talkmagic.co.uk

Hi all,
I just thought I'd report back after an evening I did last night. It was a barn dance dinner style thing, tables around the edge... I didn't get to do as much magic as I was hoping because surprisingly, everyone joined in dancing immediately, leaving a few groups of 2 or 3 around the outside. Most barn dances I've been to before have quite a lot of miserable oldies/disenchanted youth hanging round, not wanting to dance, but nevermind.

This is just a tip for anyone new to performing or considering performing, and it's been said before but I'll bring it up again... practice ROUTINES, not just tricks!

I had categorised my effects into groups, i.e. coin or "hardware" tricks, "prop" tricks, tricks involving fire, tricks I could do with no special cards or no prepared deck etc. and I had fairly bulging pockets... to give you an idea, I'll list what I was prepared to do:

2 Coin Trick
Holy Moly
All Screwed Up (a 2 in the hand, 1 in the pocket routine from Doc Eason)
Balancing Nuts (a quick effect from Sankey's "Supernatural")

Diamond Jim's Thumbcuff Routine
The Web
Hallucination (David Stone rope effect)
Torn and Restored Monopoly (again, "Supernatural")

Chap Trick (Mark Jenest)
Cat and Mouse (Diamond Jim)

Fire effects:
Anniversary Waltz
Flaming Initial
Stunt Man

Packet Tricks:
Oddball Series
Virginia City Shuffle
Card Warp
Lucky (a Flustration effect with mirrored cards by Diamond Jim)

Dan Fleshman's CTW routine
Biddle Trick
ACR
Simon Lovell's Easy Transpo
...and a dramatic "flung deck" revelation from a Michael Eaton book.


...so all in all that's 22 effects I was going to do over the course of the night.

Unfortunately, due to a lack of thorough routining, I kept panicking and falling back on my "go to favourites" (which wasn't the Web, for once... I didn't perform that at all!), meaning I ended up performing only 8 of those effects. Of those 8, I performed 3 of them only once

Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that the first "performance" went very wrong. I did Holy Moly but felt that one of the chaps was looking a bit more bemused than amazed, although his wife was pretty impressed. I then tried to do Anniversary Waltz (and the version I do is really, really easy!) but because of the sweaty atmosphere I fluffed the hindu force, revealing an "upside down" card (actually a double backer but don't tell anyone!), and just laughed it off, shoved the cards in my pocket and went onto the rope routine - which didn't "mess up" totally but because I was bricking it after that first failure, I was very nervous and it ended up petering out rather than finishing with a climax - d'oh.

So I was a teensie bit on edge from then on, and tended to fall back on the tricks that were simple and getting great reactions - namely stunt man and the thumbcuff routine. Amusingly, every trick went perfectly for the rest of the night! (Although some girls I did the "balancing nuts" for decided to snap apart the glued nuts when I let them examine them... )

So, lessons learnt?
ROUTINE! Work out on paper what goes well together, what will follow on from what, and then practice them in little routines of 2-3 tricks. You can still be flexible on the night, e.g. if you see a couple you might want to sub Anniversary Waltz in there instead of the usual card trick, but if you don't know what's going to come next you will panic and your full pockets will mean nothing to you - and you'll reach for that old faithful packet trick! But if you should have it so that once you've finished one effect you instantly have in your mind what you are going to move on to.

I could have gotten away with half the number of prepared tricks if I'd split them into 3 bundles of 3 effects and been more organised at each table.

All in all I would say it was a successful night for me, I did some great magic but I learnt a lot too, and if this helps just one person it was worth me reporting back!

You learned from it, meaning that the experience was useful (and therefore far from a failure). This is why I say that to really learn how to do magic, you have to get in front of real audiences (otherwise you are just the lonely guy in the mirror).

Good on you for taking the plunge and getting out there. You did well, even though it may not feel as such presently. So, don't let it get you down, because you learned and you are now more experienced than you were yesterday.

Now start working on getting that next venue whilst you go back to the drawing board and routining your material.

Mike.

I know that feeling dude, I had a night where I had not "routined" anything at all and no tricks really ran together. On the other end of the scale I've had a couple of times where I've been half way through a routine and had to stop, having routined too many things together. now I like to think I have a healthier balance and can string a few tricks together sensibly and duck out at any point (ish).
One of the main points of this new regime is the 11p trick (thank you james brown) and having the final load as a deck of cards, the rest writes itself really...
more points can be taken from Derren Brown's "3 card routine" on Devil's Picturebook, which states pretty much the same thing, being able to carry on or duck out as and when.

I am not a professional and have no immediate intention to go out and perform. (Due to my job paying way too much and sucking up all my time)
This does not mean I lack professional values in my performances even thought my chances of performing and few and far between, with the trouble that also entails.

Your routine problem has highlighted a problem I have, with just being a one trick pony i.e.: look at this and not STOP lets entertain, I need to break out of the one trick at a time mentality.

I would love you to share with me/us your venture into this arena and keep me/us informed of how your routining is going.

I only wish I could spend more time performing to hone my skills, as it is I spend weeks mastering an effect to show it twice, I then forget it.

With every performance, you improve. If things didn't go 100% right as you planned them then you address those areas and learn from what you perceive to be your weak spots and work hard on getting them better.

The best experience is performing for real people, rather than family and friends. When you have a performance where everything goes right and the spectators are duly impressed, it's one of the best feelings in the world and the more experience you have the more you will acheive that feeling.

Everyone makes mistakes or messes up and effect now and then, even top professionals, but you will find that people will remember your successes that night rather than what you consider to be your failures as most people, deep down, want to be entertained.

You won't realise it now, but that performance has done you more good than you realise and each performance is a building block towards being a supremely confident performer.

My advice (for what it's worth) is not to have too many "tricks" with you. Rather than hobble about with your pockets bulging, have two good solid routines that you know backwards. Then you'll need only a fraction of the "gear" (and being uncomfortable with stuff hanging out everywhere cannot help your mental state), and you'll hopefully be absolutely confident in the stuff you're going to perform.

When table-hopping or mixing and mingling you really do not need dozens of effects ready. If I'm completely honest, I work restaurants and will simply do the same routine again and again at different tables. Why? Because I know the routine inside out, I know all the lines, I know the wise-cracks, I know when the stay quiet, and (most importantly) I know it works and works really well.

There is a danger of folk thinking that being a good magician/entertainer means knowing loads of tricks and performing them all in one night. I would personally take a leaf out of the mentalist handbook. In mentalism there is really only one trick. Just the one. But it's dressed up in different ways. Hmm... have I got a point here? I seem to have lost my thread (it's late & busy weekend) but I would say that less is more. And less will certainly prove more powerful than more. You said yourself that you kept falling back on the same old favourites. That's your mind giving you a clue.

Oh dear. I've rambled again and I'm not sure I even got my point across. Oh well. Congratulations on getting up there and doing your thang though. It really does take guts to walk up to a table of folk and tell them you're going to perform magic. Well done.