It is interesting that you use the term "performance pieces." I like Larry Haas's definition of a performance piece in his book Transformations-- "every perfomance piece includes trickery, the secret technical method, as one of its components. However, a performance piece also involves all the psycological and theatrical elements such as attention management, audience management, persona, showmanship, blocking, and script." As Larry says, "Tricks become magic through powerful presentation."
I tend to play with tricks for a while until I come up with a presentation that makes it interesting. Fitzke talks about dressing up magic with dancing girls and music, but to me, the presentation has to compliment the trick rather than merely accompany it.
My best performance pieces? Margarite's Wishes - my egg bag routine, my performances of Jim Steinmeyer's Pasteboards Under Glass and Fan Mail, Tamariz's Paradise Lost, "the Adventures of Z" -- my children's Zombie Ball routine, my Cups and Eyeballs routine and my children's Mismade Zebra Safari routine.
What makes those the best?
The effort that I put into each of them to get them to fit my style. My egg bag is a custom made Lynette Welch bag (a Malini bag made to Tarbell bag dimensions), I have a wooden basket that I put the eggs in a the end, the music is selected to match the presentation and the presentation is my own script about a girl living with her mother in Nazi occupied France.
Steinmeyer's Pasteboards uses props that I made myself, variation on certain methods and rewriting the script to fit my style. Fan Mail also involves hand made props as well as a different method (using a custom gimmick made by Lynette). There is something about Steinmeyer's scripts that works for my personality and I don't have to make a lot of changes.
Tamariz's Paradise Lost was almost perfect as written up. Nonetheless, I've modified the script to make it fit with my style.
My children's routines are just fun. The zombie ball routine is about how the ball (named "Z") is being trained to disappear -- but actually can be seen by the kids floating behind my back. The ball is truly animated because it takes on a personality (much like a kid!). The Cups and Eyeballs routine has a great ending where three large eyeballs are produced from the cups. The Mismade Zebra routine involves a change bag, silks, a jumbo wand, safari hats and a camera to take pictures. It has a lot of interaction and funny moments.
My worst performance pieces -- everything that I haven't developed into a performance piece. I have a couple of older routines on Vimeo that were really the first draft of the performance pieces.
I'm working on a bunch of new routines that are going to be my own versions of classics -- a linking rings routine, a miser's dream routine, two new cups and balls routines (one using olives and talking about when I used to bartend while in law school and the other producing six pool balls (#3 though #8) as the finale), a sands of the desert routine, Steinmeyer's Dining Out, a bill in lemon routine and my variation of Tom Stone's Benson Burner using sponge bunnies. The props for all of those effects have a professional and custom feel (Proline rings, RNT brushed stainless cups, Redheart and Mohagany wand, a crystal bowl and glasses for sands of the desert, menus purchased from a restaurant supply company (along with table cloths and napkins), a lemonade picture that can perform airborne and hundreds of sponge bunnies. More importantly, the scripts are my own and the routines feel personal to me.
