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Performance Magic: What Moves You Guys?

posted by janrinok on Sunday March 30 2014, @03:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the now-you-see-it dept.

The Burnaby Kid writes:

Figured I'd toss this out there, since SN was asking for interesting story submissions. I'm a professional magician working abroad, and I've been indulging in this incredibly geeky performing art for almost two decades. One problem that happens a lot when it comes to magic is that the nature of secrecy means that we don't get open dialogue with the muggles we perform for, and that leads to us getting into this weird sort of insular and incestuous discussion with other magicians, which ends up warping our minds to the extent that we start doing moronic things like... oh, I don't know... referring to our audience members as "muggles". We get into some pretty weird debates, and I've been trying my best to argue for raising the bar, such as by suggesting that we need to be more sensitive about what you guys like, such as by making sure that if we pull out a deck of cards, we've got something to perform that can compete with Card Through Window. And yet... Maybe I've got it wrong? What DO you guys like? If you like watching magicians perform, what do you like about it? If you don't, why not?

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 30 2014, @09:47AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 30 2014, @09:47AM (#23152)

    I'll be perfectly blunt here: How about knock it off with the G*d damned secrecy all together and just start showing us how you (as a group) do things.

    Don't get me wrong, I like seeing magicians perform, but I HATE HATE HATE not being able to get some authoritative word on how their tricks actually work. And no, some random guess on some random yahoo forum does not quality. I mean step by step, with photos and examples.

    Last time I saw something like that was a series on youtube, and his "magic" was all easily-guessed stuff that depended on stage props and obvious things (like an apparatus big enough to hide thin assistants behind while they moved around to different places on the stage). After that I just gave up trying to learn anything more. Figured it was pointless.

  • (Score: 1) by BasilBrush on Sunday March 30 2014, @01:56PM

    by BasilBrush (3994) on Sunday March 30 2014, @01:56PM (#23217)

    The more tricks to which you are told the method, the more tricks will appear to you to be "easily-guessed stuff". Revealing a trick not only damages the future value of that trick, it diminishes the value of all tricks that have a similar method.