Greetings all: just wanted say a few quick words to introduce myself.
I have been performing close-up for over 30 years now. I started in Harrisburg PA in the US (Member of the Keystone Conjurers in the 1970s and won a SAM best close-up trophy once) and moved to the UK in 1993 (love the pub atmosphere for doing close-up).
My main gig is teaching politics and I play jazz trombone. When not pontificating about the world and improvising on modal substitutions, I love practising and performing close-up. This forum seems the most sensible of the many that I have visited! I like the review section and the discussions on particular topics.
I have written five books on politics (all on Amazon
), but I am working on a new book about close-up magic that is provisionally entitled Close-Up Magic: Art and Performance. I find that I use misdirection and a lot of structure to my teaching that is the same in my magical performances. I also use a lot of improvisation and play off the audience. I use every clue offered through body language to accents to make the show catered to the audience. The book will gives tips on mastering how to 'read' an audience and combine that with sleights and risks (I always liked Dai Vernon's card trick that cannot be explained).
It builds on the premise that we are all engaged in what linguistic theory calls a 'performative contradiction', which means we do exactly what we say we are not doing = 'I'll put this coin in this hand...'
Anyway, I look forward to visiting the site often and conversing with you....
Cheers,
Todd
