Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Show Business is SO Glamorous

From the Otago Daily Times in Dunedin, New Zealand comes this item about a magician who quit his day job to work three nights per week in a new restaurant. 

A Vist to the Bahamian Island of David Copperfield

From Forbes.com comes this article by Hotel Detective Gary Walther who spent three days at Copperfield's Musha Cay resort.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Episode VI: Spooning

Friday morning began with a lecture by Uri Geller.

Uri Geller: in the words of Vice President Biden, this was “a big fucking deal."

Despite his reluctance to associate with magicians, Geller has been an influence on magic for five decades.

When I was becoming interested in magic I knew only an handful of names and his was one of them. I would watch Doug Henning and Mark Wilson on American TV and “Magic Tom” Auburn on our local channels and I would read about Geller.

He came to North America in the early 1970's at precisely the right time. There was a boom in interest in all things paranormal and, as a result, his talents were eagerly received. Each deformed spoon or key, each restarted clock seemed to demonstrate that despite all of the upheaval of war and social and economic unrest, it was within our capacity to control our environment.

It should be noted that this was also the time of Rod Serling's “Night Gallery,” “Ghost Story” with Sebastian Cabot and a host of other TV shows with paranormal themes like “The Sixth Sense” and “The Night Stalker.”

I'm not sure that I ever fully bought into the notion of Geller's unique abilities. I had read enough about Houdini's campaign against fraudulent spiritualists to be convinced that Geller was doing sneaky business and was very good at it.

But while bunking down in Camp Skeptic, I was nonetheless impressed by his powers of self-promotion. Believe him or not, it was hard not to know about him and the abilities he claimed.

And two generations later, it was possible to still see his impact on the magicians gathered in Orlando for Genii's 75th Anniversary Birthday Bash.

In a number of comments made from the stage it was clear that some performers were uncomfortable sharing the program with Geller. And in the lobby, there were conference attendees lined up two and three deep to have their picture taken with him.

Needless to say, there were very few empty seats at his morning lecture.

It is not overstating it to say that Geller played his audience masterfully. At least indirectly, through the power of his mind, he was able to transform the room from a group who had the previous day snickered at comments about spoon bending to one that gave him a standing ovation and he did it all without exposing his methods.

That in itself is a great trick.

Instead of lecturing about effects and methods, Geller told his life story with the same kind of optimism and good humor with which earnest and sincere people on television convince you that you can lose weight without exercise, or earn vast profits without risking any money.

After years of hearing magicians complain about his refusal to acknowledge that his effects are the product of skill and technique rather than paranormal abilities, Geller's response is that he doesn't have to respond. He demonstrated through a series of examples that the only thing that matters to him is, in essence, that they spell his name right. (It's pronounced “Ooo-ree” and not “U-ree.”) At one point he said that he didn't bother to read the articles written about him, he just measured the number of column-inches.

And so now he travels the world selling versions of a competition show the goal of which is to ostensibly name his rightful successor. He has reinvented himself as the Simon Cowell of “mystifiers.”

Despite all the too-clever remarks and the manufactured animus between him and magicians, it is too easy to dismiss him as a footnote. He did something significant in the history of magic. He built an original act and sold it to the world. He made his reputation on deforming flatware and the general public knows his name. These are all feats to which magicians of every stripe aspire.

Regardless of what magicians may think, there is much to learn from Geller about building a career and continuing to stay relevant in the eyes of the public. He's done it, is doing it and should be celebrated for that.

That's what I think..., or maybe that's just what he wants me to think. 

 

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Genii Bash - Episode IV: A New Hope

The next lecturer at Genii's 75th Anniversary Birthday Bash was Charlie Frye.

As was the case with Mr. Long's presentation, there was a torrent of information broadcast with a similar nervous energy.  

Master Genii, Richard Kaufman, introduced Mr. Frye by saying that he had seen him lecture in Asia and had been very impressed.  I came away from the Orlando presentation wishing I had seen what Mr. Kaufman had seen. This is not a comment on Mr. Frye's skills as a performer--he put on a hell of a show at the closing night gala--but more about the structure of his lecture presentation.

Not being familiar with Mr. Frye's work prior to his lecture, I had no contect for the torrent of gags and stunts that he demonstrated.  That he performs a high energy cabaret act that clearly seems to have been informed by a lot of street performance experience helped to frame his presentation retrospectively.  Having just listened to Eugene Burger talk about scripting and the idea of tricks as pictures without a frame, Mr. Frye's presentation seemed a clear demonstration of this idea.


***
I largely kept my notebook holstered for the evening show.  It was exciting to see a performance of Thurston's Rising Cards by Jonathan Levit ably assisted by the lovely and talented Mr. David Regal.

The effect was recreated for the Los Angeles Conference on Magic History which is a tough ticket to get so seeing Thurston's signature piece brought back to life was a rare and genuine treat.

***

After the evening show was the lecture I was most excited to see.  Magician, writer and skeptic Jamy Ian Swiss was going to talk about mentalism.

This last sentence deserves a second look not because it is so artfully crafted, but because it conveys something of a conundrum.  How does a skeptic, an advisor to the James Randi Educational Foundation perform mentalism without irony?  As Mr. Swiss repeated near the beginning of his lecture, "Jamy Ian Swiss is not a mentalist, he's an asshole."

Listening to his presentation, it's hard to think of Mr. Swiss as anything other than a thoughtful and passionate advocate for his art.  As Rick Maue noted in reviewing Mr. Swiss's book Shattering Illusions, "Mr. Swiss doesn't hate mentalism, he hates bad mentalism."

Mr. Swiss went to some lengths to differentiate between mental magic and mentalism.  He referenced a conversation with Teller of Penn & Tell wherein Mr. Teller defined mental magic as being concerned with the revelation of proper nouns ("You're thinking of a_____.")  Mentalism, by comparison, Mr. Swiss defined as the revelation of thinking.

As a mentalist, Mr. Swiss claims no special powers which, he noted, was unlike another performer attending the convention.  Mr. Swiss accomplished his effects as a result of observation, experience and some specialized knowledge.  

It is perhaps because I have been listening to a lot of old radio dramas, but as I listened to Mr. Swiss, I was reminded of one of the old Sherlock Holmes programs.   Holmes would make pronouncements about visitors to 221B Baker St. that would, with different framing, rival those of Alexander or Kreskin.  As Holmes explains, his pronouncements are the result of a string of observations and deductions.

Holmes was a rationalist and Swiss is a skeptic so is it too much to describe Mr. Swiss as the Sherlock Holmes of Mentalists?

I am not a big fan of mentalism per se, but I am fascinated by the psychology of it.  Reading books on the subject, it has always seemed to me that there are so many different ways that an effect could fail and that uncertainty made it very unsettling as a form.

As I write this, it occurs to me that the critical factor in mentalism is the experience of the performer.  We audience members imagine ourselves to be wildly individual and capable of an infinite number of choices in response to any situation.  To the experienced performer, one closing in on Gladwell's 10,000 hours to mastery, the patterns of response become apparent and the selection of 37 as an uneven number between one and fifty less and less of a surprise.

It would also make sense that, after mastering magic's carefully structured classics that the more bi-directional quality of mentalism would have a strong attraction.

Somebody, and it may have been Mr. Swiss, likened mentalism to performing jazz and the comparison seems apt in that it requires a mastery of skill and technique and the ability to listen and adapt to the input from the spectator.

Mr. Swiss also spoke about the importance of "clarity of effect."  The audience should be able to describe what happened in a simple sentence.  Too many effects, both in mentalism and in traditional magic, have lots of process and that can undercut the magical moment.  As Mr. Swiss said, "Just because the audience is confused doesn't mean they've had a magical experience."

Too often the processes of a magical effect exist to disguise the method and the effect on the audience is not so much magical as confusing.  One thinks immediately of the 21-Card Trick and its endless counting and pointing.  When you contrast that with magician shows hat empty and pulls rabbit from hat, you quickly understand the difference.

The last thing I wrote down was "You have to talk away the box."

To be frank, I no longer recall the context in which the remark was made, but as I reflect on my impressions of Mr. Swiss's presentation the comment makes sense to me as integral to the creation of a piece of theatre.  Absent supernatural forces, every effect will have a method that creates boundaries and limitations on the performer.  It is therefore incumbent upon them, through their scripting and presentation to deemphasize those limitations for the audience.

More easily said than done, but foundational to the creation of magical experiences.

Dare I say, "elementary?"

Saturday, November 3, 2012

P is for Part 3

The advent of Internet videos has unleashed a torrent of magic and powered many a hand-wringing column, blog post and conversation.  It has also created a slew of performers who can display their relative skills to the world with concern for audience response.

Approbation has been conflated with page views.

Real performance is a bi-directional process in real time, a conversation really between the magician and his audience.  And, like any conversation, it is made up of an unending series of adjustments and refinements in response to verbal and non-verbal cues passing back and forth over the footlights.

There is no virtual simulation for this, no matter how good your Internet connection.

To upgrade your skills as a performer, you have to perform in front of a living audience.

Preparing for those performance opportunities means doing what other performance artists have always done:  prepare, practice and rehearse.

I can recall my own early days in magic and how each time I would get a new trick, I would renew my commitment to being a better performer only to tear open the package, pour over the instructions and quickly become bored with the props.  And, like most game day prayers, my commitment to practicing would similarly evaporate.

It was only when challenged to "do a trick" that I would go back to my props and quickly try to put together a program based on my sketchy memory of the instructions I had read.  It's no surprise then that I never accomplished my goals in magic.

I bring all of this up by way of introduction to the lecture of Eugene Burger at the Genii 75th Anniversary Bash in Orlando.

By reputation, Burger is one of magic's revered philosopher kings.  He is as comfortable discussing theory and history as he is performing his torture-themed take on the Card Warp.

What is less clear until you see him in person is the mischievous twinkle in his eye.  He clearly enjoys confounding his audiences.  In my notebook I wrote "The Friar Tuck of Magic."

The premise of his lecture was "how can we make our shows better?"  Not how can we be better magicians, or how can we master a particular aspect of presentation, but how can we make our shows better.  How do magicians make better theatre?

In answer to his question, Mr. Burger went on to define what he felt were the four pillars of a good show.

Pillar I:  Practice
Burger is an advocate of regular and conscious practice.

While I can't pretend to speak for all, it seems that, for many, practice is too much like dieting:  they know they need to do it, but something more interesting always seems to get in the way.

It is for this reason that so many effects are sold as being "easy" and requiring little to no skill.

While I am certain it happens all the time, I am pretty sure Burger would maintain it was a mistake to confuse the skill requirement with the mandate to practice.  It may not take a lot of skill to operate a Svengali Deck, but it does take practice.

One of the key reasons for practicing is to empower the performer to not have to think about the procedure of the effect.  In Burger's words, "thinking kills magic."

Until the procedure of a given effect can be performed without thinking, in other words, until you can name the 16th letter of the alphabet without using your fingers or singing "The Alphabet Song" then you don't know the trick and need more practice.

Burger went on to say that practice should also be conscious.  This is to say that in practice the moves should be second nature to the performer but they should never be automatic.  The performer needs to pay attention to their practice so as not to learn bad habits.  The last thing one wants is to invest hours and hours perfecting a piece of "sneaky business" only to have it not be right for a particular effect.

Pillar II:  Rehearsal
Burger differentiated practice from rehearsal by saying that while practice can and should be done alone and in front of a mirror, rehearsal should be done in front of a camera and, as in the theatre, attempt to replicate as closely as possible actual show conditions.  And, Burger was careful to caution, it would serve the performer well to not always assume that the rehearsal audience is nice, or even interested in his magic.

The camera can be a useful tool for identifying procedural and presentational shortcomings but, like the Internet video performances of so many young magicians, it can blind the performer to angle issues that can crop up in the real world.  To receive maximum benefit from these rehearsals, the performer should move the camera to less-than-ideal angles.

Pillar III:  Scripting
Like practicing, magicians have heard about scripting their effects, but it too often falls off the preparation checklist.

Too many performers, especially beginners who specialize presenting other people's magic, believe that by repeating the presentation of the person who demonstrated the effect to them they will be "real magicians."  Worse, there are far too many who believe, mistakenly, that they have superior improvisational skills and they simply make up their presentation as they go along.

Burger's position is that a magic trick is a "picture without a frame" and it is through the scripting process that the performer provides a context for the effect.

It should be noted here that the script for a given effect has to also be consistent with the performer's onstage character.  This comes back to the magician as actor playing the part of a magician notion of Robert-Houdin.

Presuming I could master the Card Warp effect, it would no more make sense for me to repeat Burger's script than it would for David Copperfield to perform the endurance stunts of David Blaine.  Scripting is how the performer makes a particular effect part of their particular show.

And, from a purely technical perspective, the structure of a script provides the performer with a way of avoiding cluttering up the audience's experience of an effect with unnecessary verbiage--what Burger calls "verbal lint."  Improvisation can add energy to a performance, but the uncertainty can lead the performer--especially an inexperienced performer--to a dead end the only way out of which is more words and more audience confusion.

Pillar IV:  Critique
By investing in the first three pillars--practice, rehearsal and scripting--the performer should be more than ready to accept the feedback of a constructive critique.  Soliciting the comments of trusted fellow magicians and civilians, the performer can continue to adjust and correct aspects of their show so that they can be ready for an audience.

ByThe processes that Burger described are not static.  Much like then final performance, the process is bi-directional with each refinement impacting practice, scripting and rehearsal.  Each critique, like each, performance, informs the scripting, rehearsal and so on. 

Burger's Pillars are foundational to the creation of strong, individual performance and essential to beginning a real conversation with the audience.