Everyone who is reading this has, almost without doubt, heard a trick being referred to as a miracle or masterpiece. Many of you will have experience of other performers, possibly even yourselves, proclaiming to "bend people's reality" and "blow people's minds" and other such nonsense.
When you perform, you will have an idea of what sort of an impression you want to make on your audience, and what you want them to go away thinking with regards to yourself and your magic. One must be wary when doing this, that you are not objectifying that vision and mistaking it for reality. The experience of magic is not universal. It is very subjective and dependent on a number of factors including (but not limited to); the performer, the environment, and the layman/audience member/victim. The aspect of this I will be focussing on in this thread is the performer. You. Specifically the messages you will be conveying, intentionally or otherwise, to your audience about yourself and what you are doing.
If a couple who are sat in a diner are approached by an annoying magician, who annoys them, and they remain annoyed by him throughout his performance, then their experience of magic is annoyance. Clearly nothing mind-blowing or reality-bending.
Magic is not something that you do, or something that happens in your hands. Magic is what happens in the minds of your spectators, during and after the time that you spend with them, and it is vitally important that you remember this. You can please everybody some of the time and some people all of the time, but you can’t please everybody all the time. The point is that every time you walk away from a person or group of people who seemed dissatisfied with your magic or performance, the problem is not that they did not enjoy your magic, it is that they did not enjoy you. Magic is what you sell it as.
From this it becomes clear that magic has no ‘pure form’ that is present in the presentation of every magician. If there was to be a pure form, it would be akin to the feeling of bewilderment and confusion that one experiences when one’s brand-spanking-new deck of bicycle cards is gone from where it was set down, and it is therefore not magical at all.
You may, personally, believe magic to be about mentally reducing people to a child-like state where they are unsure if magic really is real, or possibly about having a bit of fun, and neither of these beliefs is more potent or valuable than the other, but if you, The Magician, do not deliver the goods in a performance situation then you are deluding yourself. Regardless of how you see your magic, unless you convey that to your audience, you are not providing the context you see it in and you are not doing what you think you’re doing.
I should add that much of this is taken from a point made in Absolute Magic by Derren Brown, and there are a couple of direct quotes which I have not bothered to highlight.
When you perform, you will have an idea of what sort of an impression you want to make on your audience, and what you want them to go away thinking with regards to yourself and your magic. One must be wary when doing this, that you are not objectifying that vision and mistaking it for reality. The experience of magic is not universal. It is very subjective and dependent on a number of factors including (but not limited to); the performer, the environment, and the layman/audience member/victim. The aspect of this I will be focussing on in this thread is the performer. You. Specifically the messages you will be conveying, intentionally or otherwise, to your audience about yourself and what you are doing.
If a couple who are sat in a diner are approached by an annoying magician, who annoys them, and they remain annoyed by him throughout his performance, then their experience of magic is annoyance. Clearly nothing mind-blowing or reality-bending.
Magic is not something that you do, or something that happens in your hands. Magic is what happens in the minds of your spectators, during and after the time that you spend with them, and it is vitally important that you remember this. You can please everybody some of the time and some people all of the time, but you can’t please everybody all the time. The point is that every time you walk away from a person or group of people who seemed dissatisfied with your magic or performance, the problem is not that they did not enjoy your magic, it is that they did not enjoy you. Magic is what you sell it as.
From this it becomes clear that magic has no ‘pure form’ that is present in the presentation of every magician. If there was to be a pure form, it would be akin to the feeling of bewilderment and confusion that one experiences when one’s brand-spanking-new deck of bicycle cards is gone from where it was set down, and it is therefore not magical at all.
You may, personally, believe magic to be about mentally reducing people to a child-like state where they are unsure if magic really is real, or possibly about having a bit of fun, and neither of these beliefs is more potent or valuable than the other, but if you, The Magician, do not deliver the goods in a performance situation then you are deluding yourself. Regardless of how you see your magic, unless you convey that to your audience, you are not providing the context you see it in and you are not doing what you think you’re doing.
I should add that much of this is taken from a point made in Absolute Magic by Derren Brown, and there are a couple of direct quotes which I have not bothered to highlight.