Technically speaking, we cant get ready for a "live performance" since we do not know how the spectators will react to us.
Here are a couple of tips:
*Your sleight of hand needs to be pretty much flawless, when practicing, try to practice in a mirror and check all your angles, notice wich are your bad angles and how to cover them, during a live performance you may have the need to adapt your angles to how the audience is, but you need to do it naturally, you cant say "hey you! move over here", well you get my point.
*Now that you have the sleights down, you should work in your patter, come with a ncie story or something interesting that accompanies your routine, the ACR can be killer with the correct amnount of patter, you need to entertein, to perform, there is a difference between doing tricks and performing
. Another thing you have to watch out, it may be a good ideato script your routine, to write it down and to learn it, but you have to understand that you are not performing for the camera and you have to lean to listen to your audiience and adapt the situation. Also, try to eliminate the "uhm" from your patter, it sounds dull and you can make the audience lose interest in your performance.
* Make eye contact, Since we spend a lot of time practicing sleights in the mirror, we grow the bad habit of looking at our hands the whole performance, remember, most of the time they will look exactly where we are looking, so take that to your advantage and make eye contact, it will feel more personal and you will make the tricks about you, not the deck.
*When doing tricks like the 2CM where there is a moment when you need misdirection, you need the moves to flow naturally and with motivation, if you dont make a big deal out of something, they will not notice it. Also when you aksk a question ( great way to get misdirection) do it while you make eye contact with them,98% of the time they will look up to see you and answer you. Remember, since we are humans, we can get our attention on two points at once
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*You need a strong opener, because when you meet someone strange in the street and you want to perform for them, take in consideration that you have roughly like 15 seconds to make them have interest in you, ask their names first, introduce yourself and shake hands with everybody, it may seem dumb, but is perfect to make yourself like a nice person and you gain rapport with them (very important the rapport thing I suggest you investigate about it) and then do something quickly, maybe a transposition in their hands of something, but you need their attention and remember, patter first.
* You will get nervous when performing, you will shake and a lot, there is no remedy for this, but if you practice enough and you feel comfortable wit your stuff, you will learn to manage this very soon, besides, practicing the above things and taking them into consideration will help you get over it.
FIuf! that took me a while but I actually hope that you read it all, I know that I might sound arrogant here but the "G.O.P" thread is great for learning, there are a lot of performances there along with critics about what we did wrong and what we could have done better, so take a watch there and you might learn one or two things
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Take care and Im glad that you want to perform, remember, magic is supposed to be performed for people, not computers.
BTW, if you want, you could record yourself doing the ACR with patter, it doesnt matter if its live, upload it and send me the link ill help you with it and structuring your routine if you want. Have a nice day.
