Obsessed Magi­cians

Com­par­ing the past and the present times, it seems the magician’s scene is more and more dom­in­ated by trends.

I see people get­ting heav­ily involved into pro­du­cing and pro­mot­ing busker’s pouches and com­plete ‘busk­ers’ out­fits (from table to pouch to cups to wand). I see more and more shell games (and the mani­acs). When invis­ible thread was hip, every­body lev­it­ated everything. To this day there are hun­dreds of small cof­fee tables float­ing around on the stages of the world …

In card magic for quite some time the thing is semi-auto­mat­ic. Or the oppos­ite: card­istry. Some of you old timers (as me) might remem­ber the small pack­et trick craze. Then came the memdeck.

In coin magic there was (is) three-fly (I remem­ber very well when it was mat­rix). Then came the time of the flip­per coins, shells and whatever gim­micked coins.

While this tend­ency to fol­low trends seems to be as old as magic, in these mod­ern times with the inter­net everything exploded. We have groups in Face­book ded­ic­ated to the fol­low­ers of a trend. We have for­um places and dis­cus­sion groups. The mere pub­lish­ing of pic­tures of a ‘new’ props pro­vokes a mass of people who also want it. Then the dealer’s busi­ness starts.

What both­ers me is that if too many get on the train of a new trend and walk out and do the stuff, then the pic­ture gets fatu­ous. The audi­ences see too many people doing the same stuff with the same props. Magic starts to look boring.

One thing that harms magic is that there are tons of people enter­ing the place, who have no idea of how to per­form the stuff nor the tech­nic­al cap­ab­il­it­ies. They are just inter­ested in col­lect­ing or hav­ing the new­est stuff, be it routines or props. Their interest is in show­ing off the good­ies they got as quickly as pos­sible to their unsus­pect­ing spec­tat­ors, and not in devel­op­ing and cre­at­ing a magic­al exper­i­ence for the audience.

By nature, magic should be a field pop­u­lated with indi­vidu­als. Artists that have their own and dis­tinct­ive style, tricks and props. But what do we have? Legions of people own­ing the same props and doing the very same routines/​tricks with it. Legions of people who are not true magi­cians, but stub­born and nar­row minded people with a fright­en­ing tend­ency towards get­ting totally obsessed with something.

When Cel­lini star­ted his street busk­ing in the 70s, this was a ground break­ing thing. With the excep­tion of a very few old timers scattered through­out the world, nobody had done this kind of street per­form­ance before. There­fore, Cel­lini was unique and special.

Now we have dozens of man­u­fac­tur­ers of pouches, ’street cups’, wands and tables. We see dozens of Gazzo/​Cellini clones. Cup, cup, cup, balls, balls, oranges, oranges, lem­on – booom. That’s street magic!

People think in order to be a good street magi­cian, you have to do the cups and balls trick. Without it, you are no ‘real’ busk­er. Cel­lini talked with me at length about that. Because he was doing the cups, I didn’t want to do it reg­u­larly on the streets. He liked my atti­tude and encour­aged me to devise an act for the streets without a pouch, table and the cups. And I did! A com­plete street act, work­ing solely out of the pock­ets of my suit.

These trends in magic hamper the cre­ativ­ity and unique­ness of the indi­vidu­al per­former. Trends degrade the people into mind­less sheep fol­low­ing the herd. All look the same, all do the same.

The worst thing is that people spend so much time on the props and work­man­ship, that they for­get to prac­tice and hone their per­form­ing skills. So they go out with their fant­ast­ic new props and fail to act in per­form­ance. What the hell does the nicest sil­ver hand-spun cups set help with a poorly executed and non decept­ive false trans­fer (of the

Is it the lazi­ness of the ‘magi­cians’? Or their inca­pa­city of gen­er­at­ing ori­gin­al stuff on their own? Fol­low­ing trends in magic is no good thing. It is the easy way, the cheap way. But surely not the road to the ulti­mate suc­cess as a performer.

Stay­ing con­sciously and con­sequently away from trends and work­ing on ori­gin­al (or long for­got­ten) mater­i­al seems to be a healthy way for me.

I only do hope that I don’t start a trend with that …

Pass it on!