It's not over 'til the fat lady slims.
Nice quick change act from Olga & Vladimir Smirnov, currently with the Big Apple Circus:
https://youtu.be/PYGf_0jJce8
Love the last change.
via May All Your Days Be Circus Days
Little Paul - - Parent #
I love quick change acts, the mechanics fascinate me.
Although I was a little disappointed that he only had one change
Me too. One of my favourite quick change tricks I've seen saw a guy hold a black bag with one hand, then he dipped his other hand into the bag & straight out again 3 times in a row changing from a red to blue to green glove. The hand that holds the bag is clearly visible so it is all done one handed. Best explanation I could come up with is a hook on the back of each glove (you only saw the palm side) which he hooked onto a loop inside the bag. However, I don't recall him dipping his hand very far into the bag & ripping off the top glove would risk upsetting the ones underneath. Sadly I don't have a name for the performer.
Little Paul - - Parent #
Having spent my journey home from work running ideas through my head about how I would approach this (and then ruling them all out as having limitations which would make them impossible to perform)
I've just done some interweb research. "David and Dania" appeared on one of the "got Talent" shows and they include a colour changing glove in one of their routines (although they use a top hat rather than a bag as you describe).
A little further research also revealed that they sell it for about $250, and it's pretty widely available.
I'm *way* beyond the prop buying phase of being a magician[1] and would probably be massively disappointed if I splashed that much on one effect which I know wouldn't suit me in the slightest.
And who the fuck wears a tophat outside of a wedding party these days anyway?
I really don't get how the whole "magician in top hat and tails" thing is still as popular as it is. The whole point of it when the trend started was that the magician had ditched his wizards robes and was performing in the same clothes that his audience were wearing to the theater.
Audiences moved on with their atire, magicians apparently haven't. Makes me cross that does.
[1] Generally speaking most magicians go through the following learning phases in their "magical journey"
- Kids Magic Set
- Learn "free" tricks from TV/YouTube
- Buy individual tricks (throw lots of them away and never perform them - waste a huge amount of money in the process)
- Buy videos/DVDs
- Buy books
- Discover what branch of magic you like the most and throw yourself into it
It took me 20 years to get to just before the last step. At which point I read an essay which changed my view of magic, threw out all my material and never got around to building up a new act.
Cedric Lackpot - - Parent #
I just remembered there was a rocket-fast quick change act on The Slammer a few years back, they may well have been the same duo.
What was the essay? I'm interested how it could have affected you so much on a subject that you already knew a lot about.
Little Paul - - Parent #
OK - This is loooong. Sorry about that.
It was the introductory chapter to "The Art of Astonishment - Volume 1" which is a book by Paul Harris. The essay itself seems to be entitled "PH on Astonishment (Astonishment Is Our Natural State Of Mind)". I'm not sure it's ever been (legally) published online, but I'm sure you can probably track down a shoddy scan of the whole book if you look in the wrong places.
I won't point you at those places, as I paid £30 per volume for my treeware copy of the 3 volume series and they fill a very special place on my bookshelves. So yeah. It could be said that I paid £90 to end my magic performance career :)
I've not read the essay in question for about a decade, but from what I remember the basic premise was that when humans are born into this world, they have no expectations about how the world works, what's possible or impossible. Children are in a constant state of astonishment because they have hundreds of new or surprising things happen to them a day (this is why performing magic at childrens parties is largely an exercise in story telling and silliness rather than magic - for all they know you really can pull coins out of their ears)
As we grow up, we develop a view of how the world works, we put filters in place, and more and more of our experiences are familiar. We get very few moments of astonishment in our daily lives. If as a magician you can punch through all those filters and show the audience something which takes them back into that primal state of pure astonishment, it has a really powerful and personal impact on them. If you can leave them saying "what just happened?" rather than "how did he do that?" you elevate your performance from a mere puzzle to something more wonderful.
When you trigger that state in an audience, it can feel quite awkward for the performer if they're not expecting it. It's very tempting to fill a stunned silence with a joke or a quip and trample all over the moment taking the "special" away from your audience - but if you *don't* and you let the audience sit in that special moment for a while, it amplifies the astonishment and that's something really quite special for both the spectator and the magician.
If you want to see someone experiencing a rare moment of astonishment, watch Tellers face in this clip from "Fool Us" immediately after the reveal https://youtu.be/CRpz0zuAGVs He's stunned. I seem to remember a similar impact on him in https://youtu.be/YjiTAkKhG28 as well.
You can see the influence of Paul Harris in some of David Blaine's earlier work - unfortunately while allowing your audience to sit in the astonishment state is very powerful in live performance, on TV you just come across as slow and smug. If you watch how Blaine ends a trick on the street, it's very understated and clearly has a big impact on the people he's performing to - but to the TV audience he just looks like an unlikable smug git.
When I read that essay, I agreed wholeheartedly with it and mentally examined all my closeup material. All of it was puzzling, funny or just lighthearted entertainment.
Only one trick had the potential for level of impact, and I'd spoilt that impact by repeatedly stamping on the moment with a reasonably amusing aside.
At my next gig I experimented with restructuring that trick to capitalise on that impact and tried it out on a couple of tables. By the end of the evening I had a feel for it and had moved it to the end of the set, my record that evening was around 2 minutes of stunned, confused, astonished silence - a truly wonderful moment for all concerned!
I knew then that compared to that moment, almost every single other trick in my repertoire was sub standard[1] and I had a choice - go back to how I was, or throw it out and start again.
I stopped booking in new gigs, and finished off those that I had already committed to and started working up some new material. A process which I never quite finished.
Which is why I'm not a performing magician any more, but am still rabidly enthusiastic about it as an artform :)
[1] Apart from possibly my 3 watch stopping routine, where I stopped 3 borrowed watches simultaneously while the audience were holding them - but I retired that routine after I stopped some chaps Rolex and it wouldn't start again. Oops! A terribly awkward moment!
Jay Gilligan wrote something similar about jugglers' attire. At one point it was all shirt & waistcoats with black trousers & shoes. Then Sean Mckinney came along in jeans & t-shirt. A lot of people tried to emulate him but still wore the smart shoes rather than trainers.
Why are people sorry for writing long posts? I love long reads!
Very interesting, thanks. I'm surprised that you couldn't more easily adapt your existing tricks to the new style, but then I know nothing about magic and very little about performing. I've never liked watching magic much, but I think it's because I'm quite a logical person and hate to have unanswered questions. My frustration is always greater than my astonishment.
Little Paul - - Parent #
It's not so much about changing the style (writing some new words to go around the mechanics) it's about changing the structure of the trick. It's as much about psychology as it is about making your fingers do the special dance. I think my favourite quote about that is "magic happens in the audiences brain, not in your hands"
Magic tricks have "beats" and "offbeats" - where the audience tenses and relaxes respectively, to get the most impact you need to manipulate those beats/offbeats so that they build in a satisfying way, each beat amplifying the previous one. This performance element isn't really present in most juggling routines[1], so it's hard to find a common language to express it - so forgive any weak analogies in the following!
For a trick to have an astonishing impact, it has to be structured in a way that allows that. It has to build in the right way.
Most of my material at the time didn't have a suitable structure, and unlike a juggling routine where you can swap out one mechanical movement for another without preventing the rest of the routine from being possible - with magic effects the performer has to make the movements in the right order. Changing the story line of an effect without reworking the mechanics isn't a trivial task!
Sure I could build new, effective routines around the same mechanics, and that was what I set out to do (but never completed) but it's not just a case of changing the patter or the pacing. You have to change the underlying structure.
Perhaps there are better parallels to be drawn in programming. Sometimes you can give a program a new lease of life by reskinning it, tweak the UI and it becomes more satisfying to use and is a better product for it. Sometimes, you need to refactor large parts of the underlying infrastructure to achieve a satisfying result. Magic is much the same.
[1] Although when it *is* present, it's a tremendously powerful tool - and those acts really stand out
[2] eg substitute the mills mess bit of the routine for a boston mess and it doesn't really stop you from following it with backcrosses
Little Paul - - Parent #
Send an SAE (and a postcard detailing which side of the "self" vs "stamped" debate you fall on) to the usual address and I'll send you a copy
Richard Loxley - - Parent #
Nice read, thanks.
I'm a strict amateur with magic (well, I did do one gig which was both magic and balloon modelling, but I realised within the first ten minutes that I needed to spend the next 170 minutes doing balloons!)
I've only experienced that 'what just happened?' moment with two tricks. The first was the Invisible Deck, which always provoked that reaction. I bought my first copy because it was one of the few tricks I'd seen where I had absolutely no clue how it was done, and was convinced there must be some limitation because it surely couldn't be as magical and clean as it appears. But it is! Such a beautiful trick!
The other I don't know the name of - but it was one you taught me. It's where two cards change into two completely different cards whilst held between the fingers of your volunteer. I had a girl scream and run away from me when experiencing that one. It completely broke her world view. But it required more skill than I possessed to do it cleanly, so I only got that reaction occasionally, if my audience wasn't particularly observant ;-)
Little Paul - - Parent #
I can't remember the name of that card transformation either, or whose routine it was originally. I (somewhat shamefully) reverse engineered it from a performance of another magician long before I ever knew what it was called.
It really does have the potential to be something good, although it's got several elements I always felt could have been cleaned up a lot. The tripple at the beginning is too untidy, the plot is willfully confusing in the middle (and relies too heavily on asking the audience member a question they don't really understand half way through) but the ending does have a decent kick to it.
I think it probably could be cleaned up and turned into something even better with only a little work. If I was still gigging I would probably try.
The one which I mentioned in my earlier post as being my first one - was my handling for card warp.
I re-learnt it a couple of years ago (as part of a failed new years resolution to learn and perform a trick a week for some friends) and once my fingers had remembered what to do when, it had all the impact I remember.
I got my copy of Art of Astonishment off the shelf last night and had a flick through, looking at all the tricks in there which I'd bookmarked as possibly suiting me. Who knows, I might learn a couple.
I drift through phases. I think I would really do better if there was someone to do magic with who was close enough to jam with. shrug
Mike Moore - - Parent #
These were very satisfying to watch, thanks for posting them.
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