Out Of The Ordinary

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. 

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