter Pit" the actor/comic/mage. From what I was told, this was something he'd learned from Fred Kapps in years previous.

I do know that many "Personalities" follow this sort of pattern -- a unique discipline, if you would, that keeps things a bit more "clear" in their heads. I know when I worked at Opryland years ago Dolly Pardon would dress down in jean, a sweat shirt and no blond wigs in order to go off site... very, very few people knew her without all the cute outfits and big blond wigs and she could get away with being herself under such conditions.

Think about it.

I am very much trying to be as natural as possible and tune my magic to my personality and so my personality does not need to change. My aim is to not make my magic change who I am, but let the magic be another facet of myself.

Mikey.666 wrote:ok. this has been playing on my mind a couple of days now. how can you seperate yourself from the magician...or stop the magician from taking over?

If you're yourself and comfortable being yourself from the beginning, there's nothing to separate or have any conflict with. So, if you don't create a specific performance character you have to try to live and it shouldn't be a factor.

Craig Browning wrote:I I know when I worked at Opryland years ago Dolly Pardon would dress down in jean, a sweat shirt and no blond wigs in order to go off site... very, very few people knew her without all the cute outfits and big blond wigs and she could get away with being herself under such conditions.

Think about it.

Ooh, I am, I am.
Thinking of Dolly Parton dressing and undressing.

But I also think that the character should have alot of YOU. Think of Robert de Niro and you see what I mean. Unless you are very, very dull ofcourse.

Also I could say that I think that for example Derren Brown is much more closer to his own persona than Criss Angel (just a guess, I dont actually know either of them), but whatever suits YOU should work.