talkmagic.co.uk

This is a metaphor that occured to me recently. Perhaps pointless, but it made me smile.

If someone is putting on a dinner party, they have to perform two roles. They have to host, and they have to cook. If you're serious about throwing a memorable dinner party, you realise that there is a trade off between producing "high maintenance" courses that trap you in the kitchen against less inspirational courses that allow you to socialise with your guests. The holy grail for dinner parties are those meals that, either by being intrinsically simple or by consisting mainly of work done before the first guest arrives, are fantastic dishes but don't impact too much on your hosting duties.

The same is true of routines - there is "work" and there is "presentation" and although they are often bound up in each other (or should be, any way), the work will often get in the way of the presentation. Again, the holy grail tricks are those that require little in-show business but nevertheless garner great responses. As an example Out of This World continues to pack an almighty punch for virtually no dirty work at all.

Don't get me wrong Mr Grue, i agree totally but...........have you got a lot of time on your hands lately? Or are you just watching too much Come Dine With Me?

Very true, lately I've been moving towards more and more simple effects but really laying the presentation on with a trowel.

Do it this way, I'm finding that I can almost ignor the technical aspects of the trick and just work on how to make to look good. I'm getting some amazing reactions from a murder mystery routine that I've come up with. All the dirty work is done and dusted before the specs even realise that I've started then it's all just play acting for the next 5 minutes.

I think the ID is the same, you can really play that effect up into something big but it takes next to no effort to do the work.

Grimshaw wrote:Don't get me wrong Mr Grue, i agree totally but...........have you got a lot of time on your hands lately?

It was actually something that came up at work. So yes and no.

It really does depend on the situation. Sometimes i really like to give my digits a workout and perform the most complex routines i know, this is generally when i am sat down with people who play cards or maybe do some magic.
I however do revel in a good piece of mentalism where it is basically 90% show and i get to hear my favourite sound....my voice lol.

I agree there are two sides but i think there is a place for both sides in any performance

Richard

In testing my own thoughts about this I considered a routine of Michael Close's called the Card, the Forehead and the Salt Cellar. It's a high energy routine in something like seven phases, is certainly a lot of work, and is (judging by the manuscript, at least) fantastically entertaining. Certainly the dinner party notion isn't complete, but I feel it's still a useful idea, even if just a reminder that it's about the party before it's about the dinner!