The mirror myth
“Practise in front of the mirror!”—most of us have heard this advice at some point. It sounds sensible: you supposedly see what the audience sees, you can monitor yourself, and you notice straight away when something is wrong. It works quickly, directly, and without much technical effort. Mirrors are everywhere you need to control movements. A ballet school is unthinkable without large practice mirrors. Even musicians are advised to use a mirror occasionally to check correct hand position and the like.
I did this for years myself, because many people told me at the start that it was one of the most important tips and a condition for practising magic correctly. Besides, in my day it was technically and financially expensive to record a performance on video. So the mirror remained the only practice tool. But then I noticed something that made me think. A hidden point that can have serious consequences.
When we practise in front of a mirror, we are also training something that gets in our way later: we are training ourselves to watch ourselves. Our attention is split between what we are doing and how it looks.
The problem: in a real performance there is no mirror. And when we still try to observe ourselves internally, we are no longer with the audience. We are with ourselves. And the spectators sense that.
They notice that we are not fully present. Our thoughts are elsewhere: on our technique, our appearance, whether everything is working. The performer seems “disconnected” and the communication with the audience never comes about. The audience senses that “something is not quite right” with the performer and watches them with suspicion instead of being carried away by the magic.
The performers I know who stand out train differently. They practise blind, for example with a blindfold, until their hands know what to do without the mind having to intervene. The mirror is no longer the only reference. They record their practice sessions on video and review them critically afterwards. They practise until they no longer need to think about the technique and can focus entirely on what is happening in the audience.
The mirror shows us a different angle, a different distance—and thus a different experience than what the audience has of our performance. It is very useful for getting a first rough impression of how a technique looks. A three-part practice mirror is ideal for quickly assessing the different angle problems of a technique. But the mirror fails when it comes to audience effect and leads us in the wrong direction.
If we want to know how our performance really comes across, we need people from the audience to give us feedback. We need video recordings from the audience’s angle. Above all, we need feedback from people who are not magicians.
That takes us further than any mirror. I don’t want to demonise the mirror—it certainly has its place. The dose makes the poison.
See you next time,
Alexander