I've been at the extreme fringe of magic--and not the mascara-wearing and body mod end either--for about 40 years. I have no skill, no repertoire of tricks that I can use to entertain, but I do have a couple of things to say.
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.
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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.
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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?"
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.
From ThisIsPlymouth.co.uk comes this story on local magician Alex Hansford, a recent winner of Rovi trophy at the British convention of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.
According to the article, this is Mr. Hansford's second win of the trophy and it has gotten him thinking about putting off college for a year of travelling and street performing.
A recurring theme in the notes I took at the Genii 75th Anniversary Bash has to do with magic as a theatrical form.
Like theatre, magic is primarily a medium of storytelling and the magical moment--when the trick happens--is not so much the climax of the story, but the inevitable outcome of bringing a specific set of elements into conflict with one another.
What does that mean?
Stories take many forms, but all involve conflict and resolution. Whether we are talking about the Joads, or Indiana Jones, or a playing card that wants nothing more than to rise to the top of the pack, the storyteller's job is to set the scene, establish the characters, introduce obstacles, raise the stakes and resolve the story.
Stories are about transformation and so is magic. Melodrama is about the peaks and valleys of experience, but truly powerful stories affect the characters and, by extension, the audience.
While it may seem that I am advocating for Sam the Bellhop as the apotheosis of magic tricks, I am merely pointing out that which was stated explicitly, or conveyed implicitly, by the lecturers in Orlando: witnessing raw technical skill may be engaging to technicians, but lay audiences want to invest their attention in a compelling story. Put another way, while the patient has a vested interest in the outcome of the surgery, only other surgeons care about what instruments were used during its performance.
I find it remarkable that so many of the presenters and performers who lectured at the convention chose as their performing character one who was equally amazed as the audience that a particular trick worked. This was less a reflection on specific technical skill as a choice of framing for the audience. The magic was happening for them at the same time as for the audience.
Case in point was Chad Long. From the outset, he projected a torrent of nervous energy that clearly masked a high level of technical skill.
The note I took away from his presentation reads as follows: "Take a thing they know..., add something and it's a new thing."
That's all I wrote down. I have been trying to work out why that stuck with me long enough to find my pen and I think finally it has to do with surprise and storytelling.
We humans are quick to recognize patterns. It is a fundamental component of our decision-making process. We observe and then make predictions based on those observations. Anyone who has ever pulled out to pass a car on a two-lane road will know exactly what I am talking about.
Storytellers use this primal skill against us as a way of sustaining out investment in the outcome of their tales. They establish the conventions of their story and then intentionally subvert or destroy those conventions. And magicians do this all the time, for what is a "kicker" ending if not a demonstration that the assumption of the audience are mostly, if not completely, in error.
Mr. Long's notion of taking the familiar and adding new elements to create a new "thing" speaks directly to this.
Surprise, this subversion of convention, is closely tied to the magical moment. The power of the magician comes, in part, from the ability to present the idea that whether through skill, or "strange and hypnotic powers," they can, if only in the context of their performance, live outside the conventions to which the rest of us are held hostage. When you or I put the "ambitious" card in the middle of the deck, it stays in the middle of the deck. But when the magician does it, there are no rules, no telling where that card will end up.
A big part of the discoveries I made at this convention was in recognizing a kind of universal coherence across the various silos of my life.
After four decades of following magic and bemoaning my complete lack of skill, or ability to perform, I find that my "safety" interests in theatre and storytelling are more closely related to magic than I had once thought. My appreciation for a well-told joke and the associated comedy arts draws on similar skills as those used by the magician.
I wrote earlier about wanting to master The Pass as a way of connecting to the sleight of hand masters. This is still a goal, but I now understand that technical skill without context--without a good story--is like being a comedian without timing: you may know where the punchline is, but nobody else will.
So, I will end this installment of my report on the conference by illustrating a combination of elements that in combination create a magical moment for the audience.
I was privileged to be in Orlando for the celebration of the 75th anniversary of Genii Magazine.
Genie-in-Chief, Richard Kaufman has clearly been paying close attention as he has travelled the world attending magic conventions and that education paid off in spades at the event.
Every detail appears to have been carefully considered.
The selection of the Florida Hotel and Conference Center proved to be inspired. Not only was there ample room for the lectures and performances (the dealer room might have been a little larger) but as it is connected to the Florida Mall, there were lots of dining options beyond the hotel fare. In my experience, the hotel staff was unfailingly courteous and helpful and seemed bent on creating a positive experience for their guests--even the magicians.
I can't really talk about the convention without discussing the generous "gift bag" that was provided to each of the registrants.
The "bag" turned out to be a deluxe portfolio with a 1-1/2" three-ring binder, notepad, calculator and pen included. The folio needed to be that large in order to include all of the swag provided by the magazine and its partners. It came stuffed with DVDs and cards and gaffs and manuscripts for all manner of tricks. I still haven't managed to get through the whole thing!
Another important choice made in the planning stages of the conference was to keep all the participants on a single track for the majority of the event. This meant that, by and large, the participants were having the same experiences at the same time and did not have to choose which presenters they got to see and which ones they had to forgo.
Magic lectures are a unique experience. For a culture renowned for its devotion to safeguarding secrets, lecturers routinely both perform and explain their techniques and thought processes. Want to know how a magician can routinely deal himself a winning poker hand? Come to a lecture and he will freely tell you. And, in case you miss any of the subtleties, there is a video camera standing by to provide a close-up view that even those at the back of the hall can follow.
Somebody asked me yesterday what was the best trick I learned at the event. This was a tough one for me, because I am not a performer, but I am fascinated by the performance of magic. As I have written about elsewhere, the technology used is not very sophisticated, but the thinking is and the understanding of human perception and psychology is something that the so-called "hard sciences" are only now beginning to understand.
Did I come away from the conference with new tricks? Not really. What I did take away was a clearer understanding of how to think about magic.
John Carney: The Invisible Coins from HMNS on Vimeo. From John Carney, I learned about how the actor who is playing the part of a magician should prepare for his role. Carney referenced the Erdnase/Vernon credo of the naturalness of motion--the audience should not be able to tell the difference between an innocent move and a move concealing the "sneaky business." "Over-selling" that the hands are empty, for example, may have the effect of convincing the audience that the performer has something to hide.
Carney also made reference--the first of many--to Scottish magician John Ramsay's statement that if you want the audience to look at something, look at it yourself. He did this in the context of demonstrating a coin vanish routine. His position was that the performer should not call attention to the vanishing moment, but rather that the performer and the audience should "discover" the vanish together.
This is oversimplifying somewhat, but, in essence, Carney's advise was that, long after the sneaky business has happened and the coin has vanished, the performer should continue to present the "coin" to the audience in exactly the same way as he would if the coin were still there. "Show it as you would actually show it," was the note I took at this point in his presentation. If the performer believes that the coin is still there, the audience will too.
This goes to a larger and more theatrical point about the importance of the performer being fully present in the moment. This is a subtext through several of the other lectures at the conference and one that I will keep coming back to. The performance of magic is a shared experience and it is the job of the performer to do all of the necessary preparations so that he can do the sneaky business without thinking and concentrate on sharing something magical with the spectators. The performer should be experiencing the magical moment for the first time right along with the spectators.
Doing something "to" the audience is threatening. Sharing something "with" the audience is powerful. In the October issue of Magic Magazine, Joshua Jay writes about the "atfor dilemma" which is a variation of the same discussion. His position is that it is better for the performer to perform "for" the audience rather than "at" them.
There's lots more to say, but this should do for the moment.
