Clear Thinking

There's a lot of cluttered thinking surrounding magic. As a hobbyist magician, I've found it's easy to stay on a treadmill where we learn tricky new sleights, buy new effects as they are released, yet in some ways miss what magic performance is actually about. In magic, as with other things, it is the case that by focusing upon the details we lose the ability to focus upon the general picture.

This is a hard thing to swallow, but we all kinda know that this is the case. Let's go back to absolute basics here. Assuming that I want to:

• perform lots of magic
• be hugely entertaining
• feel happy doing it

surely it seems that I need to focus my attention not just on the effect itself but also how to best deliver that effect? When we think of those AAA+ magical performers (I'm thinking of guys like Ricky Jay, Harry Lorayne, Whit Haydn, Tommy Wonder, Dani DaOrtiz, Gregory Wilson, etc)  it seems that their uniting feature is not their sheer technical prowess. Surely, their uniting feature is they can all effectively deliver their magic to the audience. They can communicate it in a way which engages the audience.

This isn't rocket science, guys.

What do I mean by delivery of the magic? Well, you know, it's the stuff which most magicians are happy to ignore:

• Knowing what to say
• Having a clear tone of voice
• Nervousness
• How to approach someone you've never met before to show them your magic
• What to do if things go wrong
• How to build to a finale

and so on and so on. 

There is maybe a little bit of discussion out there on things like this, but it is so infrequent when compared to the cries of Why the Dribble Pass is an Illogical Move and other such bullsh*t debates which so completely miss the point. Why the hell is this? Why does no-one choose to talk about these REAL issues? Why haven't L&L publishing and Ellusionist both unleashed monster DVD boxsets with this type of content?

Cos from where I'm sat, it's looking for all the world that the delivery is more important right now than the effect itself. If I can just choose to focus upon delivering a more entertaining performance, I'll feel so much cheerier about my magic!