Making the connection

How do you connect with your audience?

You have to have something that you do that somehow connects with the fundamental being of your audience. Is it childhood memories? Family? Relationship between father and son,mother and daughter? What is it? Work? School? Love? Death? Strife?

It cannot just be your magic ‘tricks’…it has to be more…magic needs to connect, to move,to inspire, to dig deep into the psyche of your audience,or it is just surface rubbish that simply does not matter…

The connection comes from the way you engage in dialog with your audience;probing questions, improvisation, inter-subjective understanding;not the big ‘I am’,but a listener, shaper, and conjurer of emotional response.

You need more than ‘how did he do that’ when someone sees you perform…you need ‘wow, I feel different after seeing that’

Do you do that? Can you do that? Do you want to know how to do that?

Such things can be learned and will be revealed…..someday….

The Esoteric Trinity

Theater and art have the Aesthetic Trinity; Christianity has the Holy Trinity. Following that theme, what then does magic have? To my mind the only answer is Jeff McBride, Eugene Burger and Max Maven — otherwise called the Esoteric Trinity (actually, it has never been called that before). The parts making up this holy threesome are intensely unique and yet culminate to form a modern body of work that is unparalleled: unrivaled in its mechanical and philosophical contributions; unsurpassed in the stories and experiences that they share; and unchallenged in the historical knowledge that each man possesses.

Each has a marvelously unconventional, borderline funkadelic character, and all three have crafted a realm of performance that mixes the bizarre with the bold, the mysterious with the magical. The end result is an esoteric art form that, while not wholely original, as an aggregate exists solely because of the three gentlemen in question — three individuals that we ought to recognize as the Esoteric Trinity.

Magic is Disruption

The magician taps into something different to bring a new experience to the table. The real power of magic is about disruption. Magicians should be rebels, revolutionaries, those who shock, and those who unsettle. Magic is not about being liked, it is about disrupting your audience, challenging their beliefs, undermining their certainty, and creating a place for them to land. When you perform, are trying to win acceptance, or destroy it? Do you really want to be accepted, or do you want to be remembered for how you changed your audience? If you are trying to win acceptance, you lose, when you are rejected, you win.

Disrupt them, settle them, and let them land.

When?

Up to you.

How?

Up to you.

With what kind of performance?

Up to you!

Most people feel uncomfortable about homelessness. We pass the homeless person on the street and barely give them a moment’s notice. We sometimes pass them and give them a few coins, a note, a smile, and a nod, but do we really care? Blaine turns this on its head. He borrows a cup of coffee and turns it into a cup full of coins!

Pure genius!

Simple trick. Massive impact. Disrupt. Settle. Land.

He disrupted us and challenged our guilt about not helping the homeless. He disrupted the homeless person who thought it was some smart ass trying to steal his coffee, or play a joke on him, or ridicule his station in life. But Blaine achieved a miracle. Not the trick in itself, but the preconceptions, the context, and our sedimented ways of looking at the world.

Consider this…

Joshua Bell sets up in the Metro in Washington DC and plays one of the most intricate pieces of music ever written, with a violin valued at $3.5 million dollars. After an hour of playing, he took a total of $32, while the night before he played in Boston to a sold out crowd who paid $200 a seat. Perception and context are everything. What bell did not do, however, was disrupt, and therefore had nothing to settle and no where to land. But he did show that perception and context matter.

Stage magicians have it easy and hard at the same time. The paying pubic come to the show expecting to see magical effects, routines, apparatus, music, lights, etc. What can a stage magician do to disrupt his audience? So many of them simply play to type. They move the boxes about, they have appearances, vanishes, transpositions, penetrations, and levitations; all of which are accompanied with cheesy music and adorned with female assistants clad (or not) in latex, satin, and velour.

Wouldn’t it be cool if a stage magician sold out his show, and then opened the curtains to an empty stage: no props, no boxes, no lights, no silks, no eggs, no doves, no assistant, just the magician and his words. What would happen? What would he say? How would he amaze? How would he settle? Where would he land? Playing to type can be a dangerous business. What if the boat full of props does not arrive at the next port? Max Maven says, you need ‘nothing’…

One of the most magical performances ever is Robin Williams live in Lincoln Centre in 1986. Why? No props, apart from a stool, a microphone, and a glass of water. He spends 2 whole hours without a break dancing around the stage, moving in and out of different characters, different voices, and different poses all the while exploring profound questions of the day, many of them uncomfortable such as abortion, politics, drug use, and many others. Like the alchemist, Williams locks his audience in the vessel and cooks them until they emerge transformed, exhausted, exhilarated, settled, and … landed.

Now that is pure magic!

Recapturing Magic and the Collective Unconscious

Jung writes that there is a collective unconscious; that amorphous collection of thoughts, dreams, images, symbols, and archetypes that have accumulated throughout history from the beginning of human thought. Through his extensive analysis of dreams, he realized that patients were quite capable of coming up with symbols and representations that approximated those found in the arcane tomes of the occult tradition. He experimented with accessing this realm through his own reflections, meditations, and hallucinations, which have just been published in his Red Book, Liber Novus..

This tradition of the unconscious and its powerful symbology stretches to ancient China, Egypt, India, and finally develops in the western medieval period, where religion defeats magic and science seeks to defeat religion. For many years magic and the occult went underground and only re-emerged much later in the latter half of the 19th century. Interestingly, some of this symbology proved crucial for developing models of complex atomic structures and shell theory in nuclear physics. Religion, as we know is still a powerful force across the world.

Modern magicians, mentalists, and mystery performers of all hues (readers, intuitionists, and empaths) have different views and different relationships with the deeper traditions of magic. Richard Dawkins (e.g. The Selfish Gene and the God Delusion) asserts the dominance of science,the failure of religion, and the defeat of magic, while Derren Brown has converted from a born again Christian to a rational scientific skeptic and has joined forces with Dawkins.

Crowds flock to see the performances of a man who claims no psychic ability and yet reproduces such demonstrations as part of his show. And now he has become a public spokesperson for the skeptic community and has started doing shows that discredit the paranormal.
For others in the community, however, the magical tradition lives on, as Bizarrists carry on tapping into the collective unconscious and perform varieties of magic that include story telling, ceremonial rituals, reading of magical books,oracles, cards, and documents for divination. Mentalists from the Old School tow a fine line between outright claims of psychic ability to being ambiguous and vague about how they achieve their effects. Some mentalists even cross over into a different tradition of mentalism (see Clint Marsh’s Mentalist Handbook) and bask in a more magical real altogether.

Magic today is a broad church,but the impact of those embedded in a tradition that celebrates and draws on the ancient wisdom of mystery masters provides the way forward for modern magic.

Is a post-Brown generation on the way? And if so, what will it look like? What is the new face of magic? Is not Uri Geller one of the most successful magicians of the post World War II era?

Discuss!

Jugglers vs Magicians

Many magicians like to distinguish themselves from jugglers, as if juggling is somehow simply a skills-based form of silly entertainment. They think that magic is a superior art form and dismiss the jugglers along with balloon modelers, children’s entertainers, and clowns (all of which by the way, are significant and powerful genres of performance).

But if we really look within the world of magic,there are a lot of jugglers and then there are magicians. The term ‘Juggler’ here is being used as an ‘ideal type’, a mental construct for the sake of advancing this particular line of argument.

Watch many of the amateurs and working professional magicians and you are left wondering, ‘what exactly am I watching?’ Did I see something wonderful and masterful,or a collection of demonstrations that involved some sort of object, apparatus, and/ or people that were manipulated in some way? Has the performance had any deeper meaning, purpose, or intent, and did it really move you; take you to another place; unsettle you?

The real magician is not a juggler but one who controls his environment, uses his apparatus as tools like a master craftsman, and most of all transcends the physical and mental constraints to offer something truly moving. The real magician has complete control of his performance area,he puts us in his vessel and cooks us, until the transformation takes place, until we are no longer the base material that entered the room in the first place,but a new person who will never be the same.

The history of magic is ambiguous about this distinction between magicians and jugglers. The magician was both the entertainer (jester and juggler at times) and the serious scholar, the scientist of the unseen world, and the manipulator of time and space. The major arcana of the Tarot de Marseilles labels the magician (Arcanum I) Le Bateleur, which literally means ‘juggler’, while most people interpret it as magician.

Which are you? Do you throw your props in the air (figuratively) and then cast them aside to move onto the next effect? Or do you think carefully about your audience, how you will shock them, and take them on a journey that has a purpose, meaning, and logic?

David Stone packs his show with fast and furious effects, transpositions, changes, appearances, and vanishes, but is he a magician or a juggler? Shawn Farquhar gets a signed card in the right place in new deck position in a sealed box, but is this magic or juggling? Where do these performers take you? Is it just a bit of fun,or do they seek to take you somewhere deeper and more meaningful?

Today’s magic is so full of urgency,demand for instant gratification, and quick fixes that many of its practitioners have lost sight of the real purpose behind performing magic. Dynamo has created a generation of card jugglers; young turks with bowed heads practicing their moves without a thought for how it might matter for the audience,or why they would care to watch.

What reaction do they want?

‘That was very clever.’

Or,

‘Oh My God! That is the real thing!’

I know which one is more important and what magic ought to be doing.

The Tenth Prime is a venue for moving this kind of conversation (and many more) forward; to recapture real magic; to bring control and transformation back into magical performance; and to once again take our audiences to a place they have not been hitherto!

The First Of Many

I hereby declare Tenth Prime Magic, open. Who know’s who I am, even I’m not sure, but what I do know, is that an exciting thing is happening. Enjoy.