The Same­ness of Magic

In the past years I star­ted to watch care­fully oth­er magi­cians’ selec­tions of tricks that they per­form in their shows. No mat­ter where I looked, again and again I saw the same tricks (at least here in Ger­many, Aus­tria and Switzer­land): Chop Cup (Paul Daniels style), float­ing paper rose (Kev­in James), float­ing table (Dirk Losander), $100 bill switch (10 Euro bill to 50 Euro bill and back), bill in lem­on, paper balls over the head, a vari­ation of the George Sands’ rope trick, the passé passé bottle or the mul­tiply­ing bottles. Anoth­er trick that recently got very pop­u­lar is the link­ing of three bor­rowed fingerings.

Now I don’t mind the clas­sics of magic and I don’t mind those tricks just lis­ted, if they are prop­erly per­formed. But the prob­lem is that each and every one of the magi­cians I saw per­form these tricks use the same old lines and pat­ter the oth­er magi­cians are using.

Maybe this is so because magi­cians love to go out and watch oth­er magi­cians per­form. When they do so they are mostly inter­ested in some­how record­ing and then copy­ing the other’s lines and present­a­tion­al details for their own shows.

If these magi­cians later com­plain that it is hard to get some jobs in these times, then it is because they don’t real­ize that with all that copy­ing they put magic into a sort of same­ness which makes it unat­tract­ive to book­ers, because all the so-called acts look more or less the same.

In my life I’ve read and stud­ied an estim­ated 2000+ books. I know for sure that there is enough mater­i­al to sup­ply 500 magi­cians with 500 dif­fer­ent-look­ing acts. Nowadays it is very easy to get access to all this know­ledge and vari­ety of mater­i­al. Lack of mater­i­al and ideas is no excuse.

I under­stand it can be trouble to search out new mater­i­al and ideas, to prac­tice and hone them, and then jump into the cold water and start to per­form them in front of live audi­ence. Simply because of the fact that at the begin­ning there is no ‹secur­ity› and guar­an­tee for suc­cess. The pro­cess of mak­ing a new trick or routine into a win­ner in front of an audi­ence is tough. Only very few magi­cians will want to take the road of hard-work­ing troubled to finally end up with an ori­gin­al and per­son­al per­form­ing piece.

I also under­stand that it is easi­er to watch anoth­er magi­cian per­form some­thing, which registers well and brings him suc­cess, and then to simply take the piece away from him and per­form it in one’s own ‹show›. Most magi­cians are copycats and they do this for many years. But in these times the num­ber of magi­cians has increased, as well as the expos­ure of these magi­cians on the media. So what the gen­er­al audi­ence gets to see from magic looks more or less same. No won­der that the interest starts to decrease.

Magic could be really fas­cin­at­ing per­form­ing art if we had more real artist-minded magi­cians per­form­ing ori­gin­al and unique stuff. What we have in the major­ity are hob­by­ist magi­cians who are lazy, without ideas and just simply dull.

The key to real suc­cess is hard work, a cre­at­ive approach and the desire to per­form per­son­al­ised mater­i­al for an audi­ence. All of this requires being pre­pared to put some effort into it.

So I chal­lenge you: ask your­self what it is that you like about a per­form­ance, and then ask your­self how you your­self could bring your own voice to a sim­il­ar cre­ation. Is it the wit­ti­cism of the pat­ter of one magi­cian? Is it the dex­ter­ity of anoth­er? Is it the com­bin­a­tion of mater­i­al that takes a col­lec­tion of tricks and turns it into a set–a piece of theat­er? First give voice to what you love about that per­former, and then find your own way of express­ing that aware­ness. In oth­er words, make oth­er magi­cians want to copy you!

I under­stand this is too much effort and most of the magi­cians don’t want to invest into their magic. They want to achieve max­im­um suc­cess with a min­im­um amount of effort.

This same­ness of per­formers and their effects makes magic dull. This is sad.

But it does­n’t have to be! Dare to be your­self. Dare to look at the acts of oth­er magi­cians as a begin­ning for you and not an end des­tin­a­tion for you. What makes a Harry Ander­son a Harry Ander­son? What makes a Bill Malone a Bill Malone? What makes a Tam­ar­iz a Tam­ar­iz? Don’t be merely a mir­ror: be a stu­dent of the art.

Pass it on!