In Hannah Gadsby's special, Nanette, she talks about how the job of a comedian is to build tension and release it in a way that causes laughter.
In Daniel Sloss' show, Dark (I believe), he also talks about building tension before releasing it.
I've been thinking about this a good bit lately and I've come to the conclusion that all performance art is built upon this premise. The mode of building tension, and the way it gets released, will change between various genres of performance but everyone who is performing is trying to do just that - build tension and then release it.
Applying this to magic we can start to delve deeper into the ideas of creating a good performance. If we look at poor performances, we can see that they generally fail to build tension (ie: they are not engaging the audience and getting them to care about the consequences of the performance), and they also generally fail to release tension (either because there never was any, or because the climax of the trick or performance feels anti-climatic).
I think two great examples of this are Derren Brown and Derek Delgaudio.
As much as I enjoy Derren's work, I usually find the endings of his stage show to be lackluster personally. They are usually very busy, kinda messy, and have way too many reveals. By the time he takes a bow, the viewer is left wondering if he's not going to stop the bow and then do more reveals. It's too much.
On the contrary Derek Delgaudio's end routine for In and Of Itself is the perfect bleed off of the tension that has been built throughout the rest of the show. It comes to a succinct ending where everything is brought full circle and tidied up. You know exactly when it ends and all of the emotions of the previous hour or so are released.
This doesn't just apply to stage work, either. Every trick a magician performs can be a little show in itself, and therefore should be constructed in such a way to build and then release tension. As Teller says (paraphrased), "Surprise me. Make me believe 2+2 equals 5, and then shock me with the truth when it equals 4." That is talking about building up tension - putting a scenario in front of someone and convincing them that they know what is going to happen even though it makes no sense to what they already know - and then releasing it by revealing the truth they've known all along.
Magic literature and advertisements often hone in on the idea of a trick or routine being surprising or impossible. I think this has lead to magicians thinking that a surprising ending is always the best ending, when a surprising ending could be absolutely terrible if it doesn't mesh with the rest of the routine and release the tension.
And to the best of my current ability, I think that release of tension is what "Astonishment" actually is.
This is not a completely filled out thought process yet, I just thought I'd throw it out there to inspire others perhaps.
In Daniel Sloss' show, Dark (I believe), he also talks about building tension before releasing it.
I've been thinking about this a good bit lately and I've come to the conclusion that all performance art is built upon this premise. The mode of building tension, and the way it gets released, will change between various genres of performance but everyone who is performing is trying to do just that - build tension and then release it.
Applying this to magic we can start to delve deeper into the ideas of creating a good performance. If we look at poor performances, we can see that they generally fail to build tension (ie: they are not engaging the audience and getting them to care about the consequences of the performance), and they also generally fail to release tension (either because there never was any, or because the climax of the trick or performance feels anti-climatic).
I think two great examples of this are Derren Brown and Derek Delgaudio.
As much as I enjoy Derren's work, I usually find the endings of his stage show to be lackluster personally. They are usually very busy, kinda messy, and have way too many reveals. By the time he takes a bow, the viewer is left wondering if he's not going to stop the bow and then do more reveals. It's too much.
On the contrary Derek Delgaudio's end routine for In and Of Itself is the perfect bleed off of the tension that has been built throughout the rest of the show. It comes to a succinct ending where everything is brought full circle and tidied up. You know exactly when it ends and all of the emotions of the previous hour or so are released.
This doesn't just apply to stage work, either. Every trick a magician performs can be a little show in itself, and therefore should be constructed in such a way to build and then release tension. As Teller says (paraphrased), "Surprise me. Make me believe 2+2 equals 5, and then shock me with the truth when it equals 4." That is talking about building up tension - putting a scenario in front of someone and convincing them that they know what is going to happen even though it makes no sense to what they already know - and then releasing it by revealing the truth they've known all along.
Magic literature and advertisements often hone in on the idea of a trick or routine being surprising or impossible. I think this has lead to magicians thinking that a surprising ending is always the best ending, when a surprising ending could be absolutely terrible if it doesn't mesh with the rest of the routine and release the tension.
And to the best of my current ability, I think that release of tension is what "Astonishment" actually is.
This is not a completely filled out thought process yet, I just thought I'd throw it out there to inspire others perhaps.
