Out Of The Ordinary

I suppose you could distinguish between stage magic, closeup magic, mentalism etc., but the absolute best piece of magic I’ve ever seen is David Copperfield’s “Flying”.  This piece avoids all of the tedious build up that plagues so many stage illusions.  “Flying” is the pure essence of magic, distilled into a perfect form and presented to the audience.  What makes this piece so incredibly powerful is not only simplicity, it’s that Copperfield makes the audience want to believe that it’s real magic.  

Copperfield beings on a bare stage.  He doesn’t use a fancy costume, or any kind of elaborate stage setting.  On the contrary, he’s wearing a pair of jeans and a black sweater.  His presentation begins with a lifelong wish to fly.  Not to fly with wings, or some kind of machine, but to “push against the air and fly”.  Copperfield lies on his back on the stage, and puts his hands out to the sides and makes a gentle downward motion.  As his hands come down, Copperfield rises into the air, achieving in one simple movement what mankind has dreamed of for years. 

Flying under his own power isn’t enough for David Copperfield though.  In any magic show, there “convincers” put into the illusions to make the audience believe what they’re seeing is real.  For example, when a magician performs the Sawing In Half illusion, the halves of the table are separated, apparently showing the magician’s body cut in half.  In many such illusions, the convincers are slightly forced, and can do more harm to the overall experience than good.  Jeff McBride says “don’t run when there’s no one chasing you”, and Copperfield seems to take that to heart when performing “Flying”.  

Copperfield does indeed convince us that he’s not held up by wired, harnesses or any kind of apparatus, but he uses the concept of convincers in a very passive way.  As he flies around the stage, he does mid-air somersaults, crosses the entire length of the stage and turns in the air, showing the audience that there are no wires wrapped around him.  As well, Copperfield takes off and lands at several different points on the stage.  All of these things are meant to prove to the audience that he really is just flying under his own power.  

David Copperfield shows us that he can fly.  Rationally, we know that it’s all an illusion, and that he’s not really flying.  However, Copperfield’s presentation makes us suspend our disbelief, and indulge the thought that maybe, just maybe it’s real magic.  

Card magic’s greatest strength, from a performance standpoint, is its greatest weakness.  Card magic, as a whole, is incredibly strong material.  Now, granted, there’s plenty of card magic that, frankly, sucks.  A lot.  As beginning magicians, many of us learn those tricks that start out “now, I’ll deal the cards into three piles…”  Several years later, those tricks make us cringe and ask “did I really ever do that one”?  Oh yes, we did.  Those particular bits are great as a beginning step and a learning tool, but very quickly they become obsolete in the repetoire of the card magician.  Eventually, we take them out of the working repetoire to make room for material that has more impact, more sleights, more applications or is just more fun.  The “more” of that is exactly the problem with card magic: there’s too much of it.  

There is a HUGE volume of material in the realm of card magic.  There are literally thousands and thousands of card tricks in existence.  You can get entire books of nothing but card tricks.  Entire dvds of nothing but card tricks.  R. Paul Wilson has published a classic magic book, The Royal Road To Card Magic, in dvd form.  You can download card tricks from the internet, see card tricks performed live on YouTube and find entire sections of the trade journals devoted to card tricks.  At times, it seems like card magic is the only material being released.  Everything has to do with cards, be it packet tricks using only the aces (or kings, or fours, or whatever…), cards that stretch, bend, morph or multiply, or effects that use the full deck.  Right now, there is more card magic in existence than one person could learn/use in a lifetime.  Part of the problem with all that material is that not all of it is suitable for inclusion in a show.  

A lot of card magic is, to one degree or another, tedious.  Those “three pile” tricks are the stuff of nightmares for magicians who have read any of the card magic books such as The Royal Road To Card Magic or Roberto Giobbi’s Card College.  The beginning tricks that we all learned are just that: beginning level.  However, even when you look deeper into the wealth of card magic that’s out there, many of the tricks are fairly tedious and drawn out.  Not only that, but in many cases, the plot to the trick doesn’t make sense.  Ace assemblies are particularly guilty of this.  There is, I believe, only one ace assembly that I’ve come across that makes any kind of sense when performed.  

Martin Nash, the Charming Cheat, relased a video from L&L Publishing (The Very Best of Martin Nash vol. 2, 2005 L&L Publishing) on which he includes a routine by Ed Marlo titled “Marlo’s Aces”.  The basic idea of the routine is that the four aces are lost in the deck and then found.  Now, with most assembly effects like this, my immediate question is “well, if you wanted them, why did you lose them in the deck in the first place”?  It doesn’t make sense.  This is an acute instance of another caveat of card magic.  I don’t think the audience really thinks that the effects are magic.  I hope they don’t.  I hope that the audience thinks that I’m doing something clever and producing suprising results.  For example, by apparently losing the aces in a shuffled deck and then finding them at will;  Martin Nash hit on what I see as the most believable reason for losing the aces.  He says, after explaining the premise of the effect “cheats don’t have to work in casinos.  I can come into your house, do this with your cards and take your paycheck”.  Brilliant!  This relates the effect to absolutely true circumstances in everyday life.  How many times has an argument been decided by the cut of a deck of cards?  How many prop bets have been won or lost by cutting cards?  Damien Niemen’s excellent film Shade features the game of cutting high cards prominently.  As a performance this makes sense to the audience, and is that much stronger for it.  

Now, how does this fit into the concept of a show?  Given the immense amount of material, what questions do we have to ask when trying to fit it into a show?  First,  we have to ask whether a show can be viable if it’s comprised of only card material.  Many magicians would say no.  I think that the feeling among much of the magical community would be that a show that’s only cards would get repetitive and boring very quickly.  Personally, I completely agree that a show of only cards could indeed get repetitive and boring very quickly.  Having, say, an hour long show that’s nothing but “pick a card….here it is!” would make for poor theatre, at the very best.  Martin Nash, among others, has proved that a show can be composed of card material, but it needs the underlying elements of theatre to make it an experience, and not just the same trick over and over again.  This leads us to the second question, “how do I pick material for a cards show”?  

I think that picking the material for a show is really dependant on the chosen theme of the show.  For example, much of my work is concerned with gambling demonstrations, card cheating and the like.  Therefore, I’m not going to include a lot of traditional card magic (i.e- pick a card…here it is!).  I include Marlo’s Aces in the show because I believe it’s a great example of how cheats are everywhere, and can swindle their victims in any sort of setting.  But, at the simplest level, some basic rules apply to choosing material.  

1.  Nothing overly complicated: This is fairly self evident.  The audience will quickly lose interest if there are too many steps to a trick.  Getting their interest back is MUCH more difficult than keeping it in the first place. 

2.  No repeats: This one is a little more flexible.  It’s possible to include the same type of effect (for example, the “pick a card”) as long as it’s done in a different presentational context.  

3.  Length of show: I think a card show shouldn’t be more than an hour.  Even if the material is varied and uses the highest impact effects in your repetoire, I think an hour is about the most an audience can take.  Any more than that and regardless of careful choosing, everything will start blurring together.  

So, to sum up, there’s a huge amount of card magic available to magicians, and that means that it’s incredibly easy to craft a program of powerful, amazing magic from what’s out there.  At the same time, it’s also incredibly easy to make a program that will bore the audience to tears and have them itching to leave the theatre.  Card magic has the strength of a very large body of work, but at the same time it’s hard to wade through that body of work and choose what’s going to go in the show and what’s not.   A whole show can be made of card tricks, but it needs the backup of good theatre to pull it off, and that’s easier said than done.  Without  good theatre,  you only have a guy asking you if that’s your card for the thirty seventh time. 

On the heels of the last post, it only seems right to talk about the effects that I DO use in my walkaround work.  There’s a lot of great material out there, but I’ve narrowed it down to a few select effects at this point.  The material is easily reset, powerful magic that I can do with little to no prep work.  Prep work is a big concern when choosing material for a cocktail party situation, given that as I discussed before, if you’re taking time to reset when you could be performing is something that the client will definitely notice.  First, the effects that can be done over and over, with little to no reset time, then the effects that take a bit of prep.  Really, I want material that if it takes any preparation, can be set and ready to go in under a minute.  

The Ambitious Card.  This is one of those effects that, like the cups and balls, every magician does at some point in their career.  It’s a standby, an effect that has more work published on it than one person could wade through in a lifetime, and is a VERY powerful effect.  The ambitious card is a piece of magic that gets its impact entirely from the presentation.  The effect is as powerful or as mundane as the individual performer makes it.  Like much of the material I do,  the actual mechanics aren’t hard.  Or, at least, they don’t need to be.  In the course of the routine, if the audience sees a signed card rise magically through the deck with no shuffling and appear at the top of the deck, IT’S DONE!  Anything after that is really gravy for a visual miracle.  Card is signed, lost in the deck, deck is not shuffled or cut and yet all of a sudden, the chosen signed card is on top.  

From this point in the effect, anything I choose to do after making the card appear on top of the deck is a bonus for the audience.  I like to add a few more phases to the routine, depending on the audience, with a “kicker” ending.  The only thing needed is a regular deck of cards and a sharpie marker.  The audience can examine everything, which is a major requirement of walkaround material for me.  There’s no reset time, so I can do it instantly for another group of people at the cocktail party, and in conjunction with that I can do it a totally different way for a different group.  The routine, because of the fact that it can have so many different parts, can be structured to be a different experience for the audience.  To me, the ambitious card is pretty much a perfect effect for walkaround.  

Cards Across.  On his dvd set Bill Malone: On The Loose, Bill Malone talks about what he considers to be the three best effects in magic.  One of those is the cards across.  Again, this is an effect that has many and varied incarnations, but the basic idea is the same.  A number of cards travel magically from one place to another.  I use Bill Malone’s version which is, like the ambitious card, not a hard piece of magic in terms of mechanics.  In the entirety of the effect, there are really only three moves, and one of those isn’t really even a move.  The reset time is instant, meaning that I can automatically include it in the act as I move from group to group.  So far, the two best versions of this I’ve found are the one I use, Bill Malone’s, and a version by Howie Schwartzman.  

Really, those are the two strongest no reset effects that I do for audiences.  I can do them on a moment’s notice, and do them over and over and over.  I chose them based on those factors and for the impact of the effect, and they haven’t failed me yet.  I can’t count the number of times someone’s said “no way!” when they see their card appear on top of the deck, or in my pocket, or when suddenly they have more cards in their hand without my ever touching them.  

Then we come to effects that take some prep work or reset time.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with these effects, and I chose them for many of the same reasons  that I chose the effects I described earlier.  Mainly, for the visual / visceral impact on the audience.  I feel that the trade-off of having to do some reset is worth the added reaction from the audience.  They are: 

The Namer - From the lecture notes of Simon Lovell, this is quite possibly the best opening effect I do.  I use it for an opener because it takes some prep and I can’t really do anything else first without giving away the secret of this piece.  In essence, a card is chosen and signed, and then cut into the deck.  When the cards are spread, there is seen to be one card of a different color, with “Your Name” written in marker.  This card, of course, is the signed card.  The impact here is two fold.  First, that a card previously seen to be one color has changed to a different color and secondly that that card has the spectator’s own signature on it.  The mechanics aren’t hard (one move), and as I’m sure you’ve guessed at this point, the prep work is really very simple.  Reset of the effect takes only as long as it takes to reach into my pocket and make sure there’s a certain card at the top of the deck.  The things I enjoy about this particular piece are the reactions that I get from the audience, because at the outset they think “oh, the pick-a-card trick, I know this one” and then I completely switch gears on them.  Eugene Burger describes this in one of his effects as “leading the audience down the garden path”.  It’s quick, visual and sets the tone for the rest of the closeup set.  

Inka - Inka is something of a new effect for me, and I’m still working on the presentation.  It’s also kind of a cheat to include this in the prep work section, because it take almost none.  It’s a marketed effect by Robert Haas, and takes a very simple prop to the level of Secret Weapon.  There is a huge variety of things that are possible with this prop, and the reset time can be negligible, if you do some advance work.  The effect that I present with it is to have a card chosen, and open a “prediction” card that has the name of every card written on it.  The selected card is named and the names and suits of every other card are made to disappear from the prediction card.  The effect is VERY visual, and has a strong impact for the audience.  It’s a very versatile, flexible effect, and can be done (assuming that the prediction cards have been made up beforehand) with almost no reset time.  Overall, a great effect with the right presentation.  

Length of act is a good follow up point to those four effects.  In the situation of a cocktail party, I try to entertain as many people as possible.  Not only does this mean effects with little to no reset time, it also means that I can’t always include all the pieces I’d want to in one set.  I have a stash of other material that I can swap in, if I work for two groups close together. That way not only am I working quickly, I can do a completely different set for the next group.  Generally, however, the above pieces are always included.  They can go fairly quick, and have the best impact for the time and effort involved.  

So there you have it, the basic effects I use in my walkaround work.  They’re strong, they’re quick, and they can be set to go in less than a minute. Next up, the examination of a mind reading show, and the Problem of Cards.  

Don’t get me wrong, full deck effects can be powerful magic.  They are, however, subject to some pretty severe limitations.  I’ll look at three full deck effects here, and rant about one of them.  But really, the rant is just because I think it doesn’t work, so feel free to ignore that part if you want.  Full deck effects, for anyone reading this who’s wondering, are exactly what they sound like.  It’s a particular magic routine that has to be done with the entire deck, usually minus one or both of the jokers.   In the process of pointing out their pros and cons, I’ll use R. Paul Wilson’s effect from his series Extreme Possibilities (DVD, L&L Publishing 2008) titled “ConCam Rendezvous”, an effect from The Royal Road To Card Magic (Hugard and Braue, Royal Magic Edition) titled “The Tantalizer” and Bob Cassidy’s effect “Memorized Deck” from his DVD titled Mental Miracles.          

 The above effects are VERY strong.  Each can stand alone, and has definite impact when included in an act.  However, I wouldn’t include them in anything but a formal closeup show, done for an audience in a theatre.  Due, of course, to the following limitations.        

 The Memorized Deck is one of the strongest effects I do.  The effect is exactly what it sounds like.  A shuffled deck of cards is memorized and then called off as the halves of the deck are held by audience members.  It’s a great closing effect, and has tremendous impact to the audience.  However, I wouldn’t even think of doing this in a walkaround act.  Firstly, the impact would be greatly lessened by not performing this effect on stage.  Second, it takes five to eight minutes to reset the effect properly.  No good for a magician who’s supposed to be strolling around entertaining as many people as possible in the space of an hour.            

The Tantalizer is likewise a very strong effect.  Personally, I present it as a demonstration of a proposition bet, or a bet that the mark (victim of such a bet) has no chance of winning.  The idea is that a card is chosen, signed if you want and returned to the deck.  I deal the cards into two equal piles and propose odds of 50/50 that the card is not in my half.  Venturing a larger bet and better odds for the audience, I deal my cards into two halves, giving one half to the audience and one to me.  Increasing the bet and odds (except not really, because I’m cheating) that they have their card, I keep dealing until I only have one card.  Of course, I win the bet by having my single card be the chosen one.  R. Paul Wilson has a nice take on this where you can show the mark your cards when you have three, and they don’t see their card among them.  In the con business, that’s called a convincer, and is meant to lure the mark into betting more money, and thus losing more money to the con man.         

 The Tantalizer is a great effect, and I’ve had a lot of fun with it.  I’d still do it with a full deck.  But, that’s the limitation.  How often do I keep a full deck?  The answer is not very often.  One of the strongest things I can do as a magician is to give signed cards.  It makes a great souvenir and it makes people remember me, especially when I find the signed card in an impossible place.  So, as soon as I’ve done my first walkaround set, I’m generally down a couple of cards.  Oops, can’t do The Tantalizer anymore.  I’ve tried to work out the system, and unfortunately it doesn’t work with less than a full deck.  Thus, I could do it once, but the presentation isn’t as quick as I’d like and thus shouldn’t be included as an opener.            

Finally, ConCam Rendezvous.  This is a great trick.  I watched R. Paul Wilson perform it on the dvd and thought “damn, I’ve got to learn that!”  Sadly, I think the fault is not so much with the trick, although it suffers from the same flaw as The Tantalizer.  I think that it’s really a combination of needing a full deck and the fact that Wilson doesn’t do a fantastic job of explaining the subtleties of the technique.  In watching the tape, I kept asking “what if X,Y or Z happens”?  None of that is covered.  I would DEFINITELY include this in a formal closeup show, but it seems like putting it in a walkaround act is just asking for trouble.          

 Full deck effects are great material.  They’re strong, they amaze the audience, and in the above cases, the technique behind them is really not all that complicated.  Unfortunately, they have a lot of things wrong with them, and most of the time it seems that it’s too risky or slow to put them in anything but a formal theatre show.  So in conclusion, full deck effects can (mostly) kiss my ass.    

In the course of performing, especially performing magic, I hear all kinds of questions.  Usually, it’s along the lines of “how did you do that”, or “will you do that again”.  Surprisingly, the former of these questions doesn’t bother me in the slightest.  After all, there are a multitude of responses to both.  For example, when someone asks “how did you do that”, I can either take the easy tack and say “magic” (which personally I find lame), or I can do something a little cleverer and simply smile enigmatically.  When someone says “will you do that again”, I can either simply say “no”, and move on to another trick, or I can use my preferred response of “let me show you something different”, and move on to a completely different trick.  In the case of the former, the audience usually laughs it off, because they weren’t really expecting me to tell them anyway.  However,  in the case of both questions, there’s no offense meant, and none taken.          

 Sometimes, though, people will decide to throw politeness completely to the winds and ask “so what’s your real job”, or some variation thereof.  Recently I had someone say to me “you know, you might have to work for a living”.  Now, the funny part of that was that the person who said that to me is a freelance photographer.  We’ll get back to that in a minute.          

 Here’s the point of this: what I do IS A JOB.  No questions.  And a lot of times, it’s more work than many other jobs.  I think that most people tend to see performance as a part time thing, or as something that is just done on weekends for fun.  But, let’s examine the nuts and bolts.  I get paid for what I do.  That makes me a professional.  This is, quite simply, my profession.  And make no mistake, this is not a job just on weekends.  When people like me aren’t performing, we’re constantly going over the minutiae of the show, or rehearsing, or thinking about it.  New pieces, new scripts, new lines.  It’s there all the time.  With ordinary jobs, you go home at the end of the day and the job stays somewhere else.  I neither have nor want that luxury.  At the end of the day, I go home and go over the show again, in detail, thinking about everything that went right and everything that went wrong.          

 Now, back to the person who told me this.  Freelance photographer is just the same as what I do.  Therefore, no room to say things like this.  Both being a magician and being a freelance photographer are jobs that are subject to a lot of different factors.  Market, demand, economy, etc.  My point is, next time you say something like that to a magician, a juggler, a clown, any kind of performer, think what you’re really saying.  You’re saying “I think what you do isn’t as real as what I do”.  Most people say this as a joke.  They don’t consider that it’s not funny, it’s not cute, it’s offensive.  It belittles our chosen professions.  Instead, a better question might be “is that all you do”.  Or even better, don’t ask anything at all.  Just congratulate that person on having the courage to do something extremely difficult, and ask if they’ll show you a trick.