This is a relatively short post to mention a new MageTool on my other website.
This one is called The Narcissism Calculator and it’s my way of prepping for a routine called The Test in White Wand Chronicles Volume 3,the new book from The Jerx¹.
Narcissus
Crowd Control
or The act that writes itself every night
Years ago I went on a course run by Wayne Goodman on how to work a restaurant residency, and the latter half of this was actually working a restaurant, and trying to put us in the kind of situations that may arise. For example he would tell us to work a table which, unbeknownst to us, he had visited a few minutes prior and told them to refuse a performance.
I never had to face this particular fate as the table he told to reject me was so keen to see me perform that they ignored him and eagerly asked me to continue.
One challenge he set however was to approach a table and not perform a single trick until he gave us a signal. In short, we had to use the time to build rapport. We all just used the opportunity to make small talk, explain that we are magicians, just sweat it out until we could finally do the one thing which we thought gave us value as human beings.
But it needn’t have been that way.
I have been a fan of Carissa Hendrix ever since she started the Shezam podcast with Kayla Drescher, but since then I’ve seen her develop her alter ego persona of Lucy Darling and she rapidly became one of my favorite performers. I love a good character act, and like Rob Zabrecky and John Van Der Put (Piff the Magic Dragon) she has managed to totally remake herself. Unlike those other two however she is very nearly unrecognizable in and out of character. She changes her demeanor, her voice, her mode of speech, her makeup, her hair and her outfit. It’s incredible. But this isn’t about that. This is about what she did next.
You see, the average character act, much like the average stage or parlour magician has a fixed set that they perform with a mostly firm script. They deviate very little from this script because stage time is precious and they have to fit everything in reliably every time. Like a factory process for entertainment. The problem with this is that in an increasingly connected world, building an audience pretty much relies on putting out snippets of your act as advertising. This was once responsible for the phenomenon of the TV comedy special, where a comedian would tour an act, record the final show and then sell it to TV before writing and touring a new show. As soon as the material goes on TV, its done. Everyone has seen it. If you’re not big enough to get on TV you just have to put your out on YouTube. Its a race to the bottom where you need to come up with new material, only to put it online so everyone already knows your act. This is particularly bad in the age of reels, shorts, and tiktoks.
Magicians, I would argue, have an even harder time in this system¹.
Comedians have found a way to work around this however. Look at comedians like Gianmarco Soresi and Matteo Lane. Their shorts are mostly clips of crowd work.
Crowded House
Crowd work, for those who don’t go to comedy shows, are not prewritten jokes. Rather, they are improvised moments entirely made up on the spot through audience interaction. Whereas many assume comedians only address the audience in retaliation to a heckle, with experience comedians learn to extend their acts and sharpen their funnybones by setting aside a portion of their time to directly speak to the audience, commenting on their appearance, asking about their jobs, hobbies, relationships. Mining the crowd for humour.
There are even comedians who have entire shows which are 100% crowd work. Matteo Lanes “Advice” specials are shows where he invites the audience to bring questions, approaching his show like an advice column, so he never performs the same show twice².
The question is, how do you apply this to magic? I tried to discuss this with my close personal friend Kieron The Mighty, and he said he’s been doing crowdwork for years, and that many others do it, but I think he misunderstood the level of crowd work I was talking about. Crowd work as performed by magicians is much like the way magicians use volunteers, they don’t really invite the audience to interact beyond answering a few closed questions, usually to either assist in remembering their name for the duration of an effect or in order to distract someone for necessary misdirection. There was a time where if I tried to picture magician crowd work I either thought of the camp insult comedy of Mel Mellors, making rapid fire subtle digs at the grooming or dress sense of the front row³ or the prop comedy of someone like Mike Hammer, for example asking an audience member to bring their chair to the stage and then sending them back without it⁴.
So lets talk about what Carissa Hendrix does differently, and why it is so special.
Lucy Darling
Lucy Darling feels like she shouldn’t exist in the real world. This is fine, because she doesn’t really exist in the real world. She’s a character out of time who only exists in a theatrical space where she holds court and maintains meticulous control. She has the vibe of a movie star who died of a valium overdose in the 40s Yet somehow, through the magic of live theatre, regular ordinary people can interact with her and she never breaks character.
There are other magicians who never break character, Rob Zabrecky comes to mind as one example who also feels out of time and out of place. But they all stick to the script, have minimal audience interactions beyond talking at volunteers. What sets Lucy aside is that she actively pursues conversations with the audience, interrogating the front row about their names, jobs, relationships, choice of drink, and butt stuff,just like a comedian doing crowd work⁵.
Now I’ve never seen her live but I have seen some of her routines in lectures and so I know that in this process of asking about their drinking and reading habits she is priming them for her participation in a think a drink and appearing book routines. This contrasts to how most magicians (myself included) obtain volunteers for such routines, which essentially involves asking blindly if someone will help them with the next trick.
I have never seen a magician literally give the stage to an audience member.
The result of this is that she can snip the humourous crowd interactions for her shorts and reels, allowing for better brand promotion etc. Initially I wasn’t sure whether this was done with artistic intent and just happened to produce social media content or if it was done for social media content and it just happened to be amazingly good theatre, until I watched this interview clip with Carissa out of character, dropping the most banger piece of theatrical magic theory this side of Eugene Burger. Seriously if you only click one link in this post, make it that one. At the time of writing, that interview was five years ago. No one that switched on to the world of art and theatre just lucks into a great performance. She has studied.
¹ There are three reasons why I think this is. Firstly magic as an artform simply works better in person, where there is no question of authenticity and where the audience cannot slow down and rewatch the tape to unravel any wonder they may have felt. Secondly creating a new act takes longer for magicians because as well as having to come up with a new script, narrative, theme, etc, we also need to learn or create new tricks and buy or make new props. Thirdly there are simply more places to work up new material for comedians. Comedians can attend open mic events, or just throw a new gag into their current act to test it out. Its hard to throw something into a magic act off the cuff, and it’s even harder to find a place where magicians can go on and do a tight five.
² Yes, some of the interactions can fall flat, so you might imagine the crowd work can’t possibly always be entertaining. The secret sauce to a lot of this crowd work is the inverse of the oft lauded heckle stopper lines. Whereas magicians are always looking for one-size-fits-all gags which can stop a heckler in their tracks and win the audience back. Crowd workers have prewritten lines which rather than flattening a bad interaction, can be used as a last resort to get a laugh from an interaction which is going nowhere. These are not included in online crowd work clips because they may be repeated in future. Typically they resort to meta commentary on the value of the interaction itself, and self deprecation to excuse the downtime and get a laugh in the process. After this they can just move on to someone else in the audience, reroll the dice.
³ This material is mostly pre writtten and quite repetitive, particularly when he compared the Blackpool Magic Convention Gala Show three years in a row.
⁴ This probably sounds insane, and it was, but you have to belive me when I say it works. Mike Hammer is the only magician I know who actively advertises his shows adversarial relationship with the audience, which is sad, mostly because he is not the only magician I can think of who has an adversarial relationship with the audience.
⁵ I recognise that most of the clips here cover multiple subjects, so linking them to specific themes is probably a little unfair. I just wanted to include as many clips of her as possible to get the immaculate vibes across.
Do It Yourself
or Sloppy Seconds
On October 15 2015 I attended a one day conventionette called Lost Patrons of the Mother Black Cap. It was hosted by Dave Forrest’s Full52, and was honestly the best magic event I’ve ever been to.
During that convention I saw Dave Forrest perform one of his signature effects REM. In REM a bunch of decisions are made by a spectator leaving an arrangment of items on the table, which is then revealed to match a photograph. When you buy the trick, you get a method and a photograph.
But when Dave Forrest performed it at the Lost Patrons of the Mother Black Cap, he had one extra prop which you don’t get with the effect as sold. That prop was a 2 foot by 3 foot painting of himself with the props arranged in front of him.
It was, after all, his signature effect and so while all the hobbyists bought it as trick number 237 to half heartedly perform in front of bored colleagues, Dave was closing his cabaret shows with it, and the painting was something so permanent, so hard to fake, that it left no doubt in the minds of his spectators that this prediction was as good as set in stone.
But now… I’m seeing a lot of these…
Angels and Demons
or The Ballad of Tyler and Nikola
I feel like I need to start this post with a disclaimer that I have met Nikola Arkane multiple times, got on just fine with her and while I don’t know her well enough to arrogantly describe her as a friend, she is an acquaintance that I have almost entirely positive feelings towards.
Which is why when I needed one, she made a perfect nemesis.
Much like my earlier post on hatred as a motivating factor, I feel like recasting a person whose success you are envious of as a villain in your head allows a much stronger drive to defeat and surpass them than any kind of aspirational idolisation might offer. It didn’t really work out¹ so I am currently nemesisless, but in the peak of her villain era there was one thing she did about 5 years ago that I really didn’t agree with, and I want to contrast and compare it to something which is happening right now, as a kind of learning exercise.
Continue reading “Angels and Demons
or The Ballad of Tyler and Nikola”
Outies
or The Severed Floor
It was pointed out to me that the effect presented in my previous post bore a striking resemblence to an effect from The Jerx.
I mean the fact that the effect is Jerx inspired should be obvious by the fact that the password for Nulanima is Jerxian but bizarrely I was actually thinking of a totally different Jerx routine at the time of writing as well as two non Jerx effects.
The differences are so important I think it’s worth revisiting briefly.
Innies
or The Overtime Contingency
I said in a previous post that I am not a fan of hypnotism. It’s probably the only kind of magic I don’t like.
Maybe also troublewit.
But there’s one kind of magic I love and that’s faux hypnotism.
The kind of trick where regular magic techniques leave you with a sense of missing time or involuntary compliance without the coercive act of actually performing hypnosis.
Of course if you don’t know the difference it might feel similarly violating, which is why I love the premise behind the TV show Severence.
Umm… Spoilers for series 1 of Severence I guess.
Coinkidink
or Everything’s Connected
I realised after posting it that my diagram of the Trapezoid of Professionalism might have baffled a few people, and honestly I fear the explanation may baffle some of those people even more but I think it’s important to explain none the less.
The Connection between Paul Allen and Jon Allen is pretty obvious, they share a last name and a predilection for perfection, but other than the fact that Jonny Paul has both of their names in his name, there’s no other connection to either of them, nor is he really a counterpoint to any of their common aspects.
In fact, before seeing him by chance on a random episode of The Paul Daniels Magic Show, I had never even heard of Jonny Paul, so the fact that he entered my consciousness on the same night as the Jon Allen lecture is apparently pure coincidence.
But there is something bigger going on that I didn’t really want to get into in that post, and that bigger thing is this:
Coincidences are actual magic.
Disorder
or Stacked To Kill
Last night I watched a lecture from Joshua Jay live at the Magic Circle Theatre.
I was told afterwards that Session attndees were told that they could get a free pass to see Joshua’s magic circle lecture, which seems odd because he apparently gave the same lecture at the Session anyway.
But this isn’t about that. This is about The Particle System.
Abracanachronism
or Time Out Of Joint
After a few highly theoretical posts I thought I’d get back to some more hands on conjouriffic creativity, while also devising utterly pointless things.
You know, classic Stacy.
This post is about telephone cords as they existed 20 years ago, a modern fashion trend, and how if those two things had lined up closer there would be an absolute miracle at our fingertips.
Shabbycadabra
or Let’s See Jon Allen’s Card
A couple of days ago I saw a lecture by Jon Allen. It was pretty good, lots of solid thinking, strong methods, entertaining effects, and everything he said made perfect sense… But when he explained his reasons for doing things the way he did, I continually found myself disagreeing with him.
Normally when I disagree with someone I can put my reasons into words but it wasn’t until much later that I realised what was going on in my head, and when I had this epiphany it suddenly made a lot of other things slot into place in my head, such as why I have so many props I never use.
Jon Allen is too professional.
Continue reading “Shabbycadabra
or Let’s See Jon Allen’s Card”