I have recently posted a thread in which I issued a challenge to anyone seeking to improve themselves as a magician. I admitted in that thread that most of those thoughts I quickly banged out in a few minutes were results from a conversation I had with a colleague about the presentation of magic. After Mr. Ashers complements to my post I began to consider the subject more. After some deeper thought I outlined a few things which I compiled into a short essay on improving your magic. I hope you will find this not only informative, but beneficial as well.
Improving Your Act: Six Things You Can Do To Be A Better Magician.
When someone wants to improve at a skill or sport they must go through a series of things in order to improve at it. They must understand the How, When, Where, and Why behind the skill they wish to learn and then they must practice to build the needed confidence and dexterity to execute the skill flawlessly every time. Magic is no different!
When we are learning how to do magic we go through four different stages before it could be said that we’ve mastered an effect. Those stages are: Unconscious Incompetence, Conscious Incompetence, Conscience Competence, and Unconscious Competence. Take any effect you’ve ever learned, you’ve gone through those four stages on your way to matery of that effect. Lets take an ambitious card for example. You start out in unconscious incompetence. You are unaware of the effect, or how it can bennifet your act. After watching it performed once, you now are at a stage of conscious incompetence. You are aware of it, but you don’t know how to do it yet. You purchase the effect, and practice it enough to perform it. You have passed into the conscious competence stage. Lastly, you get so good at performing it you can do it without thinking about what your hands are doing. You’ve now reached the final stage of learning a new skill, that is unconscious competence.
It is important in magic to be at the level of unconscious competence with everything you do in your act. When you perform you want to be able to focus on your presentation and audience management and not on how you are going to get the card to do the next “move”. Your focus in practice should be getting to the point of mastering each piece in your act so that you can perform them effortlessly and without conscious thought as to what you are doing.
I. Practice
You’ve heard it said before: “Practice makes perfect.” And practice you must! There are three ways you can practice to improve your skills. You can practice in front of a mirror, in front of a live study partner, or in front of a video camera. All three have their benefits, and draw backs. I’ll cover each of them.
Mirrors: Mirrors have a lot more use to magicians other than to hide the girl from view in an apparently empty box. They give you a cheap way to get a view of what the audience sees when you are performing your effects. While the bathroom mirror is great, you may want to consider purchasing a smaller more portable one so that you can be in a more comfortable area than huddled over the bathroom sink straddling the toilet trying to figure out if your 5 speed looks clean. I keep a small mirror in my travel bags when ever I perform abroad, just incase the hotel one isn’t suitable to my comfort levels. They are also fairly cheap to buy too.
Study Partners: Study Partners can be your Parents, Best Friends, Wife, Husband, Siblings, co-workers, boss, whoever you need. They are a close confidant with whom you can trust your secrets to. People who have no general interest in magic make the best Study Partners. They can be brutally honest, give you the best critique about your act, and let you know if something doesn’t “look” right. They may not know it’s called the uber secret ultra Marlo backwards magnetic tilt pass, but they will know that “thing” you just did with the deck of cards didn’t feel natural. I love my wife for this reason. Being an engineers daughter she sees through everything and can usually give me better critique than what I would get at a jam session down at the local magic shop. If for no other reason than she’s still technically a layman.
Video Cameras: Nothing is more brutally honest than a video camera. Trust me the camera sees everything and unlike your best friends (whom may be concerned about your pride) the camera doesn’t lie. The nice thing about video taping yourself is you get a chance to watch not only your handling from an audience perspective but you can also listen to the verbal patter and watch how your body emotes during the act. Video Cameras can be a costly investment, the lower end ones are going for two to three hundred but with the growing popularity of web cams it’s becoming easier to record yourself for quick review and playback for an investment that won’t break the piggy bank. Most cellular phones now days can actually record video with fairly good clarity.
I want to take a minute to digress about a subject that I know we all feel strongly about; YouTube. I can’t recall how many threads I see on a weekly bases pop up around magic websites that usually has the poster ranting about the blatant exposure of magic on the internet either by direct intent or horrible presentations of popular effects available on the current market. Sadly, I don’t think there is anything that can be done to stop this trend from happening but I do want to point out something that does contribute to it. Don’t post videos of what would be considered practice level performances on the internet! Recording yourself is great! Keeping the files on your computer for easy access and playback works wonders, but they have no place on the internet. If you want to post a video to the internet, make sure the performance is solid, the handling clean, and the patter thought out, rehearsed, scripted, and delivered. You may not be able to stop the flow of exposure videos from being released on websites like YouTube but you at the least won’t be contributing to them.
(To Be Continued)
Improving Your Act: Six Things You Can Do To Be A Better Magician.
When someone wants to improve at a skill or sport they must go through a series of things in order to improve at it. They must understand the How, When, Where, and Why behind the skill they wish to learn and then they must practice to build the needed confidence and dexterity to execute the skill flawlessly every time. Magic is no different!
When we are learning how to do magic we go through four different stages before it could be said that we’ve mastered an effect. Those stages are: Unconscious Incompetence, Conscious Incompetence, Conscience Competence, and Unconscious Competence. Take any effect you’ve ever learned, you’ve gone through those four stages on your way to matery of that effect. Lets take an ambitious card for example. You start out in unconscious incompetence. You are unaware of the effect, or how it can bennifet your act. After watching it performed once, you now are at a stage of conscious incompetence. You are aware of it, but you don’t know how to do it yet. You purchase the effect, and practice it enough to perform it. You have passed into the conscious competence stage. Lastly, you get so good at performing it you can do it without thinking about what your hands are doing. You’ve now reached the final stage of learning a new skill, that is unconscious competence.
It is important in magic to be at the level of unconscious competence with everything you do in your act. When you perform you want to be able to focus on your presentation and audience management and not on how you are going to get the card to do the next “move”. Your focus in practice should be getting to the point of mastering each piece in your act so that you can perform them effortlessly and without conscious thought as to what you are doing.
I. Practice
You’ve heard it said before: “Practice makes perfect.” And practice you must! There are three ways you can practice to improve your skills. You can practice in front of a mirror, in front of a live study partner, or in front of a video camera. All three have their benefits, and draw backs. I’ll cover each of them.
Mirrors: Mirrors have a lot more use to magicians other than to hide the girl from view in an apparently empty box. They give you a cheap way to get a view of what the audience sees when you are performing your effects. While the bathroom mirror is great, you may want to consider purchasing a smaller more portable one so that you can be in a more comfortable area than huddled over the bathroom sink straddling the toilet trying to figure out if your 5 speed looks clean. I keep a small mirror in my travel bags when ever I perform abroad, just incase the hotel one isn’t suitable to my comfort levels. They are also fairly cheap to buy too.
Study Partners: Study Partners can be your Parents, Best Friends, Wife, Husband, Siblings, co-workers, boss, whoever you need. They are a close confidant with whom you can trust your secrets to. People who have no general interest in magic make the best Study Partners. They can be brutally honest, give you the best critique about your act, and let you know if something doesn’t “look” right. They may not know it’s called the uber secret ultra Marlo backwards magnetic tilt pass, but they will know that “thing” you just did with the deck of cards didn’t feel natural. I love my wife for this reason. Being an engineers daughter she sees through everything and can usually give me better critique than what I would get at a jam session down at the local magic shop. If for no other reason than she’s still technically a layman.
Video Cameras: Nothing is more brutally honest than a video camera. Trust me the camera sees everything and unlike your best friends (whom may be concerned about your pride) the camera doesn’t lie. The nice thing about video taping yourself is you get a chance to watch not only your handling from an audience perspective but you can also listen to the verbal patter and watch how your body emotes during the act. Video Cameras can be a costly investment, the lower end ones are going for two to three hundred but with the growing popularity of web cams it’s becoming easier to record yourself for quick review and playback for an investment that won’t break the piggy bank. Most cellular phones now days can actually record video with fairly good clarity.
I want to take a minute to digress about a subject that I know we all feel strongly about; YouTube. I can’t recall how many threads I see on a weekly bases pop up around magic websites that usually has the poster ranting about the blatant exposure of magic on the internet either by direct intent or horrible presentations of popular effects available on the current market. Sadly, I don’t think there is anything that can be done to stop this trend from happening but I do want to point out something that does contribute to it. Don’t post videos of what would be considered practice level performances on the internet! Recording yourself is great! Keeping the files on your computer for easy access and playback works wonders, but they have no place on the internet. If you want to post a video to the internet, make sure the performance is solid, the handling clean, and the patter thought out, rehearsed, scripted, and delivered. You may not be able to stop the flow of exposure videos from being released on websites like YouTube but you at the least won’t be contributing to them.
(To Be Continued)
