If you really could perform magic, what would you do? Would there be a purpose to magic you perform?As magicians we spend the majority of our time losing and finding playing cards, making small predictions, or having things vanish and appear around us. The tricks lack any purpose other than to entertain and amaze. What is the point of making a coin bend in a spectators hand or making a ball vanish from under one cup and appear under another, followed by the appearance of some lemons under the cups? Great magic, but utterly pointless. We can increase the power of our performances by giving a purpose to magic.
Creating purpose to magic we perform has been one of the ‘themes’ of the second series of Dynamo Magician Impossible. Let’s look at a few examples:
- Dynamo is talking to the DJ in a nightclub. However, the club is packed and he can’t get out past the crowds. What would he do if he really could perform magic? He would simply fly over the crowd to the exit. That’s exactly what he did.
- Dynamo visits HMV to meet his fans. It all gets too much and he needs to escape. What would a magic user do? Simply disappear. That’s exactly what he did.
- Dynamo watched a street performer and wants to reward him. He notices the performer has images of money printed on his clothes, so he turns one of the pictures real so he can give the performer a tip.
Dynamo used magic to solve his problems. That’s the purpose of magic shown on the show. How can you design your magic tricks to be useful in this way?
Purpose to Magic
I expect you may feel going from table to table entertaining people would be quite a low priority for most true magic users. So why WOULD you be an entertainer?
Perhaps, to make people believe again?
Most people believed in magic when they were kids, but then life got in the way and they came to believe what the world told them, that magic was just pretend. Could making people question this belief, be the real role of a magician?
If you ask that question whenever you next perform close up magic you will start to notice you get the same sets of answers over and over again.
- Make a bottle of wine appear
- Turn this £10 note into a £50 note
- Fly
- Make xxx disappear
- Bend a wine glass
- Read my mind like Derren Brown
If you collected all the questions over a period of time you will get a group of the most frequently asked questions, many of which you could have tricks ready to perform.
There would also be some answers which you couldn’t do. For example: “Make a tiger appear” or “Make my wife disappear” but it would be easy to create a set of funny answers for each of those suggestions.
You could construct an act which allows you to perform most of those requests. You would then simply pick a suggestion from the group that ‘hits’ and actually DO it for them. Powerful stuff!
When asking the group, you ideally want to get suggestions from several different people at the table. This way you will be likely to hit upon a request that you can actually do. If you don’t get a ‘hit’ you can turn it into a joke or an aside, as you move into your normal routine set. Don’t tell them you intend to perform their suggestions until after they give them, so you have a perfect ‘out’ by changing the subject if a hit doesn’t happen.
If you decide to try this out please let me know how you get on. You can do this in the comments section below:
