Maintenance rather than collecting ideas

Building something new is fun. Repairing things, on the other hand, isn’t. This applies to many areas of life – cars, relationships – and certainly to magic. It happens to me time and again that, when performing a trick I’ve had in my repertoire for years, things don’t go quite as smoothly as I’d imagined. There’s a reason for this: I’ve been sloppy with, or have neglected, the maintenance of the trick in question.

Anyone who reinvents a routine immediately feels that faint tingle: this could turn into something big. Everything is open, everything is possible. You’re an inventor, an explorer, a pioneer. Anyone working on an existing routine, on the other hand, is sitting in front of a half-finished building, wondering whether the door really does open inwards or whether the transition to the second effect is still half a second too long. It’s neither particularly sexy nor ‘Instagrammable’, but this is often precisely where the difference lies between an artist with a functioning repertoire and a collector with a thousand half-baked tricks in their drawer.

Nevertheless, most magicians don’t do exactly that. They’d rather play around with new ideas than nurture what they already have.

Why most prefer to mess about

In the forums and at meet-ups, the talk is almost always about something new. Who’s just seen something cool. Who’s working on the next secret project. Hardly anyone mentions that this week they’ve revised their transition from the third to the fourth cup-and-ball sequence for the twelfth time, and that it now works even with a difficult audience.

Novelty provides an instant buzz, whereas a fresh idea is like an unread book. Maintenance means tackling weaknesses you’ve known about for ages. That’s uncomfortable, which is why starting afresh is sometimes simply an escape.

On top of that, mistakes in new material are invisible. Never having been shown before means never having failed. You know an old routine inside out, including every weakness – and that’s precisely what makes the work harder than the beginning.

In the scene, moreover, having a lot of material is rewarded more than mastering it. Anyone with lots of tricks comes across as competent. Someone who performs a trick masterfully can seem boring at first glance. Unfair, but true: the market for ideas is loud and visible; the market for perfection is quiet and inconspicuous.

And finally, ‘improving’ sounds like stagnation. ‘I’m working on my coin routine again’ sounds less like progress than ‘I’m currently learning a new routine from …’. – although the opposite may well be true.

Ultimately, many magicians are not performers with a repertoire, but collectors of ideas who shy away from seriously presenting their existing material.

What happens if you don’t take care of maintenance?

Maintenance does not mean endlessly polishing a routine until it shines. It’s about securing the routine – about making ongoing improvements that work even under adverse performance conditions. It’s about refining timing, pauses, eye contact and delivery. And occasionally about refreshing it, without throwing everything away.

Anyone who fails to do this will eventually realise that the old routines are getting worse, whilst the new ones never get finished. You end up performing material that you’ve already lost faith in deep down, and the audience senses this, even if they can’t put their finger on exactly what’s not quite right. Eventually, you’ll resort to the new material again because the old routine ‘just doesn’t work anymore’. More often than not, you’ve simply not looked after it properly and have ignored or neglected its maintenance.

This isn’t a talent issue. It’s a maintenance issue.

What could make maintenance more interesting?

You can’t make maintenance sound any better than it is. However, it changes noticeably as soon as you stop treating it as a vague, never-ending project and start seeing it as real work with a visible end.

Someone who works on just one point and then finishes it experiences something different from someone who is ‘generally tweaking the ring routine’. Progress comes from completion, not from endlessly fiddling about. That sounds trite, but in practice it’s the difference between frustration and the feeling that something has actually moved forward.

Some magicians number their routines like software versions – not out of pedantry, but because they realise that otherwise everything gets mixed up. What was different in version 1.1 compared to 1.0? Was it better? Worse? Suddenly, a vague feeling of ‘I’m not getting anywhere’ has turned into a clear process. It’s a good idea to adopt versioning from the software industry into your own magic!

It’s also striking that most of the time spent refining tricks often goes into those you hardly ever perform anymore, whilst the routines you actually use eventually run on autopilot and gradually fade into the background. If you take a closer look, you’ll quickly realise which techniques actually underpin your own repertoire and which are just sitting in your bag out of habit.

Video is a relentless but honest witness to this. The difference between ‘I think this will get better’ and ‘I can see that it’s getting better’ is greater than you might think. That’s why some colleagues prefer to watch old recordings of their performances rather than buying new DVDs featuring new tricks and routines – not because they’re thrifty, but because their own performances (viewed with a self-critical eye) are the best teachers for making real progress.

Maintaining what you’ve got, incidentally, is harder than starting afresh – and therefore more interesting. With a new routine, everything is open-ended, which is why it feels easy. With an old routine, on the other hand, you have to be creative within existing limits. What is the most elegant solution without new equipment or a new move? That is the sort of problem whose solution defines mastery. Every good chef knows this when it comes to their signature dish.

Musicians don’t play their hits because they’re lazy. They know it works, that it carries the evening, and that it’s their job. Your repertoire isn’t the bridge to the next big thing, but the thing itself. The best routines should be treated like hits: they’re played regularly, occasionally rearranged, and only rarely neglected.

Smart performers do a sort of stock-take before the season: no new tricks, no catalogues, no YouTube, just a focused week on the material from their repertoire that actually goes down well with an audience. It’s all about confidence, delivery, timing, presentation and the real test – the flawless performance in front of an audience. Anyone who heads into the season after that will notice the difference: not because everything is new, but because they trust their own material again.

And then there are the little notes after the gig – sometimes just a line or half a sentence. ‘Becher game’, ‘Hansefest gone wrong’, ‘children too close’, ‘transition cut short’, ‘went well’, ‘didn’t go so well’. That’s what maintenance looks like whilst the show is running. It’s not a big new project, not a workshop, and there’s no grand announcement at the meeting. It’s the quiet work that nobody sees – except the audience, who experience the improved and refreshed material.

The magicians you admire rarely have the most material with them. They have the best-maintained material.

The dream is to build something new. Maintenance is the profession. Anyone who understands this will eventually stop collecting and start becoming a master of their own repertoire.